Elder Heber J. Grant. (2)
Strong condemnation of use of intoxicants and tobacco--Statistics showing splendid results of prohibition in Kansas--Dreadful disclosures of an old lawyer--Convincing quotations proving terrible evils of liquor traffic.
I realize that, in the language of the hymn, "the time is far spent, there is little remaining." You, no doubt, are all tired, but I have something which I wish to say to this congregation, and if any of you do not care to remain and hear it, you will not offend me or hurt my feeling in the least if you get up and go out, and your doing so will not confuse me. I have preached on the streets of Liverpool and London; in Portland, Oregon, and in other parts of the United States, and have become accustomed to preaching to traveling congregations. My ideas come just as rapidly when my audience is a moving one. We did not start this overflow meeting until 20 minutes after 10 o'clock, and therefore there are just thirty minutes belonging to me and I give all fair notice of what is coming, as I propose to occupy them, and it will be all right with me if anybody goes out.
I desire to continue the remarks that I started to make in the Tabernacle day before yesterday. I talked as fast as I knew how, but did not get half through. I am going to cut out fully one-half of what I would like to say.
It is claimed that the saloon, if banished from the community, causes a financial loss. I want to give a few facts as they are told in the Anti-Saloon League Year Book for 1908, page 26. Pellman, of the University of Bonn, tells of a very notorious drunken woman who died in 1800. A scientific investigation made regarding herself and her descendants has brought forth the following astonishing facts:
"The total number of her descendants have been 834. Of that number 709 have been traced, with the result that the record shows that 7 were convicted of murder, 76 were convicted of other crimes, 142 were professional beggars, 64 lived on charity and 181 of the women descendants were prostitutes. It has been estimated that the cost to the government of the crime and pauperism of that one line, of descendants has been $1,250,000."
How many of us would like to have saloons enrich our community by this kind of process?
I want to give you the opinions of some eminent people on the use of tobacco:
Benjamin Franklin--"I never saw a well man in the exercise of common sense who would say that tobacco did him any good."
Thomas Jefferson--"The culture of tobacco is a culture productive in infinite wretchedness."
Horace Greeley--"It is a profane stench."
Daniel Webster--"If those men must smoke, let them go to the horse-shed."
T. DeWitt Talmage--"The pathway to a drunkard's grave and a drunkard's hell is strewn with tobacco leaves."
Ruskin--"Tobacco is the worst curse of modern civilization."
E. H. Harriman [to whom we owe more for the development of this intermountain country than to any other man not a resident of Utah, and who believed implicitly in the future of our fair state]--"We might as well go to the insane asylum for our men as to employ cigarette smokers."
I desire that every man, woman and child within the sound of my voice shall be workers to bring to our fair State prohibition, and I want to quote to you one single verse of a poem by James Russell Lowell:
"They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather than, in silence shrink/From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be/In the right with two or three."
We hear so much of the financial ruin of Kansas because of prohibition that I want to give you some statistics that were furnished me by President Henry H. Blood, of the Millers' Association of Utah, taken from the Millers and Grain News, published at Kansas City, Jan. 9, 1912:
"Statistics from Kansas.
"Not only wheat, but morals, showed a high quality last year.
"Ninety-six counties out of the 105 in Kansas have no inebriates." [Gracious, how prosperity is disappearing in Kansas!] "Six or seven along the Missouri border have them." [Please do not forget that Missouri is wet.]
"Thirty-nine counties did not send a prisoner to jail last year." [My, prosperity is disappearing in Kansas!]
"There were 912 prisoners in the state penitentiary last year, but only 17 per cent of this number were Kansas born." [the 83 per cent, you see, brought prosperity to Kansas by allowing the state to support them.]
"Fifty-seven counties in Kansas have no use for poor houses, and last year did not send a member there." [I declare, they can't even be charitable in 57 counties in Kansas--haven't even the poor with them.]
"Eighty-four counties last year did not report a case of insanity." [My gracious, if there are no insane there how wonderfully they must be failing to progress financially in Kansas.]
"The death-rate in Kansas is less than in any other section in the world, seven and five-tenths per thousand of the inhabitants." [Thus vindicating God's promise in the Word of Wisdom.]
"There are 700 newspapers in Kansas, and only four of them carry whiskey ads."
The Lord says in the Word of Wisdom, in the last verse, regarding those who obey it:
"And I the Lord give unto them a promise, that the destroying angel shall pass them by, as the children of Israel, and not slay them."
I thank the Lord from the bottom of my heart, as I announced in the Tabernacle, that all over the wide world the doctrines of the Lord Jesus Christ as revealed through the Prophet Joseph Smith are being vindicated. In Kansas they have prohibition and are, therefore, partially living the Word of Wisdom and are receiving the benefits therefrom, which is shown by the fact that the death-rate there is less than in any other section of the world.
