p. 624 | Signs of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 39. (10/6/1914)

Earlier text: THEY ARE RELIGIOUS BLUE LAWS

Promising Young Man Wrecks His Home

By E. R. Potter

A Personal Experience in a Life Tragedy

By E. R. POTTER

THE charges preferred against the culprit at the "bar" are many and most serious, and demand careful investigation and prompt decision by every man, woman, and child on this world "jury."

The sworn testimony of eye-witnesses without number has substantiated every charge made, and still fresh and convicting testimony comes from the "witness-box," appealing for swift and just condemnation of the liquor traffic.

Of all the crimes committed by this traffic, none are more pernicious than its breaking up and destroying homes.

The welfare of society and the prosperity of the nation depend upon home influences. Please allow a personal witness upon this point.

TRAGEDY OF THE YOUNG WIFE'S HOME

The first place we called our home after our wedding day, May 16, 1906, was part of a new dwelling-house on Atlantic Avenue, in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Upon acquaintance with the young couple occupying the other part of the house, we learned of the singular circumstance that they had been married on the same sixteenth of May.

We became quite intimate, and our associations were the pleasantest, as we found them to be especially kind-hearted and happy, and devoted to each other. They attended a certain mission in the city, and were, with us, much interested in Christian work.

Several weeks thus passed, when suddenly a change took place. Late one night, after we had retired, we heard our friends enter the house; but instead of the usual quietness, there were unusual sounds, which became louder and louder.

I arose and was preparing to go down to see what was the cause, when one of the mission workers called me. I went down, and on nearing the door of the nicely furnished parlor, was surprised to hear my friend say, with thickened and unnatural voice, "If Mr. Potter comes in here I will smash him."

Entering the door, I said, "I thought some one must be sick down here," to which he mumbled a reply, "We are sick." He certainly looked it. And there sat his beautiful young wife with two of the workers from the mission, all trembling with terror. Some of the furniture was broken, and his wife's dress was in tatters, giving evidence of his cruel treatment and insane actions.

I was compelled to watch him and guard his wife and friends all that night. That was the sad beginning of a bitter chapter in the history of this home.

The next few years were marked with times when he was a kind, repentant husband, and times of fearful trial and disgrace to himself and the only daughter of Christian and highly respected parents.

The last time I saw him, he was staggering on the streets of Vancouver, British Columbia, where her parents had helped him to get into new associations and new work, but with the same story repeated till the home was broken up, the wife heart-broken, and her parents in despair of doing anything more for him.

It is the oft-repeated story of the promise of reform before the marriage vows are taken.

This noble girl felt confident, like many another, that she would be the means of reforming her husband.

AN APPEAL IN CONSEQUENCE

I make my appeal for the sake of the children upon whom the liquor traffic stamps a curse before their birth, whom it robs of food, clothing, love, and education during their helpless years; for the sake of the young men and women whose brightest hopes and prospects it blights; for the sake of the most generous and gentle and manly of our sons and husbands whom it debauches and degrades; for the sake of our country, whose courts it fills with criminal cases, prisons with convicts, and asylums with maniacs.

Let us each render the verdict that will banish this traffic from the land.

What Seven Influential Men Said for Prohibition

A GROUP of men casually came together at a dinner-party the other evening, and one happened to look over the table, which the women had just left, and commented on the little alcohol that had been consumed. And here is what these men said.

The first was a business man of large interests. "I wouldn't think of voting for state prohibition; but let national prohibition come up, and it will have my vote in a minute. Drinking has become an economic issue, and I am willing to give up my whisky and soda for the good of the many."

The second was a large employer of men, some eighteen thousand. "I am ready for national prohibition. Up to this time it has seemed a far-away ideal to me; now I see it as a pure efficiency measure."

The third was a clear-seeing Irishman. "Alcohol has been the curse of my people. I have stopped taking it, after forty years of occasional drinking, and my vote is ready for national prohibition."

"Go ahead," said the fourth man, a railroad official of high standing. "I am ready for it personally, and so are all the officials of our road."

A physician was the fifth. "Medicine can do without it. Science is against it. The old idea of alcohol as a food is exploded. I am all ready for my vote for national prohibition."

