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Debra G. Olson, Digital Project Assistant
Special Collections Research Center
Syracuse University Library
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We hope you are not willing to let any opportunity for voting down the dramshop devil pass away unimproved. Nothing short of votes can kill him: All that preaching and praying can do to this end is to help men to vote right.
Town Meeting draws near. We trust you will have in each town a full and thorough anti-dramshop ticket. See to it that there be not upon it the name of any man, who clings to either of the dramshop parties - to the Republican or Democratic party.
Be not discouraged because our numbers are so small. Smaller numbers began the work, which ended in the overthrow of slavery and in the salvation of the nation. The present is but our seed-time. The harvest comes hereafter.
"In due season we shall reap if we faint not." All honor to John A. Foster, who was the only man in Stockbridge honest and brave enough to vote against the dramshop ! In the days of our very small votes for the slave, dear Alvin Stewart was wont to call such votes "the seed-wheat of humanity."
The American people were blind in our anti-slavery struggle. They did not see that the question before them was: "Shall slavery or the nation die?" In our anti-dramshop struggle also they are blind. They see not that the question up is whether it is the dramshop or the nation that shall die. Let the dramshop be suffered to exert, a few years longer,
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its corrupting and debasing influence upon our morals and politics, and the nation will be dead-morally and politically dead. But it will live, and live a new and beautiful and glorious life, if a majority of the voters shall have the virtue and the courage to vote the dramshop to death. They are, however, to lose no time. For there are, already, a million of drunkards in our land : and our cities, by means of their very rapid growth and of their being emphatically clusters of dramshops, do already rule our land.
Be not deceived. Be on your guard against pretended temperance men. Do not forget that base trick by which, last Fall, a handful of intriguers, calling themselves "The New York State Saratoga Temperance Convention," cheated the anti-dramshop party out of thousands of votes. Be on your guard against those who make a display of their temperance regalia a substitute for temperance voting : and beware of those who substitute temperance talking, preaching and praying for temperance voting. No man is with us, who votes against us. No man is for temperance, who votes for rum. Temperance professions, which end in rum-voting, are sheer hypocrisy.
Let us, at the approaching Town Meeting, multiply by five the two hundred anti-dramshop votes, which our county gave last Fall.
January 20th 1871.
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