The great life insurance companies with their hundreds of millions of dollars of assets, with their medical examination for every man who applies for a policy less than $50,000, and two examinations where he applies for fifty thousand or more, have a death-rate of ten per 1,000, or more than they have in the State of Kansas. No stronger proof on earth, it seems to me, can be found of the beneficial effects of prohibition in Kansas than the fact that there are 700 newspapers in Kansas, and only four of them carry whiskey ads. in their columns. Do you think we have prosperity in Salt Lake because three of our four daily papers carry whiskey ads."
Now, I intended to quote a great deal from a sermon which I preached in the Tabernacle at the Mutual Improvement Association Conference, June 14, 1908, but you will find the sermon in the August, 1908, number of the Improvement Era, and I shall read only a small part of the sermon, but appeal to you to get the Era and read it all. Here is something I quoted in that sermon:
"Leaves from the Diary of an Old Lawyer:
"I believe that it will require the force of the whole people, men and women, applied at the ballot box, to effectually blot out of existence the great curse to the country, 'The laws that license and permit the sale of alcohol as a beverage.' I deny the right of the government to sell to one citizen the privilege to tempt another to commit crime. I doubt the policy of those laws that seek to raise a revenue by the sale of that which debases the people, it is the prolific source of crime and pauperism, and costs the country annually a thousand times more than the revenue received therefrom. I deny the justice of those laws that on one page of the statute books legalize that which promotes crimes and makes criminals, and on the next, provide severe penalties to be administered to those they have tempted to transgress. This little volume [larger than our large edition of the Doctrine and Covenants] is presented to the public to promulgate those views. They may be thought radical, and perhaps are so; but they are the result of long years of experience in our criminal courts, and are but a feeble expression of my abhorrence of the vice of intemperance, and the laws that encourage and promote it.
"'Tell me if I hate the bowl--Hate is a feeble word; I loathe--abhor--my very soul
With strong disgust is stirred Whene'er I see, or hear, or tell/Of the dark beverage of hell."
My experience at the bar has satisfied me that intemperance is the direct cause of nearly all the crime that is committed in our country. I have been at the bar over thirty years, have been engaged in over four thousand criminal cases, and on mature reflection I am satisfied that over three thousand of those cases have originated from drunkenness alone, and I believe that a great proportion of the remainder could be traced either directly or indirectly to this great source of crime. In sixty-three cases of homicide forty-nine have been caused by the maddening influence of strong drink.
Think of it, my brethren and sisters, forty-nine murders out of sixty-three cases, were caused by strong drink!
"I have seen upon the counsel table of our court room the skull of an aged father who was killed by a drunken son. My brother and myself sat by his side as his counsel, and I never shall forget the look of that son when the ghastly evidence of his guilt was laid on the stand before him. That silent yet eloquent witness! It was but an arch of bone, and was handled carelessly by the jury in their investigation, yet it had once been covered by a fathers gray hairs, beneath it had throbbed a brain full of pride and affection for the son who was now on his trial for murder, and as it passed from hand to hand the fearful expression on the face of the accused plainly told the terrible feeling of remorse that filled his soul. It was a wicked and most unnatural crime, and begot feelings of loathing and horror in the breasts of all who witnessed the trial. Yet it was not in reality the son who had committed the crime, but the demon that lurks in every cup of strong drink. And that cup had been filled and placed to the lips of that son by the baud of a most respectable member of society--a man who had a license from that very court to sell that which maddened the brain and prompted the hand to murder.
"I saw upon the table the skull of young B--, who was killed by his most intimate respectable proprietor at whose hotel the murder was perpetrated, and who sold the maddening spirit that prompted the deed, was witness to the trial. He said he had a license from that respectable court to sell liquor; yes, from the very court then sitting in judgment on that act, which was but the natural sequence of the license it had sold and granted.
"I have seen upon the table the skull of a little child, with the evidence upon it of a murderous blow, inflicted by the hand of a drunken mother. Yet it was not the mother who had committed the most unnatural crime. All our knowledge of the promptings of the human heart deny the charge. Who that remembers his own mother and her maternal love could believe it? No! a demoniacal spirit had violated the sanctuary of the mother's heart and cast out the tender, loving tenant that once resided there, and that was the spirit of strong drink, sold to the woman by a man who held a license to sell under the seal and sanction of that very court.
"I have seen upon the table the blood-stained skull of a wife, cleft from top to base by an ax in the hand of a brutal, drunken husband, who came home from a neighboring licensed beer-shop, reeling, drunken, and maddened by drink there sold by a most respectable dealer, by a man who had a legal right to sell that poison whose effects are more terrible than the plagues confined within the fabled box of Pandora, and tinder whose baneful influence
"The hand that should shield the wife from ill, /In drunken wrath is raised to kill.