It was a club man who spoke next. "When I see drinking among the caddies at our club, and our caddy master silly with it, I am ready to give up my cocktail and vote against the whole business."

And last of all was a wholesale dealer in liquor, who started the talk, and who finished with this significant statement: "You're right. We are seeing the handwriting on the wall. I said at a meeting of our wholesale liquor dealers the other evening that we didn't have five years' life ahead of us. Strange as it may seem to you, I would vote for national prohibition. It's for the best all around."

Not a dissenting voice! — Ladies' Home Journal.

"Crime, Booze, and Taxes"

By A. C. Gilbert

A Striking Illustration — Hard Facts

That Tell Their Own Story

By A. C. GILBERT

MUCH is said about conserving the natural resources of the country. The greatest conservation that can be accomplished is the saving of human lives from physical and moral degeneracy; and the next is the protection of the monetary income to the benefit of the producer, turning it into legitimate channels of trade.

Any power or influence that turns the earnings of toilers into avenues of profligate waste must be considered a debaucher of humanity, an abettor of crime, and a breeder of vice and misery. Such is the liquor traffic.

THE TAXPAYER, THE POLICE, AND THE DRINKER

The province of Saskatchewan, Canada, is waging a vigorous warfare called "Banish the Bar Campaign." The campaign organ, Banish the Bar Crusader, contains a pertinent article that sets forth the relation of the liquor traffic to economics. It is headed, "Crime, Booze, and Taxes," and reads as follows:

"The report of the police department of the city of Regina for 1913 has just been made public, and shows a strange state of affairs.

"The taxpayers of that city pay $57,000 annually to maintain their police force, and in the year 1913 there were apprehended or summoned by the force 2,583 offenders.

"Of these offenders, no less than 1,850 were in trouble as a direct result of the liquor traffic, which the good people of that city

voted to retain in the 1910 local option contest. . . .

"These figures mean that somewhere between seventy per cent and seventy-five per cent of the cases in the Regina police court are due to the existence in that city of the liquor traffic.

THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND THROWN AWAY

"The police force, as above stated, costs the city $57,000 yearly. The liquor traffic pays licenses to the amount of $3,200 into the city coffers, leaving $53,800 to be raised elsewhere. An amount about equal to the licenses is levied on the unfortunates who are arrested or summoned; and the balance, over $50,000, comes from the rate payers. At least seventy per cent of this $50,000 is directly due to the liquor traffic, or approximately $35,000. And the force must be increased at once, so the chief constable says.

"What a kind, gentle, long-suffering lot of rate payers those rate payers in Regina must be!

"Surely it is high time, from an economic standpoint, that these crime-breeding, tax-levying, vice-spawning holes should be plugged up."

Let us, by our votes, our voices, our pens, help to sweep this infernal traffic from our doors and ultimately from our land.

Twin Ballots

By Anonymous

Along in November, when chill was the weather, Twin ballots were cast in a tin box together. They nestled up close, like brother to brother. You could not tell one of them from the other.

Chorus

They were both rum votes, And sanctioned the license plan; But one was cast by a cunning old brewer, And one by a Sunday-school man.

The Sunday-school man — no man could be truer — Kept busy all summer downing the brewer; But his fever cooled off with the change of the weather, And late in the autumn they voted together.

The Sunday-school man had always been noted For fighting saloons — except when he voted. He piled up his prayers with a holy perfection, Then knocked them all down on the night of election.

The cunning old brewer was cheerful and mellow. Said he: "I admire that Sunday-school fellow. He's true to his church, to his party he's truer; He talks for the Lord, but he votes for the brewer." — Anonymous.

Prohibition and Drunkenness

By Pasadena Board of Labor

From Address by Pasadena Board of Labor

It is argued that drunkenness is greater in prohibition territory. This is not a fact in Pasadena, it being very rarely that an intoxicated man is seen on the street. Of course this would not hold good in newly made prohibition communities, as it takes some years for men who have drunk freely all their lives to lose the habit. We do not believe that this charge is true in any "dry" territory; for if more liquor were consumed, then more men in the liquor industries would be employed, not discharged, and prohibition would be welcomed by the brewing interests.

The rising generation in this city is not acquiring the drink habit, because of the absence of constant temptation; and down in your own hearts, brothers, you know they are better off...

