He looked confused. I said: "Women do not usually go to saloons but you men bring it home and use it on the table and women are just as apt to catch the disease of alcoholism as men. This may be the way your wife learned to be a drunkard. Wives have been nursing their drunken husbands for years; now the chickens have come home to roost, and you are nursing your drunken wives."
Poor man! He, indeed, seemed distracted; and he is not alone, there are hundreds of cases.
I met a lovely creature on the train, who had been married a few months. Her husband was a lumber merchant in Chicago. She sat by me and told me her sad story. She had been a poor girl and dearly loved a man whose mother opposed the match and prevented the marriage.
The young lumber merchant, left rich by the death of his father, proposed and she married him. In a month, the mother of the man she loved first, died and the obstacle was removed. In telling me this story I smelled liquor on her breath. She would say a few sentences and then say: "Oh, Carry Nation I am so miserable! If Charlie would only be true to me I would not grieve for the man I love, but Charlie drinks and he goes with other women, and leaves me alone. He gives me all the money I want. I have everything that money can buy; but, Oh! I almost hate these things! I had rather have a hut with someone to love me." She kept talking this way until it was enough to break my heart.
She said: "Charlie will be in from the smoking car, and please Mrs.
Nation speak to him. I want to be a good wife and I will do all I can to make him a good man. But he laughs at me when I talk to him, he never takes me in earnest. Go speak to him."
So I did. I found him to be a young man about twenty-three, with the marks of dissipation on his face. I said: "I have something to say to you privately. You have a beautiful young wife. If you wish to make her happy you can do so. There is one thing that will ruin the happiness of both. That is intoxicating drink. Did you know your wife is under the influence of some drug? He said: "Oh, don't say a word to her about that, I am the cause of it. I drink and have persuaded her to, because she has a right to do what I do."
I told him of the fatal results and asked him to quit or it would be the ruin of both. Here were these two on the brink of ruin, so young, so attractive. I never shall forget the pathos of that woman's story.
The yearning of that heart for love. Of course in her unhappiness she would turn to the benumbing fascination of the poisonous drug.
On every hand I see the desolation of homes and hearts. There are no five things that make so much enmity between the sexes as this one-- the licensed saloon. The home life is destroyed. Men and boys are taken from home at the very time they ought to be there, after their work is done. Families should gather in the evening to enjoy each other's society.
It is said that Germans are the cruelest husbands on earth. Their beer gardens have taken the place of firesides. There are more insane and suicides in Germany than any nation on earth. Alcoholism is a disease.
Men go to the Keeley cure and take different treatments to get cured.
This disease is killing more every year than the deadliest epidemic, and still not one of the senators or representatives will discuss this. Roosevelt toured this country moralizing on different questions. The nearest he ever touched on the subject was "race suicide;" but he did not wish to intimate that drinking intoxicating liquors was the cause. He wished to reproach women for not raising larger families. What protection has a mother if she does? She has to produce the grist to make these murder-mills grind, and I for one, say to women, refuse to be mothers, if the government will not close these murder-shops that are preying on our hearts, for our darling sons are dearer to us than life.
If I had a family to raise and had to live in a city, I know of no place as desirable as Topeka. I was once lecturing in Lincoln, Neb., and made this remark. A wife said to her husband, "Let us take our boy and go to Topeka. So they came. The husband was D. L. Whitney, manager of the Oxygenor Company, and both he and his wife have been a great help to me. I say to fathers and mothers, move to Kansas, where your sons are taught that it takes a SNEAK to sell, and a SNEAK to drink, intoxicating liquors in that state.
I was arrested in Topeka for going into the dives. The officials were determined to keep them open, and the police arrested me for even going in. They did not arrest the keepers. I was thrown out and called names by the proprietors, in the hearing of the police, still they were let go. This was during the time that Parker was mayor.
The voting citizens of Kansas will soon find out that no one but prohibition officers can be trusted to enforce prohibition statutes. I am glad at the present writing there is said to be not a dive in the beautiful city of Topeka, and that she has passed the Rubicon. God grant that no more criminal dens be opened by Republicans, Democrats or any other Anarchists.
I was arrested in Wheeling, West Virginia, winter of 1902, for going in a saloon and telling the man he was in a business that would send him to hell as well as others. The facts are that the police never knew what I was going to do and they were so frightened and rattled that they of course thought they would arrest me to prevent trouble. I have been a terror to evil doers. I was in jail there two nights. No pillow. The bed bugs bad. Col. Arnett, my lawyer, said I had a good case of malicious prosecution. I have begun several suits but the "laws delay" and the condition of dishonest courts has prevented me. I desire to compel Murat Halstead to be shown as he is, a liar, almost equal to the "Murdocks of Wichita."
I was arrested in Bayonne, N. J., the summer of 1903, because I was talking to a poor drunkard. A policeman came up and ordered me to "walk on". I said: "I have a right to speak to any one on the street."
