WHY I HATE THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9179, 31 August 1908, Page 6

WHY I HATE THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC.

(By Governor J. Frank Hanly, of Indiana). Personally, I have seen so much of the evils uf the liquor traffic in the last four years, so much of its economic waste, so much of its physical ruin, so much of its mental blight, so much of its tears and heartache, that I have come to regard the business as one that must be held and controlled by strong and effective laws. I bear no malice to ward those engaged in the business, but I hate the traffic. I hate its every phase. I hate it for its intolerance. I hate it for its arrogance. I hate it for its hypocrisy. I hate it for its cant and craft and false pretence. 1 hate it for its commercialism. I hate it for its greed and avarice. I hate it for its sordid love of gain at any price. I hate it for its domination in politics. 1 hate it for its corrupting influence in civic affairs. I hate it for its incessant effort to debauch the suffrage of the country, for the cowards it makes of public men. 1 hate it for its utter disregard of law. I hate it for its ruthless trampling of the solemn compacts of state constitutions.

I hate it for the load it straps to labour's back, for the palised hands it give to toil, for its wounds to genius, for the tragedies of its might-have-beens. I hate it for the human wrecks it has caused. I hate it for the almshouses it peoples, for the prisons it fills, for the insanity it begets, for its countless graves in potters' fields. I hate it for the mental ruin it imposes upon its victim, for its spiritual blight, for its moral degradation. I hate it for the crimes it has committed. I hate it for the homes it has destroyed. I hate it for the hearts it has broken. I hate it for the malice it has planted in the hearts cf men —for its poison, for it bitterness—for the Dead Sea fruit with which it starves their souls. I hate it for the grief it causes womanhood—the scalding tears, the hopes deferred, the strangled aspirlations, its burden of want and care.

I hate it for its heartless cruelty to the aged, the infirm, and the helpess, for the shadow it throws upon the lives of children, for its monstrous injustice to blameless little ones. I hate it as virtue hates vice, as truth hates error, as righteousness hates sin, as justice hates wrong, as liberty hates tyranny, as freedom hates oppression. I hate it as Abraham Lincoln hated slavery. And as he sometimes saw in prophetic vision the end of slavery and the coming of the time when the sun should shine and the rain should fall upon no slave in all the Republic, so I sometimes seem to see the end of this unholy traffic, the coming of the time when, if it does not wholly cease to be, it shall find no safe habitation anywhere beneath "Old Glory's" stainless stars.*