Syracuse University Library
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Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection

Anti-Dramshop Party.

Smith, Gerrit, 1797-1874.

Digital Edition.

This digitization project was supported by Regional Bibliographic Databases and Interlibrary Resources Sharing Program funds, awarded by the New York State Library.

Call number: Smith 562

THE ANTI-DRAMSHOP PARTY.

The public and formal proposition to exchange the name "Anti-dramshop party" for "Prohibition party" opens up a wide field of thought and argument.

This party is merely a political party. It contemplates accomplishing its object not by persuasion, but through the coercive power of the ballot. It is not a temperance society. It does not call upon government to espouse the cause of temperance. It leaves that cause in the hands of the people. It leaves it with the temperance societies, the pulpit, the press and other persuasive agencies. Its one work is with government : and this one work is to bring government to suppress dramselling. It is true that, by means of such suppression, great and even indispensable aid would be afforded to the cause of temperance. But, since the aid would be merely incidental, government would deserve neither praise nor blame for it. The sole province of government is to protect person and property : and it is because these are put in more peril by dramselling than by anything else, or even by all things else, that the suppressing of it is the very highest duty of government. We, of course, mean by dramselling chiefly the selling of intoxicating drinks to be drunk where sold, as in hotels, saloons and other public drinking places. Such is the selling which makes the vast majority of our drunkards, paupers, madmen, incendiaries, and murderers. I add, that dramselling includes no small share of all the retailing of intoxicating drinks.

Is not, then, our party already well-named ? Does not its name point out, distinctly and emphatically, the very work that is to be done ? - the very evil that is be put away? But it is objected that it is a low name. Yes: and it is a low thing against which our name rallies its. It is the dramshop that we are called to wage war upon. Therefore let its wage the war under a name, which shows that we are neither afraid nor ashamed to have it clearly seen what that war is. They who, forty years ago, attacked masonry, did so in the name of anti-masonry. Whether they were right or wrong in attacking it, they were, at least, fair and frank in the choice of their name. They who, soon after, made war upon slavery, were as wise as they were bold and honest in making that war under the name of anti-slavery. No uncertain sound was theirs. So, too, the Englishmen who formed the anti-corn law party signified, in their well-chosen name, that they meant to rid England of her oppressive and cruel corn-laws.

Why, then, in defiance of all example and all analogy, and, we may add, of all reason also, should we abandon our name? Most of all, why should we exchange it for "Prohibition party?" "Anti-dramshop party" hits the nail on the head. But "Prohibition party," aiming everywhere, hits nowhere. It scatters its ineffectual fire, whilst we concentrate ours and concentrate it, too, where it will take most effect; for, when the dramshop is killed, the rum-power is killed. The members of the " Prohibition party" need to be continually explaining the significance of their party ; but our party is, by mere force of its name, self-explaining. This fighting against the dramshop without naming the dramshop reminds its of the dodge which not a few ministers were guilty of in the time of our anti-slavery struggle. They could not screw themselves up to pray for the abolition of slavery ; and hence their prayer would be for some such thing as the removal of all oppression. They would spread themselves out against all oppression; but they could not gather themselves up against slavery in particular. The slaveholder had no quarrel with this broad and general praying; and the dramseller appreciates the polite kindness, which, instead of particularizing him as the anti-dramshop party does, and holding him up as the chief offender, generously makes him, under the name of "Prohibition," no worse than the mass of his neighbors. "Prohibition" presents the man, who ignorantly and innocently makes a little pie-plant wine for his sick wife, an offender in common with the dramseller, who sells his hundred or thousand glasses of whiskey a day. It equally prohibits the work of both, and does not tell the world which of the two it holds to be the worse.

The chief objection to our name is that it does not cover the whole ground, but leaves unforbidden many practices all pursuits which go to swell the tide of intemperance. It leaves, for instance, the importer and manufacturer of intoxicating liquors to continue their evil work. Their motive to continue it will, however, be greatly reduced when there shall no longer be dramshons for them to supply. It leaves the merchant also at liberty to supply families with liquor. It is true that many wise and good men call for laws against all

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these and all other auxiliaries of the dramshop, as well as against the dramshop itself. Some of them would go so far as to forbid by law the making and drinking of small beer by the housewife, and also her making and drinking of currant and gooseberry wines. But such a law could not fail to be regarded as a sumptuary one, and as wrongfully invading the rights and usages of families. Could it be enacted, it would not be long endured. Our families must, so far as the laws go, be allowed to drink and eat what they please - even rot gut whiskey and spoiled meats. But neither they nor any one else must be allowed to take their spoiled meats into the public markets, nor to set up public shops-hotels or saloons - for the sale of their rotgut whiskey.

