Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 95, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 August 1908 — OPIUM MERCHANTS WITH BREWERS. [ARTICLE]

OPIUM MERCHANTS WITH BREWERS.

Reverting to that weirdly hopeful published interview with the great Lieber der Gross®, boss brewer-politician of the state, doesn’t it strike the reader that several of the statements need a grain or two of salt? They are very "fresh.” He Is all right when he says oounty local option is the paramount issue before the people of Indiana this year. He is wrong in his essay in prophecy on the result of the election in November. There are thousands of temperance Democrats in Indiana. Tom Marshall is sow one and he must feel embarrassed by the pecuniary and personal support erf Brewers. Lieber and Fairbanks in hie race for the governorship. In the Democratic convention a great cheer rang through Tomlinson hall when that sentence of the platform was read that teys the present temperance laws are not to be interfered with. Now these good temperance Democrats are becoming more ind more “wise” to the true meaning of that local option plank commended by the brewer-politicians. A township and city ward nnit local option law would ring the knell on the remonstrance law, which now provides the very thing the other nominally Is proposed to do. r _....~_V'y~:

But about that Lieber talk. He is interesting when he says the Democ; racy Is reinforced by the German and Irish'societies, who, he says, “do not believe the majority has the right to dictate to the minority a’s to purely personal matters.” Hibernian and Teutonic societies are hot always and only drinking olhbs. The greatest temperance revival of the first half of the last century came out of Ireland and our Irish-American brethren still reverence the hame of Father Mathew. The Catholio church stands for temperance, and the many thousands of men of Irish and German birth or descent in its communion in tills state know and subscribe what its priests teach. He who believes with Lieber that the majority has no right to dictate to the minority as to ptifely personal matters reminds us of the opium merchant of China and his argument. Dealers in the drug that is the curse 6f the Orient talk Just as Lieber does, but the late movement to banish opium and the opium pipe from Japan and China and India Is progressing almost as rapidly as the local option crusade is in America. The vested interests of “dope,” liquid or vegetable, are cry: iijg alpud from the housetops of both Occident and Orient against Invasion of their personal rights. Vested wrongs they are, and the community that obliterates them exercises only its natural and divine right of selfpreservation. The Republican party in Indiana desires and is pledged to give that community right to each county in the state, which also under the proposed local option would have as much right to say “leave us our saloons.” “By the majority thou shatt abide.”