ing dishes in a hotel. The man did not bring home anything. He did not care much about the children. The only marks of his consideration of them were usually black marks on little Sunshine's face, for he had a spite against her and unless her mother could keep her out of the way her face bore the blue marks of the hatred he had against her. The mother was taken sick and the doctors said "appendicitis and the hospital," and they took her there. They operated upon her and after two weeks she said, "Can't Jake come to see me?'' They said, "No." Later they took her back home, where there was nobody but Jake and the children. All she had to eat was salt pork and fried potatoes, which Jake cooked. She got well and Jake signed the pledge, and now he was to her a husband and to the children a father. But he found he could not go to and from work without passing many saloons, so he went out to Bug Hollow, where they were building a railroad, and he promised he would not touch it and he would come in Sunday night, and Sunday night he came in and went back. One day he sent word, "I can't come in any more, I can't go past those saloons and I will have to stay out here." So they put her and the children into a coal wagon and jolted them out twelve miles into the country. All the summer they lived there in a tent. One Sunday night she stood at the door of the tent and looked out and saw Jake standing with Twinkle on one side and Sunshine on the other. She said, "It is worth while when you can see a man come out like that!" They went back to town and election day came on and there was treating on every side, and Jake went down and then the happy look on the wife's face went away and the black spots came back on Sunshine's face and Nancy had to go back to washing dishes at the hotel, and she said to me, "Is it always going to be like this?" We said, "No." She said, "Are you sure?'' We said. "We are sure."' She said, "Why?" And we said, “Because it says in the bible, "They have made a covenant with death and with hell are they at an agreement; they have made lies their refuge, and behind falsehood have they hid themselves, and the covenant with death shall be disannulled and the agreement with hell shall not stand; and hail shall sweep away their refuge of lies and the waters shall overflow their hiding places!'"' She said, "Does that mean the saloon?" And we said, "Yes," for in our hearts we are sure it does. Was there ever anything so much a covenant with death and an agreement with hell as that which leads a father to make a mark of blue on the face of his little child? If Isaiah was inspired when he wrote, "The covenant with death shall be disannulled and the agreement with hell shall not stand, and hail shall sweep away their

refuge of lies and the waters shall overflow their hiding places," and if that was true in that day when Isaiah wrote, it was true when he looked into the future to this day and saw our covenant with death which piece by piece is being disannulled. The mother said, "You are sure it is so?" We said, "We are sure it is so." She said, "Will it come in time to save Jake?"

That is what we want, we want it to come now in time to save Jake, and in time to save the boys and girls back of you and whom you represent; so we are educating every Sunday School member for total abstinence, for the destruction of the liquor traffic, for the extinction of the cigarette habit, and for the surrender of every selfish indulgence which destroys the power to render service to God or to men. That is the temperance education to which our Sunday-schools have committed themselves, and the means which they have given us are four temperance lessons each year from the Word of God, and do not think that there will be any less! They are in the uniform lessons and the graded lessons.

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC

REV. A. C. BANE, D. D., SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.

With an oblation of tears and blood our nation was christened the land of the free and the home of the brave," but intoxicated with a beverage of beer and rum, it is fast becoming the land of the drunk and the home of the slave.

While the home and the church are building characters in the image of Jesus, the saloon and the liquor traffic are making wreck and ruin of our work. The liquor traffic, with the consent of the people, and under a license bearing the seal of government, is engaged in dispensing alcohol, a poison, that is slaughtering our citizens. It is responsible for forty per cent. of the diseases that afflict us, and has increased our death rate by thirty-one per cent.

Alcoholic liquor is the direct or indirect cause of eight hundred thousand deaths annually among the citizens of this republic. The traffic is creating of its patrons drunkards, criminals, paupers, insane and mental defectives. It is responsible for most of our suicides and divorces. It is making widows by the tens of thousands and orphans by the hundreds of thousands.

This traffic in drink is degenerating and slaughtering innocent childhood. Eighty-two and one-half per cent. of the children born to hard drinking parents are born mentally and physically degenerate; it

increases the death rate among the children of liquor users by two hundred per cent.

This licensed traffic robs seventeen out of every one hundred children of a grammar school education, and forty-seven out of every one hundred children of a high school education; it is also forcing two million children under fifteen years of age to work for wages in the great factories and sweat shops of the nation.

It is wasting the wealth of the nation; it is placing the heaviest financial burden upon the tax payers to control and support its victims; it is robbing the toiler of his wages; it is diminishing his productive power and wage earning capacity, and it is closing to him the door of industrial opportunity. The traffic is making a wreck of moral character, destroying the manhood of our men and the virtue of our women. But the light is being turned on this great agent of destruction, until the whole civilized world is in open revolt against it. The liquor problem is not a mere local problem, nor a mere national problem. It has become a great world problem. Sweden, Finland and Iceland have voted in favor of the national prohibition of the liquor traffic.

Switzerland has broken a social custom of generations by forbidding parents giving liquor to their children.

