Editorializing on the subject of liquor, any sort of liquor, possibly will not prevent the man who desires to take a drink from doing so, because the man who wants to fill his skin full of mean whiskey is going to do so regardless—if he can beg, borrow or seal the price.
However, a news story which appears in this paper this morning relative to a raid made yesterday by a force of officers from the sheriff’s office here, gives us a thought for a subject to discuss in this column.
There is and in fact can be no denial to the stories which have been broadcast about the methods of manufacturing moonshine whiskey. It is generally know that it is made under cover of darkness in the fastness of woods or swamps, and it is generally known that the man who takes a chance on the manufacture of booze doesn’t care about the effect on the consumer’s stomach or his general well-being.
We have known of stills being found near hog pens, stable yards and other unsanitary place. We have known of galvanized iron distilling plants to make the brew which is sold to the thirsty ones and there are probably many worse cases of which we have never heard.
Yet it is a fact that the average man who wants a drink will buy a pint or a quart from a bootlegger he has never seen before, and may never see again, pay him two or three dollars a pint for the same and go off and swill it down without a thought as to whether he is drinking poison or nectar.
Yesterday a local raiding party found a distilling plant of the illicit variety a few miles from Goldsboro. There was a quantity of beer nearby.
Lying near were the carcasses of four hogs which had drunk of that beer and it had killed them as dead as Hector’s proverbial puppy.
If such stuff will kill a hog, what will it do for a human being?
Again we say that there is probably not one wit of use in calling such to the attention of thema, or the woman either, who is intent on tanking up on whiskey of an unknown manufacture, but that doesn’t alter what we started out to day; and that is that if those human beings who do drink were to stop and give serious consideration to such news stories as that to which we refer, they would at least confine themselves to imbibing only that which they knew to be fit for consumption, and which was not such a deadly potion that it would cause a hog, the most gluttonous of all animals, to lie down, stick his feet up in the air and breathe his last.
A hog doesn’t’ know any better. Human beings should have more sense and use the gray matter with which the Lord Almighty endowed them.
From the editorial page of The Goldsboro News, Sunday morning, March 7, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn93064755/1926-03-07/ed-1/seq-4/
If you want to read the news story about the raid, go to:
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn93064755/1926-03-07/ed-1/seq-7/
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