Possibly, I am wrong in holding that the dramshop is the only drunkard-malting agency which needs to be suppressed by the laws. Nevertheless, all must admit that the suppression of the dramshop will prepare the way for, and make easier, the suppression of any of its allies, provided it be found that there are any of them, that cannot be subdued by moral influence. Sufficient for our present political temperance war is that with the dramshop. Our grappling with that monster leaves us no spare strength for encountering politically his auxiliaries. No employment of moral means against any or all of them would we suspend for one moment. We would do all in our power to dissuade all persons from drinking even small beer, or from accepting as a beverage whatever contains so much as a single drop of alcohol. We would guard most scrupulously against creating even the smallest beginnings of an appetite, which has done more than all things else to till this world with woe.

A people, amongst whom are no dramshops, will, if they are not already such, soon become: a sober people. Their youths, deprived of these the principal drunkard schools, will, very few of them, become drunkards. Dramselling is the very core of intemperance: and thrice happy, therefore, is the county in which there is no dramselling! I say county - for a town, though there be no dramselling; in it, is by no means free from the curse, so long as there is dramselling in the towns around it. The young people of our little Peterboro, in which there is neither rum-hotel nor rum-saloon, cannot have a public dance without its being disturbed awl disgraced by liquor brought into it by base persons, who reside in the rum-towns around it.

Taking the "bull by the horns" is the only possible way to overthrow the dramshop. We do this in organizing a political party specifically against it. But they utterly fail of this indispensable bravery, whose pointless policy lies in indirections and generalities; or who, with mock dignity, shrink from the vulgarity of fighting; expressly the vulgar dramshop. I do not say that there are any means by which the dramshop can be overthrown. I fear there are not. The dramshop, so long our master, will, I fear, remain our master. So familiar are we with the curse, that we can hardly see it to be a curse. When, instead of arresting a great evil, such as slavery or dramselling, we sutler ourselves to grow into familiarity with it, and to be no longer capable of being alarmed by it, quite certain then is it, that we shall be finally ruined by it. Born and bred in sight of the dramshop which stands at almost every turn and corner, we sleep over the ruin it is fast bringing upon our country; and sleep so soundly that, but too probably, we shall not be awakened until it is too late. The dramshop rules our politics and our government; our voters, and therefore our rulers. Not even our churches nor our temperance societies have the integrity and courage to vote against it. It will be likely to go on debasing us, until our religion shall be reduced to a mockery and a farce, and our political institutions, which can be sustained only by virtue and intelligence, shall have given place to a bloody despotism or a bloodier anarchy. We need not look beyond our own State to learn that the dramshop rules our country through her city populations. It is well understood that, as goes the election in New York and Brooklyn, so goes the election in our State: and who can doubt that the election in these cities, so long as there shall be from ten to fifteen thousand drinking and drunkard-making places in them, will continue to go for the devil.

In vain do we look to our religious teachers for help. They are willing to talk against the dramshop, but they reserve to themselves the privilege of voting for it. The Democratic party, which, fifty years ago, was our progressive or reform party, and which, amongst other good things, gave us "universal suffrage" and abolished imprisonment for debt, has, long since, ceased to move in any other than a backward

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direction. The Republican party began its existence as a party of great moral ideas - for the abolitionists, who entered into it, were, from the first, its inspiring and suggestive element. It has abolished slavery and enfranchised the slave it has contended successfully for the honest and full payment of our vast national debt : and, all the way through, it has aimed to be entirely just and eminently generous toward our misguided Southern brethren. But, alas, it now fears to espouse other great moral ideas, lest it may thereby lose votes! It does not see that, as by the force of such ideas it reached predominance, so alone by means of such force continued can it retain that predominance. The Republican party will sink away and die, when it shall no longer aim to carry onward , and upward the cause of human rights in all its breadth and fullness. This party should, ere the present time, have put, at least, two more plank into its platform - one of them that of no more licensing of dramshops, and the other that of no longer excluding women from equality of rights with men. Let the Democratic party continue to go downward for its accessions, and to this end continue the policy of dragging men downward by the dramshop and other debasing agencies. But let the Republican party go upward to increase its numbers: and the more, therefore, will it increase them, the more it shall elevate the people by urging upon their approbation and adoption great truths and essential reforms.