The claim is also made that local option is the proper method of settling the liquor problem, in spite of the fact that when local option is proposed in a community, the same interests tell us that local option does not prohibit, and that we should have a national law governing the matter.

We know that local option does cut down the use of intoxicating drinks, and we believe that national laws will cut it down still more.

"Shiloh, the Man of Sorrows"

By Mrs. L. D. Avery-Stuttle

Will all those who sent in their names as advance subscribers for the book "Shiloh, the Man of Sorrows," please send in their money at once to the publishers, and receive their volume? Some are not fulfilling their pledge promptly. This is causing embarrassment, because these names were sent in by the author in good faith. So please send the $1.50 at once, as agreed. Author's portrait free.

Address The Gorham Press, 194 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts.

Mrs. L. D. Avery-Stuttle, 1215 Vermont Avenue, Lansing, Michigan.

Turkey and Its End

By Editor

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Topsy-Turvy Evolution

By Editor

PROF. WM. BATESON recently gave an address before the British Association at its meeting in Melbourne, Australia, in which he set forth the theory that Darwin and his followers have doubtless been wrong in teaching that evolution began with very simple forms of life and developed into the more complex. The professor thinks that after all, “primordial form or forms of protoplasm could have contained complexity enough to produce the divers types of life.”

The evolutionist looks with a great deal of pity as well as scorn and contempt upon the individual who will not accept his varying and shifting theories. Yet it is quite evident that among themselves they can not agree. But without any agreement, they ask us to accept the theories of evolution just the same.

The Bible truth is not only far more satisfying, but it is the only reasonable solution of the sources of life and of material things that we see about us. “By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which appear.” Heb. 11:3.

Not only in this text, but in numerous other passages, the Book declares that God’s word is the only source of creation. And when we see the orderly march of the planets, and observe the multiplied millions of stars shining as bright suns in the infinite space about us, who can doubt that there is an all-powerful Being capable not only of creating all of these things, but of directing their movements? The planets that revolve around our sun keep perfect time. The mathematician may figure for years to come, and tell us accurately where we will find these heavenly bodies. Such infinite precision in the movements of the immense suns and their attendant worlds can not come by chance. It is the work of the infinite Being who is not only the Creator but our heavenly Father.

And some men would try to supplant His wonderful work of creation by the absurd and conflicting theories of evolution. Let us stand by the Book, and the common sense fact stated in that Book, that “by the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.” “For He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.” Ps. 33:6, 9.

The Sunday Issue in California

By Editor

WE are giving considerable space in this number to the discussion of the proposed Sunday law by the initiative in the state of California. This will be a new experience in America. The people themselves are asked to decide whether or not California shall have a Sunday law. Heretofore such matters have been decided before legislatures. How many of the people who vote upon this question this fall will really stop to consider what they are doing?

Sentimentally, some will say that the laboring men need a day of rest, so we will vote for a Sunday law. But the laboring man can have his day of rest if he will take it, by simply exercising his independence. This is proved by the fact that there are thousands of Seventh-day Adventists — and they are scattered through every state in this Union — who observe Saturday. They require no law outside of the law of Jehovah to compel them to do it. It is true that they face difficulties. They sometimes have to give up some job of work, and seek another where they can keep the Sabbath, but they do it. And those who really desire to keep Sunday can do it without any of these difficulties that confront the Seventh-day Adventist.

The laboring people who are in favor of such a measure do not realize the trap they are setting for themselves; for if they vote that the state may control one seventh of their time, they thereby admit that the state has a right to make them slaves, and that it can control all of their time. Are we desirous of becoming slaves?

The Next Program for Peace

BEFORE this awful war in Europe broke out, we were assured, over and over again, that our Christian civilization in all of the great world powers was such that we would have no more wars of any consequence. We were told that our powerful cannon and our big battle-ships, our submarines and our military aeroplanes, were so terrible that men would not face them in actual war, and that really they were "peacemakers." But this war, coming like an explosion, has dissipated that idea; and the world for the time being is awake to the fact that the most barbarous, the most cruel, and the most destructive fighting this world has ever known is now in progress.

Within two months, war is declared, millions of men are in the field fighting, and more thousands of persons have been killed, and more property has been destroyed, than in a year or possibly in four or five years of any past wars.

