Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 66, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 April 1908 — THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC [ARTICLE]

THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC

Extract from Gov. Hanly’s Speech at the State Convention at Indianapolis. Personally, I have seen so much of the evils of the traffic in the last four years, so much of its economic waste, so much of its physical ruin, so much Of its mental blight, so much of Its tears and heartache, that I have come to regard 1 the business as one that must be held and controlled by strong and effective laws. I bear no malice toward those engaged in the business but I hate its very phase. I hate it for its intolerance. I hate it for its arrogrance. I hate i for its hypocrisy I hate it for its cant and craft and false pretenses. I hate it for Its commercialism. I hate it for its gresd and avarice. I hate it for its sordid love of gain at any cost. I hate it for its domination in politics. I hate it for its corruptnig influence in civic affairs. I hate it for its incessant effort to debauch the suffrage of the country; for the cowards it makes of public men. I hate it for its utter disregard for law. I hate it for its ruthless rampling of the solemn compacts of State constitutions. I hate it for the load it straps to labor’s back for the palsied hands it gives to tgil; for its wounds to genius; for the tragedies of its might-have-beens. I hate it for the human wrecks it has caused. I hate it for the almshouse it peoples; for the prisons it fills; for the insanity it begets; for the countless graves in potter’s fields. I hate it for the mental ruin it imposes upon its victims; for its spiritual blight; for the moral degregation I hate it for the crimes it has committed. I hate it for the homes it has destroyed. I hate it for the hearts it has broken. 1 hate it for the malice it has planted in the hearts of men, for its poison, for its bitterness, for tlie dead sea fruit with which it starves their souls.

i hate it for the grief it causes womanhood—the scalding tears, the hopes deferred, the strangled asperations, its burden of want and care. I hate it for its heartless cruelty to the aged, the infirm and the helpless for the shadow it throws upon the lives of the children; for its monstrous injustice to blameless little ones. I hate it as virtue hates vice, as truth hates error, as righteousness hates sin, as justice hates wrong, as liberty hates tyranny, as freedom hates oppression. i hate it as Abraham Lincoln hated slavery. And as he sometimes saw in prophetic vision the end of slavery and the coming of th| time when the sun should fall upon no slave in all the republic, so I sometimes seem to see the end of this unholy traffic, the coming of the time when, if it does not wholly cease to be, it shall find no safe habitation beneath Old Glory’s stainless stars. I still have several thousand drain tile in stock, which will be advanced 8 and 10 per cent after April Ist J. I. MILLER, Pleasant Grove, Ind.