"I once defended a man for killing his own brother, by whom, in a fit of drunken frenzy, he had been attacked with a dangerous weapon, thereby compelling him in his own defense, to strike a blow that had taken his brother's life. He was tried for murder, and in his defense I called the landlord to prove that the murdered brother was mad from the effects of the liquor he had received at the witness bar. He so testified, yet seemed conscious of no wrong. Why should he? He had a license from the court, and why should that brother's blood cry to heaven for vengeance against him? Oh, no! he was a respectable citizen, possessing a good moral character, for the law grants license to none other. He had a legal right to present the maddening cup to his fellow's lips, and no one should complain of him. He had acted in accordance with the law, and did not one of England's greatest and best of men say that the law was that science whose voice was, the harmony of the world, and whose seat was the bosom of God?"
I had the privilege of being one of the several thousand that walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D. C. and who stood before the Capitol and presented a human petition to our representatives in Congress to give us national prohibition by an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. I listened to a splendid speech there, a copy of which I hold in my hand, by Mr. Ernest H. Cherrington, the General Manager of the Anti-Saloon League of America. I will read only a few extracts. I wish I had time to read it all.
"The Supreme Court of the United States is authority for the declaration that the statistics of every state show a greater amount of crime and misery attributable to the use of ardent spirits obtained at these retail liquor saloons than to any other source."
Really, is it not too bad that in every prohibition state they should be losing prosperity!
"No state of the Union has given prohibition so fair a trial as has the State of Kansas. Today that State presents the unparalleled record of almost two-thirds of the counties of the state without a single prisoner serving sentence for crime, while in some of the counties a jury to try a criminal case has not been called in ten years."
How sad they must feel in Kansas because of a lack of prosperity, in not having their share of paupers, and just think how in prohibition Kansas they are robbing the poor jurors of their fees!
"One-half of the people now living in license territory in the United States live in four states of the Union, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New Jersey."
The large cities of our Union are where crime concentrates. Every district all over the fair State of Utah, where the Latter-day Saints were in the majority, with one exception, went dry when we had the privilege of voting on this question a few years ago. Had the people of Utah not been robbed of the privilege of voting on the liquor question as county units instead of changing to precinct units by amending the existing law, we would have had a dry state years ago.
'One-fourth of the people in this nation who live in saloon territory live in six cities, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston and Cleveland. One-half of all the saloons of the United States are located in fourteen cities. There are fewer saloons south of Mason and Dixon's line than there are in the City of Chicago. Thirty-six states of this Union have fewer saloons in the aggregate than the City of New York. These significant facts, together with the well known fact that the vices of the nation center in our cities, thus adding complications to complications, make the great moral and social problems of the city practically unsolvable so far as the city alone is concerned."
Those of us who live in the cities appeal to you who live in the country to help us to rid Utah's fair cities of crime.
I have here a newspaper clipping from the Spokesman Review, which shows that Russia, Germany, England and France have learned that they can not win in the great war now raging unless they first kill whiskey. It reads as follows:
It is Something More than a War Against War.
"One of the many remarkable features connected with the war of the European revolution is that it is not only for many of the combatants a holy war against war, but for the governments is a war against alcohol. It almost seems as if the world at war had declared war upon the use of intoxicating drinks by soldiers.
"No vodka for the fighter is the word in Russia, no saki for the Japanese army, no whiskey or rum for the British trooper nor any absinthe for French infantry or cavalry. Reports from Germany as to the use of drink by its armies have not appeared, but doubtless the German military staff has no more use for drink than have its opponents.
"This almost absolute elimination of alcohol from the supplies of armies in the field forms part of the modern theory as to efficiency in war. The inexorable demand for the maximum of effectiveness in the soldier insists that his condition in the field shall approximate the Sunday school standard of conduct. Tommy Arkins, Jean Crapaud, Ivan Ivanovitch and Banzai Idzumo are far from the Captain Falstaff who recognized his Corporal Bardolph through the redness of his nose.
"The German emperor early in the year declared against drinking in the army and held up abstinence as the military ideal. Kitchener, when the war began, declared for total abstinence and ordered that no gifts of liquor be forwarded to the British forces. The government of France forbade the sale of absinthe at Paris during the war. Czar Nicholas has stopped the sale of liquor throughout Russia and one of the first acts of the Russians in Prussia was to shut the saloons. The French bill of fare for the soldiery omits alcohol."
