The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-08-23

l the big convention class recently. The Sons Of Temperance. 8 worthy order of venerable years, held it's last | annual meeting in Providence, R. l. There was a time when national meeting of the Sons of Temperance would have brought great crowds, but 1t has dwindled down to a@small mem bership. Birmingham might have se- cured the sons had an effort been made, because no wine is allowed to be served at it's banquets. But the sort of con- ventions that count in a big city are the Elks, the Shriners. the Knights Templar. the Knights of Columbus, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the Federation of Catholic socie- ties. Several of the societies referred to are noted for their temperance habits, but to secure anyone of these annual meets, hotel accommodations must be ample and the town must have outgrown such a provincial thing as technical prohibition. Prohibition bona fide prohibition-is all right for small towns, provided public sentiment backs up prohibition. TN dspensary Is an excellent thing for Huntsville and other cities of that size, but Birming- ham has 10000 population now and should be in the list of especially popu- lar convention cities. but it never will be so long as it is without saloons and without a modern, fire-proof, sky scraper hotel costing s1,000,000 or more.
 By the way, in speaking of hotels, I read in The Age-Herald recently that MT. Dangaix was prepared to build the sort of hotel we need on the one con dition that the lessee would be able to have a buffet as feature of the hotel. If a s1, ,000, 900 hotel is to pay the own CTS, or stockholders. anything like a fair rate of interest on their invest ment (after repairs are made), it would have to rent for $75o0O a year. The bar privilege would be worth between s25,000 and s30,O00 year. If the pro prietor had to rent it without bar he wouldn't pay over $50,o00: perhaps not that much.
 "The lessee of the Piedmont Tn At lanta had a provision in the contract that in the event of prohibition pre- vailing In that city his rent was to be S30,000 a year less. In Birmingham a clause would certainly be inserted in the lease of any high-class hotel re- sarding the saloon business. It is all mighty nice for prohibitionists to talk about chipping in to help build ho- tel, but in order to build one of the sort we of the Chamber of Commerce have long been discussing, very large in- dividual subscriptions must be forth coming Without buffet or bar a s1,- coo 900 hotel here Is simply out of the question.
 %Another thing that must be kept in mind by men who are interested in general prosperity, is that in order to cultivate trade with the Latin coun- tries growing out of the opening of the Panama canal we must have repre- sentative merchants from the little re- publics south of us come here as our guests. Latin Americans all drink wine, but there Is no such thing as drunk enness among them. Those who drink wine at banquets would feel disgraced if they were to become boozy, but to them a banquet without wine is so ut- terly provincial as to disgust them with the town that called itself a city. This idea was suggested by citizen of Bir- mingham who spends much of his time in Latin-America as representative of one of our great mercantile concerns.
 "If Birmingham should remain sa loonless we would have to wait until we could have another election and vote for regulation and high license before doing much boosting. We have the blind tigers now. We would still have them under a dispensary system But blind tigerism does not set well on great national conventions or on capi- talists or on any other progressive peo- pie who might have business here dur ing the year"