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in the purchase of this little home. And smiles
of gladness glistened through tears of gratitude
when the bereft wfidow and fatherless children were
led to a home of their own.
“Way Down Upon the Suwanee River.”
Live Oak is the capital of Suwanee county, and
blossoms in all her thrift and beauty near the
bank of the picturesque Suwanee River, so famed
in song and story.
Professor J. L. Edwards, the scholarly, and for
a prosperous decade, the beloved superintendent of
the Live Oak Public Schools, believes in instilling
in his pupils “love of home and country,” and un
to this end he has his several hundred boys and
girls sing often and merrily “Way Down Upon the
Suwanee River,” and all Live Oak herself seems
to have caught the minstrelsy of music and poetry
in the threnody of her progress.
Open Letter to Atlanta Journal.
Editor Journal: No stronger, more sensible edi
torial has appeared in the Journal in many years
than your leader of the 24th inst., “OBEY THE
LAW AND GET BACK TO BUSINESS.” But
you went further than the discussion of that in
junction. You told how to secure the peace and
keep it. All the ills of Atlanta and the big, round
earth are not “bunged up in a wdiiskey barrel,”
but officers of the law, the recorder of our courts,
and the superintendents of our asylums will prove
by actual statistics that more devilment, horror
and sorrow come from the sale and drinking of
liquor than any other one cause which the law
can touch and prevent. You rightly argue, then:
“CLOSE UP THE NEGRO DIVES ON DECATUR
AND PETERS STREETS, AND KEEP THEM
CLOSED FOREVER.”
And now, in your issue of yesterday, you
and that brainy, brilliant young statesman from
Moultrie, Judge W. A. Covington, go a wise
step further and argue that even as the guar
dianship of the government will not allow whiskey
sold to its ward, the Indian, because that “fire
w T ater” makes the Indian a fool and a demon, so,
then, the guardianship of our own government,
state and municipal, should make it a crime to sell
whiskey to the negro on the self-same ground.
Whiskey excites the natural evil, makes him lose
his head and become a brute. And this is why you
wisely say it should not be sold to him. Mr. Editor,
are there not “others”? You know, and every other
sane man know 7 s, that while not, perhaps, in the
same degree, w’hiskey also excites the natural evil
in a white man and makes him become a brute.
Many of the mob w’ho shot down the defenseless
and unoffending negroes in the riot that has stabbed
Atlanta’s heart and given our fair and famous
city an everlasting crown of sorrow—these highway
murderers had filled up on whiskey which they did
not buy from a negro dive. The records of crime
in Atlanta alone will reveal hundreds of cases where
white men—some of them educated and once refin
ed—bought liquor from “respectable (?) saloons”
and, under its hellish influence, stabbed their best
friends to death or went home to shoot down their
pleading wives and children or beat them as a brute
would beat a dog.
Ask Recorder Broyles for these countless records
of brutality and shame.
The “Irresistible Logic.”
Whcjre does the irresistibjle logic carry you?
In heaven’s name, by what kind of argument should
we stop the sale of “hell-raising liquor,” as you
call it, to negroes because it excites them to crime
and CONTINUE its sale to white men who rush
from the “respectable saloon” to the brothel, to
murder and hell?
The man who begins the argument and stops
half way is inevitably caught between Scylla and
Charybdis—or “the devil and the deep blue sea.”
Let us be consistent—let us be brave and go all
the way! I know Judge Covington will not stop
short of this sane and inevitable conclusion. And
I believe the heart of the man who wrote that ring
ing editorial will do the same.
Cutting Off the “Luxuries.”
And, again, why discriminate ? Why shut off our
The Golden Age for October 4, 1906.
fellow citizens who live on Peters street and De
catur street from these bar room “luxuries” (they
certainly cannot be called “necessities”*), and leave
these same “luxuries” to the people of Mitchell,
Broad, Marietta and Peachtree? Most of the li
quor that intensified that Saturday night riot was
bought and imbibed on one of these four streets.
Mayor Woodward has done nobly during these
dark days of trial and tension.
The members of the city council, some of whom
had before made the best people of Atlanta sick
at heart, have redeemed themselves like men with
an awakened conscience, and they are determined, I
believe, to do their duty to the suffering present
and the threatening future.
Then all saloons, thank God and these councilmen,
are closed until October Ist, and Aiderman McEach
ern, in his great heart, is wishing that there would
never be another opportunity to enforce his wise
ordinance clearing all drinking places of tables and
chairs and thus stopping the rendezvous feature of
idleness and dissipation.
“I would be in favor of prohibition if it would
really prohibit,” declares almost every man who
makes any claim to respectability. Hear, again,
the crushing argument of Judge Covington: “IF
PROHIBITION DOES NOT PROHIBIT, THEN
WHY CLOSE UP THE SALOONS DURING THIS
TIME OF EXCITEMENT AND DANGER?”
There is no answer! THERE CAN BE NONE!
