Why doesn’t he borrow from a bank, giving a mortgage for security? Bless you, no bank that would lend to farmers, on the risks and time usually necessary, could continue in business.
The suggestion may be startling, but still it is practical, that it may yet be necessary, for the proper feeding of the community, that farming, like the policing of cities and the maintenance of an army and the conduct of the postal department, shall be done at the expense of the government. This seems to have been the method in Egypt in the days of Pharaoh and of Joseph, his steward, and America may yet have to revert to it. The Government will have either to manage the farms or assist the farmers; the people may choose which shall be done.
Most people have heard of the man who in a difficulty with a vicious bull finally got the animal by the tail. He could not hurt the brute, yet he did not dare to let go, so he was slung about most unmercifully, and at last accounts he was still being slung. The bull was in the wrong, the man in the right; still he had the animal only by the tail: instead of quieting or frightening the brute, he merely made him angry and was severely punished for his well-meant efforts.
The people of the United States in their contest with the rum power are in the position of the man with the bull. The rum power is in the wrong; the people are in the right, yet they have the monster only by the tail, so they only worry him and make misery for themselves.
It is not necessary to recount the harm done individuals and families by the liquor traffic. Almost every charge that the most rabid prohibitionist makes can be substantiated by a thousand men who sell liquor, aside from what total abstainers may know or believe or imagine.
[Illustration: RESIDENCE HON. POTTER PALMER.]
Bishop Warren, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, is not an excitable man, but he does not overstate the truth at all when he says: “Innumerable are the crimes of dolorous and accursed ages, and a fruitful source of them all is intemperance. It robs the body of its strength, the senses of their delicacy, the mind of its acuteness, the spirit of its life. It fires every passion, makes every base appetite the master of mind and will, leaves man an utter wreck. Of its work there are frightful statistics of robberies, arsons, murders, insanities, and curses to the third and fourth generations; but there are no statistics that can measure the heartbreaks of wives, hungers of children, disappointments of fond parents, and physical inheritance of deterioration and unconquerable appetite. It is the one great, stark, crying curse of our race and age. It is the personal foe of every parent, Sunday-school teacher, and preacher of righteousness.”