My friends, hesitate before you vote liquor back into North
Carolina again, now that it is out. It is powerful, aggressive and universal in
its attacks. Tonight it enters a humble home to strike the rose from a woman’s
cheek, and tomorrow challenges this great Republic of ours in the halls of
Congress. Today it strikes a crust form the lips of a starving child and
tomorrow levies tribute form the government itself. There is no cottage in the
country humble enough to escape it—no palace strong enough to shut it out. It
defies the law when it cannot coerce suffrage. It is flexible to cajole but
merciless in victory. It is the mortal enemy of peace and order; the despoiler
of men, the terror of women, the cloud that shadows the face of children, the
demon that has dug more graves and sent more souls unshrieved to judgment than
all the pestilence that has wasted life since God sent the plagues to Egypt,
and all the wars since Joshua stood before Jericho.
Oh, my countrymen! Loving God and humanity, do not bring
this grand old state again under the dominion of that power. It cannot profit
any man by its return. It cannot uplift any industry, revive any interest,
remedy any wrong. You know that it cannot. It comes to turn, and it shall
profit mainly by the ruin of your son and others. It comes to mislead human
souls and to crush human hearts under its rumbling wheels. It comes to bring
gray-haired mothers down in shame and sorrow to the grave. It comes to turn the
wife’s love into despair and her pride into shame. It comes to still the
laughter on the lips of little children. It comes to stifle all the music of
the home and fill it with silence and desolation. It comes to ruin your body
and mind to wreck your home and it knows that it must measure its property by
the swiftness and certainty with which it wreaks this work.
--A.E.
Greene, Virgil,
N.C.
No comments:
Post a Comment