Jasper County Democrat, Volume 11, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 August 1908 — THE ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE. [ARTICLE]

THE ANTI-SALOON LEAGUE.

There is in Indiana an organization which was started by men who were opposed to the licensing of saloons on moral grounds. The organization has had heretofore the respect of right thinking people because it conducted its own affairs after its own methods and for its own purposes. In its extremity the republican party has fastened itself upon the Anti-Saloon League like a leech, and is seeking to convert the work of the organization from a movement in the interests of good morals, into an effort to continue the republican party in power. The league is composed of men of all parties, and it has had an honorable existence, with a good effect along the line of its chosen work. What it will amount to if it is made the tool of the office-holding and of-fice-seeking contingent of the party now in power remains to be seen, but can easily be guessed. No association having for its purpose the good of all the people can succeed when it allows itself to be made the means of securing political plunder for a set of chronic office-seekers. That fact does not, however, concern the republican state organization which is conducting a campaign under cover of the league. Neither is the republican state organization concerned over the fact that it is able to make use of the league only by exerting influences which are questionable in their relation to the cause of temperance. Politics, as it is practiced by the republican state machine, is a good deal like the method of benevolent assimilation used in conducting the affairs of the trusts which have been fostered and built up under the administration of- that party.—Laporte Argus-Bulletin.