Perhaps one of the bravest and most influential opponents of the liquor traffic in his day, or in any day, was former Governor J. Handley, of Indiana, who attained national prominence. He had remarkable ability as a speaker, as the following article will show.
“I bear no malice toward those in the liquor business, but I hate the traffic. I hate its every phase.”
“I hate it for its intolerance; for its arrogance; for its hypocrisy; for its cant and false pretense.
“I hate it for its domination of politics; for its utter disregard of law; for it ruthless trampling on the solemn compacts of state Constitutions.
“I hate it for the load it straps to labor’s back; for the palsied hands it gives to toil; for its wounds to genius; for the tragedies of its might-have-beens.
“I hate it for the human wrecks it has caused-for the almshouse it people; for the prisons it fills; for the insanity it begets; for its countless grave in potters’ fields.
“I hate it for the mental ruin it imposes upon its victims; for its spiritual blight; for its moral degradation.
“I hate it for the crimes it commits; for the homes it destroys; for the hearts it breaks.
“I hate it for the malice it plants in the hearts of men; for the poison; for the bitterness; for the dead sea fruit with which it starves the soul.
“I hate it for the grief it causes womanhood—the scalding tears, the hopes deferred, the strangled aspirations, its burden of want and care.
“I hate it for its heartless cruelty to the aged, the infirm and the helpless; for the shadow it throws upon the lives of children; for its monstrous injustice to blameless little ones.
“I hate it as virtue hates vice, as truth hates error, as righteousness hates sin, as justice hates wrong, as liberty hates tyranny, as freedom hates oppression.
“I hate it as Abraham Lincoln hated slavery, and as he sometimes say in prophetic vision the end of slavery and the coming of the time when the sun should shine and the rain should fall upon no slave in all the republic; so sometimes I seem to see the end of this unholy traffic, the coming of the time when, if it does not wholly cease to be, it shall find no safe habitation anywhere beneath Old Glory’s stainless stars.”
-- in "The Message" 1959
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