And you, Mr. Editor, speak truly in your editorial
of yesterday when you declare: “IN THE PRES
ENT TEMPER OF OUR PEOPLE ANY RESIS
TANCE ON THE PART OF THE LIQUOR DEAL
ERS TO THIS SCHEME WILL BE MET WITH
THE VOTING OUT OF THE SALOONS ALTO
GETHER.”
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A Widow’s Home —Gift of Citizens of Live Oak, Fla.
Now, the Journal is talking in the good old way.
I believe that there are not a dozen men in Atlanta,
saloon keepers included, who would not declare to
day that if an election were held tomorrow every
saloon would be hurled by the votes of outraged
freemen, white and colored, from its bloody throne
of power and crime.
And when will the “present temper” of our
people cool? JUST AS SOON AS THE SOPHIS
TRY OF “PERSONAL LIBERTY” AND THE
BLIGHT OF COMMERCIALISM CAN HAVE
TIME TO TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER THE
PARAMOUNT CONSIDERATION OF LAW AND
ORDER AND THE SANCTITY OF OUR HOMES.
If Luther Rosser, singlehanded and alone, can con
quer a mob when weakling policemen fail—if Low
ry Arnold can turn back a band of hoodlums by
one fearless stand and one crushing blow, then
every man knows that THE COMBINED MAN
HOOD OF ATLANTA AND EVERY SALOON
CURSED CITY, CAN RUN OUT BARROOMS AND
KEEP OUT “BLIND TIGERS,” IP THEY CON
TINUE IN THE PRESENT BRAND OF HEROIC
BRAVERY AND ETERNAL VIGILANCE!
In good old days the Atlanta Journal used to
be counted the actual enemy of the saloon. In these
latter days the Journal has proven its ability to
lead a campaign of reform. NOW, LEAD AN
OTHER REFORM. Follow out your able argu
ment. Roll up your sleeves, unsheathe your good
sword, sound the tocsin and rally your clans, and
the first sun of the year of grace, 1907, will rise on
Atlanta redeemed. William D. Upshaw.
Atlanta, Ga., Sept. 28th.
Items of General Interest.
More than one-fifth of the land surface of the
globe is under English rule.
It is a dull market day in New York City when
5,000,000 eggs and 500,000 pounds of butter are not
received.
American shoes are so popular in Germany that
many manufacturers in that country sell their
goods as “American made.”
Sir Andrew Fraser, governor of Bengal, virtual
ruler of 80,000,000 people, is the active president
of the Calcutta Y. M. C. A.
The richest orchestra in the world will be the
Warsaw Philharmonic, which has just received a
legacy of $1,000,000 from a music-loving Pole.
Chinese laborers in Samoa get only $2.50 a month,
besides board, lodging and medical attendance. They
want $5, but the planters say that that would make
farming unprofitable.
According to a calculation made by a Broadway
shoe dealer, who has a fondness for figures, there
are twenty-two pairs of shoes worn out in New
York City each minute.
John Jacob Astor is the largest private owner
of automobiles in this country. They number twen
ty-four, the average cost of each is about $5,000,
making a total of $120,000 invested in his ma
chines.
The largest and costliest building thus far under
taken in New York, the city of immense structures,
is the magnificent $10,000,000 Episcopal Cathedral
of St. John the Divine, now being erected on Morn
ingside Heights. This will be the greatest sacred
edifice in America and the fourth in importance m
the world.
One point in the Queen of Spain’s future life
seems to have escaped general notice. She will
have to live under the same roof as her mother-in
law, her sister-in-law, her aunt-in-law, her hus
band’s brother-in-law and the three children of the
king’s dead sister, the eldest of them being heir to
the throne.
It has often been claimed that “men dig their
graves with their teeth,” or, in other words, that
the average man eats too much; but a recent demon
stration of the value of abstemious eating is given by
Mr. Asbel W. Riley, in the office of the War De
partment, who lives on twelve cents a day and has
done so for years. Mr. Riley is seventy-four years
old, looks ten years younger and maintains that
his good health is due to his diet of fruit, eggs and
bread, and but small quantities of these.
According to a recent utterance of Frederick Pe
terson, M.D., President of the New York Neurologi
cal Society, and one of the greatest nerve special
ists in the world, insanity is the result of nerve
friction and this friction is greater in New York
City than anywhere else in the country. In sup
port. of this theory cases of insanity are rapidly on
the increase in New York, and Dr. Ludwig G. Hoff
man of Berlin during a recent visit to New York
prophesied that this ill would probably eventually
destroy the population of the city.
Now that the New York Central Railroad is to use
electric engines exclusively on all its trains enter
ing New York City, attention is being called to the
magnificent new terminal station being erected for
use of this company. The building is to cost several
million dollais when completed and will cover six
city blocks from Forty-second to Forty-Fifth street
for a frontage and three blocks in depth. The build
ing u as begun in 1903 but will not be completed un
til 1910.