Mr. [John N.] TILLMAN [D.-Ark.]. Mr. Speaker, in this discussion it is neither my purpose nor desire to wantonly insult any man who may be engaged in the liquor business. The expression "Down with the saloon and up with the saloon keeper and the saloon patron" has obtained wide currency and generous approval in prohibition circles. But I shall not search for soft phrases in which to express an opinion of a traffic which is destroying men and women in this Republic alone at the rate of 100,000 a year, a traffic which fills the land with beggars and tramps, a traffic which draws from the pockets of the 'people of the United States two and one-half billion dollars annually and gives in return sorrow and suffering and tears and poverty.

King Alcohol collects from his vassal more of his substance than is required by any other potentate on earth, and when he has stripped him to his foolish hide he kicks him out of his palace into the street. The princes of earth, the executives of commonwealths, send abroad their tax gatherers once a year to collect from the people a small part of their earnings for government expenses, and they furnish officers to protect the life and preserve the peace and property of the citizen; they provide armies, hospitals, asylums, and pensions; but King John Barleycorn, who bestrides the narrow world like a colossus, haughty and heartless, the mightiest monarch of earth, greater than George the Fifth or William of Germany, greater than Sultan or Mikado, stations his collectors all over the land and gathers tribute from his thirsty subjects every hour in the day and every day in the year. Fair and generous rulers pension their servants, soldiers, and sailors when they become old or disabled, and provide for their widows and orphans if they fall while serving the State. Individuals and corporations do likewise, but you may serve this hard master till your money, char even provide a poorhouse to shelter your helpless wife and babies. If a subject flushed with the kings beverages, in lightsome sport or otherwise, kills a fellow man, King John does not draw from his well-filled purse money wherewithal to employ counsel to defend him, but he lets him hang, undefended, so far as he is concerned, when the real criminal is King John's agent, the man who sold the whisky. If a faithful subject, after paying tribute for many and many a weary year, at last yields to delirium tremens and dies a pauper's death, King John does not even give him swift burial in the potter's field. Pitiless King John! And yet men will march under his scarlet banner and give up honor, home, wife, and children that he may reign in guilty splendor. Men will serve this red despot and give him everything they have, even their bodies and their souls, and get not a pleasant look in return. The most arrogant, the least polite, the coldest mannered, the most disdainful citizen, is that haughty plutocrat, the American brewer, usually tainted with Teuton sympathies and damned by a German conscience. The average barkeeper-and it has been my ill fortune to meet him a few times in days long gone by-is as cold as the heart of the dead. One thing that can be said in his favor, however, he is always sober, because paradoxical as it may seem, saloon keepers want bartenders who do not drink. They will cheerfully sell you their wares, but they have too much sense to drink their own liquors. A cynical old miller of my town once said of the flour made by a rival mill that it was not fit for anything except to sell. In the eyes of the sensible barkeeper, whisky is good for nothing except to sell.

Royal King Alcohol, let us drink his health in pure water. Sweet, beautiful water. "Brewed in the running brook, the rippling fountain, and the laughing rill; brewed in the limpid cascade, as it joyfully leaps down the mountain side; brewed in the mountain top, whose granite peaks glitter like gold, bathed in the morning sun; brewed in the sparkling dewdrop; sweet, beautiful water; brewed in the crested waves of the ocean deep, driven by the storm, breathing its terrible anthem to the god of the seas; brewed in the fleecy foam of the whitened spray, as it hangs like a speck over the distant cataract; brewed in the clouds of heaven. Sweet, beautiful water! As it sings in the rain shower and dances in the hailstorm, as it comes sweeping down in feathery flakes, clothing the earth in a spotless mantle of white, always beautiful. Distilled in the golden tissues that paint the winter sky at the setting of the sun, and the silver tissues that veil the midnight moon. Sweet, health-giving, beautiful water; distilled in the rainbow of promise, whose warp is the raindrop of earth, and whose woof is the sunbeam of heaven; Sweet, beautiful water." But the drunkard prefers Budweiser or Anheuser, Old Crow or Moonshine, to this blessed, God-made, health-giving beverage.

Oh, the miseries, the tears, the crimes, the deaths chargeable to this prince of destroyers. King John lays his heavy hand on the smallest and the greatest of earth, and they die his victims. The great son of Phillip conquered every foe save wine and death, and died like a dog. Lord Byron's brilliant mind and handsome face were debauched and destroyed by drink. The great Bums drank heavily, and going home one night from a drunken orgy he sank in a stupor by the roadside and thereby contracted an illness which soon stole the color from his splendid face and the glitter from his fine eyes, and long before his time this gifted Son of Scottish song struck his colors to the pitiless foe that always conquers.

Who are for whisky? Those who make fortunes out of it.

Who are against it? The mothers of the land, because it destroys their loved ones. The ministers, because liquor undoes What they do. The officers of the law, because alcohol is the unapproachable chief of all causes of crime. The doctors advise against it because there is no more potent source of disease. The judges are against it because of its appalling record of misery, pauperism, and crime. Statesmen are against it because it is a menace to stable government. Educators are against it because it is a grim threat to every child in the land. Oh, I can call a cloud of witnesses to condemn it ....