THE CIRCUS MAN’S STORY.

White Ribbon, Volume 32, Issue 369, 18 March 1926, Page 8

THE CIRCUS MAN’S STORY.

One evening the latter part of the first Prohibition year a group of churchpoople were holding a Prohibition dinner conference. Different individuals rose and told what church they represented. Suddenly a long, lean, lank man got slowly up from his chair, and iu a drawling tone of voice said: "I ain’t come from no church; I belong to the circus."

Naturally he had at once the attention of tin group, and be continued: "1 saw out here a Prohibition meeting was going on, and so I come in to tell you my story.

“Last year when the saloons were running in Chicago our circus came

to town; one of our men got hurt, and we took him to the County Hospital. The superintendent showed me over the hospital, and finally took me into the morgue. There was a shelf about six feet wide running all the way round the walls, and on that shelf were dead bodies wrapped up in sheets with only their heads showing.

"I lookixi around, and I see many of them were young girls, and so I counted —and there were 30! I grabbed the arm of the superintendent, and said, “In the name of God, how does this come?’’ And in* said ‘Booze.*

"And I thought about my little girl at home, a little 15-year-old curlvheaded thing that I love better than my life, and right then and there I swore before Almighty God that I would fight the stuff to the last day of my life. “Yesterday our circus came hack to Chicago, and I went over to the County Hospital, and I said. ‘Let me go into the morgue,’ I went in and looked around on the shelves, and didn't see a single dead girl. And I said to the superintendent, ‘Where are all the girls?’ and he said. ‘We don't have them now.’ I said ‘Why?* and he said. ‘Prohibition.’ ” 1 think this is a good answer to thoughtless and unfounded statements charging Prohibition with being harmful to young girls.—" Lena B. Mathes, In the Chicago Post,"