Belmont chronicle. [volume] (St. Clairsville, Ohio) 1855-1973, 1869-12-02

on, no physical force to take refuge un-
der. He gives US the intelligence and
the virtue of the people, the title-deed of
your estates, the guaranty of your life,
the shield of your freedom of speech
Nothing besidesI OF course, in ordi-
nary hours of calm a Chinese junk will
float with safety, but you need the Well
modelled frigate, and the sagacious pilot,
when the storm comes on and the ocean
swells. That is what tries and strains
the institutions of q country, and sets
out to work the real power of the laws,
and how much they will bear. And so
i'll these critical moments when the
keen fire of n great quarrel brings out
the hidden secrets of a nation you see
where the 'nub" of power rests. And
why do go back TO these reminlscen-
ces? | will tell you. Because there are
certain great questions looming overthe
! horizon, and even now commanding us
to admit them into the great tribunal
of discussion. The great questions await
ing their solutions, and their primal in
| tsrest turn on this pivot.
The first is temperance. We see an
orphaned family. We see man suffer-
| ing even more than those whose happi-
ness he has wrecked. That is intemper-
ance viewed from the Christian stand
| point. But there is another point, and
it is how much this great national weak
ness, putting aside its sin how much 1t
has to do with the purpose and to mold
the machinery of civil government. L
am going to look at it tonight, with
your permission, from the standpoint of
/ its relation to law. What are We? We
are race of Germans. We belong to
| the blood of the North by affiliation.-
Now every race has its own temptation;
every blood its own weakness. You go
! to the tropics and you find there men
under one temptation, and you go to
the temperate zones and you find men
under another; and you will always find
our, when you can not otherwise do 1t,
the dominant passion or characteristic
| in the race. if you run your eye on the
centuries back anterior to its adoption
of Christianity, and find what its my
thology was; for man or a race always
projects its dominant idea, and forms
out of it It's ideal of God. We take what
we think strongest, or most beautiful,
attractive, or most characteristic in our
selves. and project it into the infinite,
and that is all.
Here are the four great elements which
every statesman must never forget: A
ballot box which floats without an an
| ehor on the changing wave of popular
turbulance, which no statute book and
no magistrate ever steadies for. single
instant. Secondly, q race that is called
to the 2ravest temptations by drink
| Third, science that holds out the means
at one-half the price that it ever did be-
fore. Fourthly, labor, well-paid if not
Justly paid, that furnishes the means of
intoxication by the labor of day for the
drink of a week. Here are the four great
attendant features that clutch at the
very heart of possible self-government.
How will you manage them? Two
hundred millions of dollars massed up
in this very city, devoted directly or in
directly to the manufacture and disper-
sion of Intoxicating materials. You can
not sneer at this or be Indifferent to the
danger which lies there. 1t has made
the government of your metropolis o
farce, as it has all other great cities
Take my city (Boston). 1t is most ia
miliar to me. We have three thousand
places where $40, 0,0s0 900 of massed-up
capital makes its open portfolios out of
which it fires the cannons on the public.
There never was an election in Boston
that 5000 votes taken from one side to
the other would not reverse the victory.
The consequence is that any man that
drinking saloon is a candidate for BOs-
ton Mayor. When We get a stranger in
the old town the only place we have to
show him are our schools. We haven't
any streets;jthey are only alleys. Now,
why is all this? Because of this great
race temptation because of this poison
in the blood which we inherit. We have
tried. license, and the result is-bere we
are! You can't dig up hidden history,
Christian or Pagan, in Asia or Europe,
that does not contain license law; and
yet, despite our struggles, the same great
evil is dragging us down to-day. Is
Yankee ingenuity exhausted? Do we
give up the struggle? Are we ready to
say, "Rule the country by republican,
ism, and the cities by despotism ?" No,
our ingenuity is not exhausted, for you
know that a Yankee baby often months
looks over the side of this cradle, plans
a new one, and gets up and patents it
before he is twelve months old. Laugh
ter Now, how shall we grapple with |
this theme and save self-government? =
You can not rest universal ballot box |
on drunken people. for it surely gives |
them into the hands of demagOgues, |
and in the great struggle that loom. over |
the future your self-governmenth has the |
grog shop for Its greatest foe. We think |
we have discovered remedy, and We |
call it prohibition. Some men don't like |
it. Well, like the patent medicine ped
der on the cars, we only ask a trial. | |
don't say prohibition is right Though l |
think it Isl, but / say that two centu-
ries of the medicine called license is a |
failure; and, if you have not got any
thing else, you must own up, take refuge |
at the foot of Napoleon or Gar, and set |
Il l.,
the influence of the mob. One hundred |
and fifty men own England to-day, and
do not care for the masses, and they can
keep the nineteenth century at bay
Bring back that state of things in New
York, unless you can fihd some remedy
for this underlying stratum that gives
you over to the rule of demagogues. One
OF the most eloquent of our young tenn
perance lecturers tells u story of the
richest man in certain county who Of
fered the half of his estate to'any one
who would give him power to pass "that
doOrw One thing that you, or L, or the
law can not do is to put soul into the
wrecked being we call drunkard; but
we can shut that door [applause], and
make the streets safe for weak soul to
tread, and that is prohibition. The great
of craftsmanship is to find n
panacea for this accumulatingevil, and
we believe that in prohibition is the un-
derlyiug safety of the ballot box. Yet
we may be wrong and you may be right,
and prohibition may be something that
bears within itself the seeds of its own
failure. But don't despair. AS long rs
live, as long as voice is given me and ,
thought remains, L shall contend that :
the first great duty of the true states
man in this country is to find the means
Of saving the ballot box from the drunk
enness of the streets, aud unless our :
statesman can do this we must own that ,
The DecIaratinn of Independence is of