People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 January 1894 — BISHOP IRELAND. [ARTICLE]

BISHOP IRELAND.

This Fearless Champion Gives His Views on the Liquor Traffic. The following words of wisdom and of warning were uttered by that fearless Catholic champion of right, Bishop Ireland, of Minnesota, in an address delivered in Baltimore. We commend it to the careful perusal of our readers: “Outside of hell there is nothing so hideous as the home where the father and mother both drink. The drinking man is most cruel. Drink is the destroying angel of peace of the family. We must at least protect the women and children. Woman’s enemy is liquor. It is horrible for women to touch it in any form. Women are too lenient about their husbands and brothers drinking a little. “The brewers and distillers are the real guilty parties. If I could only keep our people from the saloon, what a race they would be. The devil doesn’t put up strange names over the doors. No, we see there the noblest names in Ireland’s history. I would have no men keeping saloons, and I would save Catholics from keeping saloons for the damnation of our fellow men. Our record has not been honorable in this respect. It is a disgrace to our religion. The liquor traffic has almost made the church powerless. What force has the Catholic church when in a city we find members selling liquor and selling it on Sunday too? Let us go on record hereafter as a sober people. The liquor traffic has allied us with law breakers. Drunkenness is a mortal sin, and the drunkard is a bad man In every way. Cursing, infidelity and immorality are found about the saloon. Our people are being robbed away from us.

“Here is Sunday, and Catholic saloon keepers selling liquor and think it all right if they rent a pew! They think they are pillars of the church, but they are mistaken if they think they can buy the silence of the church. They control the politics of the country. You will find them at every Democratic caucus. The police walk up and down past the saloon, take a little drink and then are ready to go into court and say they didn’t see the saloon open. They are conveniently blind. You are so simple as to go and vote for ‘personal liberty.’ The man ought to have liberty to save his money. The saloon keepers have saloons even on the road to the graveyard.”