The Republican journal., 1909-02-18


en- women along the great highways in
England under license in one days time
than | ever saw in my lifetime in the
State of Maine under prohibition. The
fire water" that our mother country
used to ship over to the colonies degrad-
ed and ruined the Indians as a race.
Their craving for liquor became so great
that they sacrificed their fur trade to
secure it, and husbands were willing to
even sell their wives to obtain it; and
yet we are told when the white man first
gave the poor Indian liquor it caused his
eyes to almost burst from their sockets
and drove the sweat gushing from every
pore in his body Shame! shame on our
motherland for sowing the seeds of in
temperance among the Indians and our
early people, which led to habits of vice,
disease, crime and death.
Our forefathers scattered seeds in the new
world with careless hands,
And dreamed they would never see them more;
But after three centuries of long weary years
Their fruit appears,
In drunken weeds that mar our land,
Or healthful store
Year after year the white sails of COM
merce bore the serpent rum across the
ocean from our mother country, and as
time went on our early settlers drank
harder and harder-spending days and
nights in savage idleness and drunken
ness, and often with Indian women.
Half-breed children grew up and follow
ed in the footsteps of their drunken
sres, thus to suffer through life from an
inherited evil. If we could have taken a
look into many of the log cabins of our
first settlers early some morning nearly
century ago. where wild drunken ca
rousals and outrages had occurred during
the night, we would have seen white men
and Indians all mingled together sleeping
off their debauch under rude blankets,
bear skins and straw, and also heard the
frightful warwhoops and yells of drunken
savages which woke the echoes of the
deep forest as they staggered to their
wigwams.
From the earliest times in Maine
strong drink has been the greatest foe
of our people, inficting more ruin and
misery upon them than all other crimes
combined Well did Lord Bacon say:
"All the crimes on earth do not destroy
so many of the human race, nor ALLEVIATE
so much property, as drunkenness. Com
ing down to the opening of the Revolu-
tionary war we learn that the vice of
drunkenness had become thoroughly fas-
tened upon our people. 1t was during
this great struggle for independence that
1000 of the brave men of Maine persisted:
but the memory of their glorious deeds
will live forever in the hearts and minds
of men. Yet war has killed less of our
people than alcoholism, and caused fewer
hearts to bleed and less sorrow and an
guish. At the close of the Revolution
there was such an increase of drunken
ness among the people throughout the
colonies that even Patrick Henry, &C
cording to John Jay, our first Chief JUS
tice, the greatest of orators" was dis
tressed and alarmed over it and he did
everything in his power to arrest the
vice in Virginia. And when Washington
became President under the new consti-
tuition, and the first excise law in our
government on domestic spirits was pass
ed in 1871, there was no section through
out the Union where it was more bitterly
assailed than in the Province of Maine.
We had people then who cried out against
the hateful liquor tax" as we have today
those who cry outagainst our h: eful pro-
hibitory law.
Too little has been written in the his
tories of our country on the ''Whiskey
Rebellion" The reason, l suppose, is
because the strong arm of Washington
put the instruction down so quickly.
However, it should always be remem
bered that whiskey was the first direct
challenge to our government that it
would not obey its laws. A century has
passed since this, and yet we find today
that whiskey is the same old hoary
headed criminal as of yore. have often
been asked, while speaking in Maine and
other States, who it was that first advo-
Gated the principles of prohibition in our
nation, and | have always replied, that
so far as l knew it was Madison. He
was certainly one of the first, if not the
first, of our American statesmen to ad-
vocate this great principle. He wrote
much on the temperance question, as
we'll on the slavery issue in the early
days of our Republic; and considering
the times in which he lived it was re-
markable that he held such advanced
notions on the temperance question, be-
lieving as he did in prohibiting the
manufacture and sale of spirits. 1t is
quite coincidence that this great states
man, who refused early in life to follow
the custom of the times to furnish whis-
key to his supporters to aid in his cleo
ton to the Virginia legislature, had
brother-in-law in Maine, which was the
first State or section in the world to
declare for the great principles he mad