Custer chronicle. [volume] (Custer City, Black Hills, D.T. [S.D.]) 1880-1890, 1886-06-26
Too Many Working People Drop Wages
Into Bags With Holes.
One of the Holes Graphically Described
By the Distinguished Preacher.
What Total Abstinence Would do for
Laboring People.
Drinking Incapacitates Men for Good
Work.
An Elaboration to all to Mend the Holes
In the Bag.

Rev. r. Dewitt Talmage, ID. d.,
preached Sunday, June Is, in the
Brooklyn Tabernacle, the fifth OF his
series Of sermons on ''The Labor ques-
ton" His subject was 'Strong Drink
the Worst Foe of Labor" DIR. Tai
mage took his text from Haggai, chap.
/, v. g.: HE that earneth wages. earn
eth wages to put it into a bag with
holes" DIR. Talmage said:
In Persia under the reign of Darius
Hystaspes the people did not prosper.
They made money but did not keep it.
They were like people who have a sack
in which they put money, not knowing
that the sack is torn or eaten of moths
or in some other way made incapable
Of holding valuables. AS fast as the
coin was put in n end of the sack it
dropped out of the other. 1t made no
difference how much wages they got,
for they lost them. 'He that earneth
wages, earneth wages to put it into a
bag with holes"
What has become Of the billions and
billions of dollars in this country paid
to the working classesp Some of these
moneys have gone for house rent OF
the purchase of homesteads or ward.
robe, or family expenses, or the neces-
stiles of life, or to provide comforts in
old age. What has become of other
billionsP Wasted at the gaming table.
Wasted in intoxicants. Put into a bag
with a hundred holes.
Gather up the money that the work
ing classes have spent for rum during
the last thirty years, and / will build
for every workingman Il house, and
lay out for him a garden, and clothe
his sons in broadcloth and his daugh-
ters in silks, and stand at his front
door a prancing span of sorrels or bays,
and s.cure him n policy of life in
so that the present home may
be well maintained after he is dead.
The most persistent,
MOST ovERPowERING ENEMY
of the working classes is Intoxicating
liquor. 1t is the anarchist of the cen
turtles, and has boycotted and is now
boycotting the body and mind and soul
of American labor. 1t is to it a worse
foe than monopoly and worse than as
sociated capital. 1t annually swindles
industry out of a large percentage of
it's earnings. 1t holds out its blasting
solicitations to the mechanic or opera
tive on his way to work, and at the
noonspell, and on his way home at
eventide; or Saturday, when the wages
are paid. it snatches "A large part of the
money that might come to the family
and sacrifices it among the saloon
keepers. Within eight hundred yards
of Sand street Methodist church,
Brooklyn, it has tif%ty-four saloons and
is plotting now for another. Stand the
saloons of this country side by side,
and il is carefully estimated they would
ICdtH lIohl ISCW w SlllIdEos
Forward, march, says the rum power,
and take possession of the American
nation!
The rum business is pouring its Wit
riolic and damnable liquids down the
throats of hundreds of thousands of
laborers, and while the ordinary strikes
are %ruinous both to employers and en-
-. ~. .n
STRIKE AGAINST STRONG DRINK,
which, if kept up, will be the relief of
the working classes and the salvation
of the nation. l will undertake to say
that there is not a healthy laborer in
the United States who. within the next
ten years, if he will refuse all insoxi-
beverage and be saving,
may not become a capitalist on n
small scale. Our country in a
year spends one billion, five hundred
million and fifty thousand dollars for
rum. OF course the working classes
do a great deal of this expenditure.
Careful statistics show that the wage
earning classes of Great Britain ex-
pend in liquors one hundred million
pounds, or five hundred million dollars
a year. Sit down and calculate, q
working man! how much you have ex-
pended in these directions. Add it all
up. Add up what your neighbors have
expended, and realize that instead of
answeri,g the beck of other people
you might have been your w capital
list.
When you deplete a working-man's
physical energy you deplete his capital.
The stimulated workman gives out be-
fore the unstimulated workman.
My father said: II became a temper
.ance man in early life because l no.
ticed in the harvest field that, though |
was physically weaker than other
workmen, / could hold out longer than
they. They took stimulants, l took
none"
A brick-maker in England gives his
experience in regard to this matter
among men in his employ. He says
after Investigation: 1.-The beer-drinker