The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-03-18
and clean when it awakes in the morn

and clean when it awakes in the morn
 ing.
 The evolution of the civic conscious
 ness is very interesting to study tol
 example, in our earlier history 1t Wa'
 easy to rouse patriots to dangers arls
 ing from armed assault without, bu'
 hard to rouse them to perils arising
 from corruption within. The firing or
 Fort Sumter in 1861 brought forward g
 host of men ready to die for their coun- try. It was so in the Spanish war al
 the close of the nineteenth century. Ii
 was emphatically so in the great wal
 of 1880 which hurled back the hordes of Asia and saved the civilization of Flu
 rope and America. Hundreds of thou
 sands left their farms, their workshops
 and their offices, gave years out of thell lives, gave health, limb and life itself
 to preserve the republic! But what is the republic worth unless it preserves
 those jewels of liberty and opportunity for which republics exist? Fortunately
 there never was time of moral crisis
 when there were not left true patriots enough to save the country from fatal surrender. But thank God for being
 born in this better age when we look back on the public evils which existed
 at the beginning of the twentieth cen
 tury and discover low little the aver
 age man felt concern or responsibility
 therefor. It would appear that officials
 in this state were accused of accepting
 bribes, that the corrupt use of money in
 elections was a conceded fact, that stat
 ute laws were detiantly violated With
 out action by the authorities, that a
 barbarous sport, called prize fighting,
 now happily extinct, was licensed by
 the authorities of various cities in dis
 regard of law, and that these and kin
 dred evils caused but little comment in l the journals of the day As rule, the
 merchant buried his nose in his ledger, the workman trudged away with his
 full dinner pail, the professional man
 shrugged his shoulders, and few Of them bothered their heads about the
 abuses which they could have stopped by a healthy concern and participation
 in public problems. For example, I form of gambling called poolseiiihg, now plotted out by supervision of horse races and by governmental control of telegraphs and telephones, was still in existence century ago, though Illegal. Incredible as it seems that citizen commonwealth would permit the laws to be violated with impunity, it js a fact that pool-selling was publicly car ried on at the races in West Hartford, at the rate of hundred thousand dol lars an afternoon, without interference of officers or complaint of citizens. At fotr tah " at hIlrv 1inI1nr was sold illegally in large quantities and in the presence of thousands, and municipal authorities, liquor prosecut- ing agents, Christian church members and a great body of American citizens let the outrage go on It was a com mon thing in New Haven, Hartford and other Connecticut cities for liquor to be sold at balls, in defiance of law with out molestation and almost without comment. Great heavens what would happen should such thing be attempt ed now? Within half an hour some cit izen would convey the news to the au- thorities and within another half hour the guilty persons would be arrested and headed for jail, else the authorities themselves would be impeached by an indignant people.
 The matter of the regulation of the liuuor traffic Is one wherein we have by no means reached the ideal point, but at least we do not bungle so crudely as did our fathers. They required the appli- cant for license to state whether his saloon was to be within two hundred feet of a church, school house or ceme- | tery (though proximity to the latter would seem fittingly convenient), and 1 then, with beautiful consistency, licen- sed saloons within the prescribed dist ance Instead of one entrance to sa- loon, as now, there might be dozen, | and a policeman, to know what was | doing on Sunday, would need to be on all sides of the building at once. Nearly | every saloon has its back room and in many of them gambling, drinking at hours illegal, solicitations and nameless nfamies were carried on. Hundreds of girls were drugged in the back room and hurled to ruin by brutes in human form, before Christian commonwealth .ook alarm and shut up those horrible .raps forever. Formerly, too, the sa oons cloaked themselves with screens Even on Sunday when the screens were echnically removed the windows could ,e blocked with battles and beer signs, ,r che interior architecture so skillfully trranged that no clear view was possi ,le. Our present notion, I need not emind you, is that if the liquor busi less is to exist 1t must run as openly IS barber shop. The whole history of egula ton has shown that the business annot be trusted out of sight There ore an awakened sence of responsibility n citizenship has destroyed all opportu- lities for concealment. The surveillance maintained is the more effectual be- ause we have greatly reduced the num- er of saloons in proportion to the pop lation The present number of one undred saloons in this city of 100000 nha abitants seems excessive to many. 'ut a century ago, when the population 1as less than one quarter what it is ow, it was actually infested with three undred and eighty saloons. Our an- estors were used to the disorders re- ulting but failed to trace their origin. t ic pertinent to my subject to men, ion the great advance made along the ,hoe line of the repression of crime, : Or it is an awakened and vivified citi- . enship that has produced it. It is ard for us to understand how our fa 4