It is but too probable, however, that the Republican party ; will sink down into a low chase with the Democratic party after votes. So far from going forward and making itself more and more a reform party, its murmurings against President Grant and frequent signs of disaffection toward him reveal its declining appreciation of even those great moral ideas it had already espoused. For to which of the grand undertakings and precious interests of the Republican party, at the time of his election, has he been found unfaithful? To not one of them. Identified, therefore, as he is, with them all, and the most prominent upholder of them all, every one of them is necessarily disparged when he is traduced or undervalued. For the Republican party to turn its back upon President Grant is to turn its back upon its honorable past - upon the past of its better and more patriotic days. He remains the same man he was in those days. He has proved himself to be free from the accursed spirit of caste, and true to the equal rights of all men - of the red man and black man as well as the white man. He has deterred to the popular will, instead of moulding and fostering a policy of his own. He has proved with what entire sincerity it was that, in entering upon his office, he expressed his desire for peace. The late Treaty between England and America, in the credit of which he shares so largely, is the grandest and most auspicious peace measure the world has ever seen. The rapidity with which we are paying our national debt is a high proof of his wisdom and honesty. And, yet, such a President no very small share of the Republican party - certainly no very small share of its leaders - seem willing to drop! We hear them say that General Grant cannot be reelected. But if he, who, confessedly, did more than any other man to save our country in the perils of war, and whose great influence in peace has all gone to make that peace more perfect and more blessed, cannot be made our nest President, what Republican can be? Manifestly, either he or the Democratic candidate will be our next President: and if the Democratic candidate shall be, and shall represent and be a specimen of the bad, very bad, Democratic party, what then can save our country from ruin?

Never was there a darker day for the cause of temperance than is the present: and nothing makes it so dark as the almost universal refusal of the professed temperance men to regard and treat. dramselling as a crime. Mighty are the powers on the side of dramselling. A legion fights for it. Its inherent force is well-nigh resistless. Surely, surely, it will not be possible to arouse a spirit against it sufficiently wide and strong to compass its suppression, unless the people shall first be educated not only to put it in the category of crimes, but to see it to be a very great crime - nay the chief fountain-head of all crimes. Our Anti-dramshop party was organized for the purpose of thus educating the people and of thereby bringing government to recognize the high criminality of dramselling, and to assert the right to punish it according to that high criminality. But the mass of the professed friends

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of temperance withstand us : and not a few of them encourage government to abdicate this right, and to leave it to each town or county to choose for itself whether to curse or not to curse its people with those streams of death and damnation, that issue day and night from the dramshop. Government very properly leaves it to the people of each locality to decide whether to have certain proposed school-houses and certain proposed highways built. But as well might government leave it to them to decide whether they shall have gambling hells and brothels as whether they shall have dramshops - yes and, also, to decide whether they shall tolerate perjury, forgery, theft and murder. For what parent would not rather his son should be wronged by the perjurer or forger or thief or even put to death by the murderer than victimized by the dramseller? Moreover, these professed temperance gentlemen tell us, either very ignorantly or very impudently, that this "local option", which supersedes government and excuses it from the imperative duty of shutting the dramshop, will be a step toward the absolute and universal prohibition by government of dramselling. But as well might it, be said that a step toward hell will be a step toward heaven. Taking out of the hands of government its sole duty to protect person and property - and this, too, in an instance where these are pre-eminently perilled - is certainly not the way to improve the character of government and to justify the expectation that it will hereafter discharge that duty. But it is the way to make government contemptible and to reduce it to an empty name: and to this bad end works every man, who is so unprincipled or ignorant, as to substitute this silly scheme of "local option" for absolute and universal prohibition of dramselling.

God grant that temperance men may soon cease from their nonsense, and may soon, under the sway of common sense, unite in demanding that government shall everywhere and unconditionally shut up the drain shop - that overflowing source of matchless wretchedness and ruin.

I must end my already too long paper. If any reader shall think it disrespectful and ill-natured, let him reflect how difficult it must be to preserve a good temper under the provocations of such unreasonableness. For what can be more unreasonable, ay, or more insulting, than this proposition to change the name, and with the name the aims and character of the Anti-dram shop party ? Our consent to change these would be construed into our conscious weakness and failure, if not, indeed, into the striking of our flag. It would, at least, be the hazardous step of changing our base in the presence of the foe, that is pressing upon us. "It is no time," as President Lincoln used to say, "to swap horses when crossing the stream." Certain it is that we are in no circumstances, just now, to be casting about for a new name.

GERRIT SMITH.

PETERBORO, August 10th 1871

NOTE. - The Nominating Convention of the Madison County Anti-dramshop Party will be held in Peterboro 1st September: and the Nominating Convention of the New York State Anti-dramshop Party will be held in Syracuse 6th September.