A national commission in France has reported that alcoholic liquor is degenerating the French people, and large posters are now seen in her principal cities containing a warning against the use of alcohol.

In Italy the commissioner of insanity has warned the nation that wine drinking is filling the insane asylums with Italy's people.

New Zealand is fast voting out her saloons.

Australia is making rapid progress toward the suppression of the liquor traffic.

England is aroused as never before, and public billboards bear the government's warning against the effects of liquor.

The Russian government has ordered stamped upon every bottle of "vodka," the national intoxicating drink, a skull and crossbones, and the word "poison," as a warning against the use of what the bottle contains.

A commission appointed by the German nation has reported that beer is destroying the German people. Germany is today teaching in her schools the evil effect of alcohol. Emperor William has become a total abstainer, and a popular lecturer against the use of liquor, and has ordered beer forever out of the German army.

At a world's congress on alcohol held in London in July, 1909, twelve hundred scientists from twenty-seven nations issued to the world a great

statement, declaring that "alcohol is a poison, that its use as a beverage is destructive and degenerating to the human organism, that its effect on the body is depressive, narcotic and anaesthetic."

But you ask, what is the attitude of our own government toward this great curse of alcohol?

While the people in our municipalities, counties and states are aroused against the evil as never before, and recognize the liquor question as the most vital question before the nation, our federal government is encouraging this king of slaughter in his work of destruction. Our nation is liquor's stronghold. From America are sent forth the alcoholic beverages that poison the world. This fact discredits our name as a Christian nation. In the Mohammedan nations they speak of drunkenness as a Christian sin. Within six months after our flag began to float in Cuba, two thousand saloons had been opened and a work of destruction started by this Christian nation.

President Schurmann, the first chairman of the Philippine commission said: "We found the Filipinos a sober race, and today American civilization, represented mostly by the American saloons, gambling dens and their accompanying evils, is rapidly sinking the native race lower and lower in vice and crime; while American soldiers who went out noble, honorable boys, have gone crazy through drink and are brought home in handcuffs and legcuffs.''

We have long boasted that "trade follows our flag." This is certainly true of the liquor trade; the first building it often floats over in a new land is a saloon. When the American rum shops were first opened in Manila, an American flag floated over the building, and the bar was draped in our flag, saying in silent language to the natives, "This is the ideal of the new American civilization." Wherever the American missionary has gone with his Bible, the American liquor dealer has gone with his Bottle. Yes, we confess it with shame.

But the time will soon come when the Bible will follow our flag. Nine whole states already have banished the saloon; two-thirds of all the counties in the United States have banished them. Yes, today we have forty-four millions of our people living without an open saloon, and seventy per cent. of our territory free from the curse of the retail liquor trade.

But the United States Government, represented by the federal laws and authorities at Washington, is supporting, encouraging and defending the liquor traffic, in all its slaughter of men, morals and money.

You ask, how does our federal government foster and sanction the liquor traffic? First, by collecting an internal revenue tax of twenty

five dollars a year from every dispenser of this poison, and supporting the government by the revenue derived; second, by her interstate commerce laws which permit the shipment of liquor into territory where its sale is forbidden. The internal revenue tax, which ought to be called the infernal revenue tax on alcoholic liquor, was a temporary war measure adopted by Congress, during the Civil War, for the purpose of raising revenue for our then depleted treasury. Mr. Lincoln, then President, objected to the proposed law, and said he would refuse to sign the bill, but upon assurances from Congress that it was only a temporary measure and would be repealed as soon as the war was over, he signed the bill.

It gives to the traffic in liquors a badge of respectability; it gives it government sanction and support; it makes the government a partner with every saloonkeeper in the land; it forces you and me to share in the profits of this death-dealing trade.

Last year our government authorized 210,319 persons to dispense this poisonous beverage; technically this federal tax receipt does not authorize its holder to sell liquor, but it gives an equitable permission. Every man who receives an internal revenue receipt for twenty-five dollars, first takes an oath that he intends to sell liquor, and he believes when he pays his money that he obtains that privilege. This tax receipt is a pledge of neutrality on the part of the government in any contest that may arise between the liquor man and the local authorities. In probibition territory the government is thus encouraging law breaking.

The people of the sovereign state of Kansas have said by an overwhelming majority that the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors shall not be permitted within her territory. But the United States Government in one year sold internal revenue tax receipts to 3,217 men, who paid twenty-five dollars each, and each took oath that he intended to engage in the sale of alcoholic liquors in Kansas and thus break its laws. For the sum of twenty-five dollars paid to Uncle Sam he encouraged these men to violate the prohibition laws of Kansas.

The United States Supreme Court has said: "The granting of a license by the federal government to sell intoxicants is a direct usurpation of the police power reserved to the states."' That the federal government has a right to collect a tax from a trade that the state has prohibited is an absurdity.

Illegal liquor sellers are violating state and local laws in all the prohibition states and counties. They are establishing blind pigs, and the nation cannot help the state to punish them, for these law violators