The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-09-04


 employees compensation and a 1 number of other reforms have been | 1 bitterly resisted in legislatures and |
 in courts as unrighteous efforts to
 interfere with the freedom of the
 individual Indeed, it is a some
 what suspicious sign that both the
 saloonists and the exploiters make
 use of identical arguments.
 But the fact is that when we set down to brass Jacks, the real ques-
 tion at issue is whether or not the social traffic; whether it's re-
 suits in society are beneficial OH the
 whole or not; whether or not in
 fine, it is not 50 over hrrdencl With
 dangerous results and disastrous
 cc'lE equences, the personal !i' trty
 involved has to be sacrificed to the
 general welfare.
 Without intemperately asserting
 that all liquor is baneful, we do not
 have to travel very far to discover
 that it has as a whole baneful eff
 fleets. There are temperate users,
 but there are so many incorporate
 abusers of intoxicating liquor, that societys right to control, abolish } or otherwise interfere in the traffic , is unquestioned.
 , No reliable physician will dare , uphold alcohol as anything else but poison. And why it should not have it's traffic subjected to the same degree of inhibition as any : habit forming drug is not very ex- s plainable.
 It is a question whether the liquor |. man is justified in scattering his : poison throughout a community, de 6 stroying and running many lives de- $ moralizing and degrading so many { things that come in contact directly
 with it.
 e Now we would like to see as a re- . lief from these arguments in favor of personal liberty some of those t writers uphold the saloon as a so- e cial institution.
 = We have read dozens of these C paid articles in the papers of AL y aska, north, south, east and west, l and not a single one of them up- q holds the saloon. Not one of them I tell you that if you vote down the l saloon you are abolishing the best d friend you have got; that you are n destroying a place where your wife B and your mother can feel right at - home; that you are abolishing e something that cannot be replaced; 1; t that you are destroying what every 0 person knows and feels is a beneti, S to and an improvement in any com
 munity No Sir. They are not making arguments of that kind. They : don't tell you that the saloon is the
 friend of the labor movement with l it's absolutely scab made whiskey. e They don't tell you that the union man that blows his money in will be the man to hold out longest; = that the man with his brains fuddled a and muddled with the poison of al- s cohol is the man that will aid best in the emancipation of his fellows; | that the man who has spent the h last cent in some booze dump will d be the guy that will hold out long n est when the scab herder gives him n pint of rot-gut
 - And why not? If there were pro-
 posed laws against labor organiZa- e tion and against labor unions 6o C you imagine that the unionists would u confine their arguments to theOreti C cal talks upon patriotism and d Henry and personal liberty? Do 'u
 think that the unionists would not It be there with bells to show you that e labor unions were necessity, that 6 because they were, they were going U to remain in spite of laws or any n thing else; that the real reason they 6 were being destroyed was because Il they fought special interests and in. o tended to keep on fighting them: n But because the saloon has 70 ar e gument, because it ruins the Ion c l. destroys labor's effort to better its > condition, spills its filth al. over IS the surface of society, it knows bet l. ter than to come out defaat,y in r, the open and defend itself as an ir d stitution. It defends itself by squirt.