Watertown leader. [volume] (Watertown, Jefferson County, Wis.) 1909-1911, 1909-07-23

meaner lie told than that business
prosperity depends upon protected
uncleanness, gambling or purchased
politics.
| once heard a man thus describ-
ed: He has the most ponderous
and exhaustive stock of misinform-
alton of any one in the common
wealth. :" Just that staggering
load of misinformation have all
those who are telling Us that bust
ness will suffer if graft in any
sneaking form is cut once for all
like a piece of rottenness out of the
body polite. In the great open
gambling towns of Europe in the
last generation, hundreds of impor-
tant and mighty business men
shouted from the housetops: If
you stop this gambling upon the
green tables, you'll ruin our towns,
people won't come here any more. !"
Everybody now sees that those
gentlemen were elaborately misin-
formed. Their immediate pecuni-
airy interests blinded them to the
real facts. When the gambling
was removed, some vocations were
injured suicides, for example,
stopped. There were fewer people
for the undertakers. High-class
bawdy -houses suffered, and the
trade in cocaine and champagne
fell off, but the Inhabitants as a
whole gained UNNECESSARILY in
wealth and welfare.
| live in town of 100, 900, in
which for more than twenty years
not saloon has existed. Every
class has the same chance TO buy
and take home, if he will. liquor
from nearby Boston, but the open
saloon which focuses lawlessness
IN politics, gambling, and vice,
that has gone. For years at the
start, scores of business men
fought fercely because it would
hurt business. They were insane
against the faddists and theorists,
but slowly the evidence came in.
1t came from the grocer and the
shopkeepers. 1t came from every
bank and rent-collector. 1t came
from the boarding-houses it came
from a thousand working class
mothers of families that every legi-
innate business was gaining. Ger
tain liquor men, some petty graft
| ing politicians, the brothels and
the parasitic brood of loan sharks
feeding upon the misery of the
poor suffered, but their suffering
merely spells the better health and
prosperity of the entire town.
Those frightened business gentle
men were grotesquely mistaken.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is a
sublime discovery that even ma
terial welfare rises as the vices,
the injustices and political graft
ing sink and disappear. To find
that out gives us footing solid as
granite on which we may stand in
the rising crusade against the link
ed business and political corruption
of citizenship in the United States.
And even if a little cowardly, we
want to be on the winning side.
We had better look to it. We
have not only the swelling tide of
democratized devices, but the
strengthening organs of the govern
ment-Eederal, State and city-are
directed every year toward deeper
and more searching investigation
of the exact relation between bust
ness buccaneering and political
graft and crime. The full and
threatening knowledge of these
things is passing rapidly to the
people and every day that passes,
the man who fights this machine
alliance fights with a greater and
more determined army at his heels.
Is the fool-area in any man S
head so ample that he supposes
this movement can be stayed or di-
verted? | once saw on a country
road, some children watching an
oncoming shower. With pretty