© International News Service. DOG-DRAWN MACHINE GUN, BELGIAN ARMY

God's word has predicted that in this time, the nations would be angry, and the spirit of war would be rife; but men have been saying "No" to the sacred Book. They have been telling us that we are approaching an era of peace. So now our good peace advocates — thousands of whom, without any question, are perfectly sincere in what they have been and are saying — are beginning to tell us that we have been on the wrong tack in the past; that in place of these great implements of war being peacemakers, we should have disarmed the nations; and that if we did not have these destructive armaments, then we would have no danger of war, as our civilization would prevent it. Hence a strong crusade is already setting in in favor of peace and disarmament, and we are already earnestly told that this war will be so terrible that its lesson will be sufficient for all time, and that we will be in danger of no more wars.

But be not deceived by these things. The good Book says that "the heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it? I, Jehovah, search the mind, I try the heart, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings." Jer. 17:9, 10.

Our deceitful hearts lead us to believe that our civilization and our Christianity are very superior in this age and generation; and without question there are multiplied thousands of men and women living to-day who stand as high in Christian morals as any who have ever lived. But regardless of these, our world is in a desperate situation. God foresaw it, and pointed out, through the prophets, that the conditions in this time would be war and not peace; and the stormy sentiments in society everywhere ought to arouse us to the fact that God's word is correct in what it has foretold.

We may expect this war to close, possibly as suddenly as it began, but it will not end the strife. The Book explains that things will continue to grow worse and worse until finally the only thing that can meet the climax of violence, strife, and wickedness in general will be the mighty power displayed in the second coming of Christ.

Let us not lose sight of the fact that the Book which has foretold these wars has also foretold the mistaken notes of peace that would be sounding in these war times. It is "when they are saying, Peace and safety," that "sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall in no wise escape." 1 Thess. 5:3.

Commercial Men and the Sunday Law

By J. O. C.

The Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles has been examining the initiative measure, to be No. 45 on the November ballot, having the title, 'One Day of Rest in Seven'; and Mr. Bradner W. Lee, chairman of its committee on laws, has reported on it as follows:

"The initiative measure proposing to provide one day in seven as a day of rest, would undoubtedly be made an instrument for punishment, in accordance with its penal clause, of all persons who permitted any persons in their employ to perform any class of labor on that day. Even though an attempt is therein made to except what is denominated 'works of daily necessity,' yet the measure is so full of uncertainties even in this regard, that were it to become a law, the courts would be kept busy in attempting to interpret it when called upon to enforce its penal clause. Many persons might be under the belief that they were strictly complying with its requirements, and yet unconsciously violating them. It is not a well-considered measure, even though its title seems to provide for that which every reasonable person would not oppose, and undoubtedly would probably favor.

"The proposed act is masked under a title which undoubtedly should and would be popular, yet the measure itself can be made an instrument productive of great harm should it become a law. It belongs to the same class of legislation as the proposed amendment to the penal code known as Proposition No. 3, hereinbefore referred to."

Proposition No. 3, referred to in this careful analysis, is the measure intended to restrict all labor in the state of California to eight hours a day, or forty-eight hours in a week. This eminent lawyer sees in No. 45 a danger that was designed to be covered by a supposed popular church measure, and by thus masking its real import, draw to its support all religious organizations. In view, however, of the legal report rendered, the Chamber of Commerce at once voted to combat initiative measure No. 45, known as the Sunday rest bill, and is now sending out opposition literature to affiliated bodies throughout the state.

It is to be hoped that other organizations formed on behalf of successful labor and good citizenship will join the campaign against this pernicious legislation. J. O. C.

Sunday Laws Oppose God’s Law

God's Book says that "the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God." There is no evidence, anywhere in that Book, that God ever changed this law, or authorized any one else to change it. And have you ever thought of the fact that when a state, through an initiative, or when a legislature, assumes to pass a law requiring the observance of Sunday, in that very act it is setting up a direct opposition to the law of Jehovah? Making Sunday laws is rather serious business. Men should think before they leap into any movement that would assume to set aside the plain declaration of the great Jehovah, the mighty Creator, by placing a man-made institution in its stead.