The Monitor. [volume] (Woodstown, N.J.) 1884-1892, 1884-05-09
THE DELUsIoN OF HIGH LICENSE
BY REV. HERRICK JOHNSON, DID,.

Prohibition is coming And it is coming
to stay. Thirty years of its laundering up in
Maine have not been wholly on deaf ears.
Men all over this land have listened, and
have believed. Thirty years ago prohibition
was an enthusiasm sweeping over many
states. To-day it is a conviction, getting
rooted in many states. The day has ar
rived" said Joseph Cook the other day in
Boston, 'when the two strongest passions of
the Anglo-Saxon, love of liberty and love of
home, are to be locked around the neck of
the liquor trade, and the latter broken once
and forever" He might have mentioned two
other passions, one lower and one higher,
that are to have hand in the conflict: the
love of money, and the love of right. Prop
erty and conscience are to take this evil by
the throat, as we'll as liberty and home. The
traffic has come to be fearful assault on
property 1t compels millions now for trib-
ute every year. And property will not stand
that forever. And higher and mightier than
property, higher and mightier than liberty
and home, is conscience. Get that reused,
get the public mind once seized with the i'm
perious grip of an ought, and the dramshop
is doomed.
Yet now, thrust right in the way of our
march to prohibition, is new device. 1t is
a sort of indeterminate nondescript or inter-
mediate somewhat, tertietna quid called high
license 1t is measure undoubtedly hon
estly advocated by few as step toward
prohibition. Undoubtedly honestly advo-
Gated by others as the best thing attainable in
the circumstances. And still by others I'M
doubleday as bar to prohibition. Some
good temperance men accept it as substi-
tute for something worse. Some liquor men
accept it in dread of something worse And
no wonder it attracts such strange bed-fel-
lows 1t is q child of compromises Mr..
Facing both-ways; neither one thing nor the
other. High license may be a tub thrown to
the whale: but which whale The biggest
half of it-'' license looks as if it meant
the saloon whale. But the other section of
the tub high looks like squirt to the
temperance whale.
Honestly but mistakenly supposed by some
to be measure of genuine reform, am pre-
pared deliberately to pronounce it miser-
able and mischievous device, that will put
some additional dollars into the treasury, but
turn to ashes every other hope of good from
its operation.
There are five things five indubitable
things-that make high license, as remedy
for the evils with which we are cursed by the
traffic in strong drink, delusien and a sham.
1. The first is that high license gilds the
traffic with certain air Of respectabihty And
behind gilded vice the most danger turks
The more outwardly respectable you make
the saloon the worse you make 1t. The as
sault upon morals and manhood is then SUBJ
tle insidious, treacherous 1t is not your
open, outrageous, infamous sinners that do the
most HARM blatant boasting Ingersoll is
far less potent for mischief than willy and
ingenious skeptic wearing the guise of chris
tianity only to betray it. So it is not the be-
sotted and loathsome drunkard, swinging
from his drinks to the gutter, and crawling
from the gutter back again to his drinks
who tempts hayward feet to the folly and
filth of intoxication The saloons that keep
up appearances, that put on pretence OF
virtue, that claim to be decent in conduct and
law-abiding-it is these that play the mischief
with our young men.
High license tends to give them the guise
of responsibility. Five hundred, or one thou
sand dollars paid to the government for the
privilege of doing certain thing gives to the
one doing it kind of dignity, and inevitably
stamps the thing done as business Of some
considerably increased Importance and worth.