The Columbia herald. [volume] (Columbia, Tenn.) 18??-1935, 1902-01-31
THE FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREN

THE FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREn
: The New Voice says:
, You may 20 out today into tn
streets Of any great or small American
city and meet the children conliDl
from the schools and know that as the,
pass before you you are hooking int,
the bright fresh little faces of hun
dreds of thousands of girls and boy;
who. tive, ten or twenty years from
now will. by the system that we keel
in power, be iufallibly crushed,
blighted. ruined.
Along our streets to and from odI
schools 20 the little girls that our pro-
tected system of vice drags TO its in
famous dens to take the places of the
young women that il is numbering.
Along our streets go the innocent
little girls for whom our saloon system
is providing drunken brutes TO be their
husbands. Crushed. broken-hearted,
hopeless, ten years from now Il ey will
be neglected, beaten. murdered drunk
ards wives. whose misfortune will be
told in corner paragraphs of the daily
papers.
Along our streets to-day there are
going, too, the happy young mothers
who twenty years from now will weep
bitter tears over the collins If their
slaughtered hopes We know it. We
know that just as certainly as the sa
loon goes ON with its work it will take
great army of boy babies. now in
their cribs and baby carriages. and
will murder them. body and soul, to
the breaking of their mothers hearts.
And the saloon is going on, and If
we care anything about the girls, about
the boys and about the mothers, the
great majority of the American people
never show it.
No man of fair intelligence and dis
corning mind, we care not what may
be his habits or his business, can deny
the awful truthfulness of the above.
And no part of it is truer than that ''if
we care anything about the girls.
about the boys and about the mothers
the great majority of the American
people never show it. -
Men become absorbed with sympathy |
for Beers, thousands of miles away, |
while one of their own family, perhaps, |
is drinking damnation to his own soul.
Men go wild over the legal ratio
between gold and silver, and visit
political ostracism upon friends of 4
life time. And yet will bare their
backs to the party lash, or for the
paltry consideration of few dollars
in trade, will vote with the whiskey
gang upon the slightest excuse.
The temperance people insist and
they are entirely logical in their
that the question of temper
ance, this question of regulating, re-
straining, or crushing the whiskey
-arffic, should not be and shall not be
ignored any longer. The rank and file
If the party have wanted it brought
10 the front long ago; the leaders have
Iept it down. Political platforms
made for Tennessee and declaring for
he freedom of Ireland and the in
dependence of the Dutch Republic,
lave been stuffed down the throats of
he people in the past, but they de- l
line to be fed ON such tommy rot in L
he future. They have not lost inter-
st in the great questions of finance
nd tariff and foreign policy; but they I
ave learned that these do not belong
0 state conventions, and are thrown
n, more often than otherwise, as I
ecoy ducks, to distract from real
urning issues that bring happiness 1
, our homes or despair to our hearts. u
Both the old parties in Tennessee IL
Iust meet this issue this year. They d
lust indorse the principle of local u
ption which is no more nor less than II
n endorsement of that bedrock Il
doctrine of local self gov u
both the old parties, we say. y
lust vote in convention on this ques- CO
on, aud woe be to the one that votes u
down. az