Let me tell you one thing about Russia. One of the officers of the largest life insurance companies in the world, on his way to San Francisco, stopped off in Salt Lake City, and I had the pleasure of spending an evening with him. He told me that he had found some astounding figures in Russia, which were almost unbelievable. That notwithstanding the war, because of the banishment of liquor, the death-rate of his company had been less than before the war. He felt there must be something wrong, some mistake, and was going to investigate it further. I feel sure his additional investigation will only be one more confirmation of the Lord's promise in the Word of Wisdom.
Here is something I must read to you, although my time is going:
"According to the Kansas City Star, Mrs. James Watson, editor and publisher of the Dearborn, Mo., Democrat, has the following suggestion to make to booze fighters: 'To the married man who cannot get along without his drinks, we suggest the following as a means to freedom from the bondage of the habit: Start a saloon in your own house. Be the only customer. You will have no license to pay. Go to your wife and give her $2 to buy a gallon of whiskey, and remember there are sixty-nine drinks in one gallon. Buy your drinks from no one except your wife, and by the time the first gallon is gone she will have $8 to put in the bank and $2 to start business again. Should you live ten years and continue to buy booze from her and then die with snakes in your boots, she will have money to bury you decently, educate your children, buy a house and lot and marry a decent man and quit thinking about you" [Laughter.]
"On the 3rd and 4th of this month a remarkable temperance meeting was held in Philadelphia. Those in attendance were physicians and scientists. Several notable papers were read on the increase in the number of slaves of alcohol and drugs, the relationship between disease and drink, and the conclusion arrived at by insurance societies regarding the mortality of drinkers of intoxicants. These are questions of immense importance to all."
"Colossians Maus, surgeon in the U. S. Army, made this statement:
"During the last year (1912), 2,000,000,000 gallons of wine, beer, whiskey, brandy, gin and other intoxicants were used in this country at a cost of as many billions of dollars. The country would be electrified if called upon to appropriate this sum to suppress diseases and national epidemics. Yet this expenditure is the most important factor in the cause of our misery, poverty, suicides, robberies, murders and crimes, besides the hundreds of thousands of deaths and the intellectually dead to be found in the insane asylums, feeble minded and epileptic institutions of the country."
"Dr. Keister declared that if the American people would quit drinking intoxicating beverages homicides would be reduced by 50 per cent, suicides by 60 per cent, and lunacy by 33 per cent. [Thus adding to our financial ruin!]
"These startling statements did not come from fanatics, but from men with exceptional opportunities to study the causes of sickness and crime, and well equipped for that study. We must accept their conclusions. And if we desire the betterment of existing conditions, the evils must be attacked at the root."
The following is a statement of the causes of deaths in the state of Kansas for 100,000 population:
In U. S. In Can.
1913 1913
Nephritis (Bright's disease) 102.9 64.5
Typhoid fever 17.9 19.4
Diphtheria 18.8 7.8
Tuberculosis (all forms) 147.6 61.8
Cancer (all forms) 78.9 55.9
Diabetes 132.4 85.5
Diarrhoea and enteriris (under 2 years) 75.2 52.8
Violence (ex. suicide) 92.5 63.6
When the United States officials in Washington received the report of the death rate--9.8 to the 1000--in Kansas they would not believe it, and so they sent a special commissioner out there to investigate, and the report was substantiated. I would like to read the whole of the Era article by Brother Edward H. Anderson, from which the above is taken, but my time is gone. The article is an additional confirmation of the promise of the Lord Almighty that the destroying angel shall pass by those who obey the Word of Wisdom and keep His commandments. I appeal to you all to read Brother Edward H. Anderson's splendid article in the April Era, "For the Consideration of Utah Citizens."
We listened yesterday to the testimonies at our prohibition meeting in Barratt Hall of Stephen H. Love, John L. Herrick, Melvin J. Ballard. Andrew Kimball and Joseph E. Robinson, as to the beneficial effects arising from prohibition in Colorado, Arizona, Washington, Kansas and Oregon. I wish every man, woman and child in Utah could have heard these testimonies.
May God help us to keep His commandments, to live the lives of Latter-day Saints, that we may be worthy of an exaltation in His Kingdom, is my prayer and desire, and I ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen.
"Song of Solomon of the Redeemed," was rendered by the combined choirs.
Elder Bryant S. Hinckley pronounced the benediction.
Second Overflow Meeting
Another meeting of the Conference was held in the Assembly Hall, at 2 p.m., at which Elder George F. Richards presided. The combined choirs of Forest Dale, Waterloo, and Richards wards again furnished the choral numbers.
The hymn, "Arise, my soul, arise," was sung by the choirs.
Elder Samuel C. Parkinson offered the invocation.
The combined choirs sang the anthem, "Palm Branches."