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The Golden Age
(SUCCESSOR TO RELIGIOUS TORUJI)
Published Ebery Thursday by the Golden 59ge Publishing
Company (Inc.)
OFPICES: LOWNDES TUILDINQ, ATLANTA, GA.
Price: $2.00 a Year
Ministers $1.50 per Tear.
In cases of foreign address fifty cents should be added to cober
additional postage.
flake all remittances payable to The Golden Age Publishing Company.
WILLIS9M D. UPSHS9W, - - -’ - Editor
A. E. RAMSAUR, ... Managing Editor
LEK G. BROUGHTON - - - Pulpit Editor
Entered at the Post Office tn Atlanta. Ga„
as second-class matter.
To the Public: The advertising columns of The
Golden Age will have an editorial conscience. No
advertisement will be accepted which we believe
would be hurtful to either the person or the purse
of our readers.
Every one is aware that the cost of food, cloth
ing, legislation, rents, fuel, mules and all the other
necessities of life is higher than ever before,
but the advance is spreading into channels which
one would naturally expect to remain unaffected.
Recently when expenses were being discussed, a tired
looking housewife sighed and said: 11 Everything
is up. Think of having to pay a boy a quarter to
be good, when it used to cost but fifteen cents!”
»5 *!
The Boom of Cannon.
Our readers outside of Georgia must forgive us
—if we need forgiving—for allowing the prohibition
battle in this state to occupy the “center of the
stage” just now. We know it is Georgia’s battle,
but, after all, it is everybody’s battle who is in
terested in the overthrow of the liquor traffic, and
we are sure that our readers from Maine to Texas
will follow with intense interest the battle from
afar. There will be plenty of other things to do
when this great crisis is over, and while we are not
allowing our regular departments to suffer one whit
by the attention given to this fight against saloons,
we feel that the situation justifies all we have said
and expect to say —and ten times more, if we could
say it.
The speeches made and the scenes enacted at
the three great rallies in Atlanta last Sunday
night will always be mountain peaks in memory.
Hon. Jas. L. Mayson, the astute Christian lawyer
who has been elected president of the Fulton Coun
ty Anti-Saloon League, was the principal speaker
at Grace Methodist Church. Hon. W. A. Coving
ton, of Moultrie, caught and stirred and swept the
crowd at Wesley Memorial Tabernacle, while at
the Baptist Tabernacle Dr. Broughton himself
“submitted a few of his own ‘feeble remarks’
Senator L. G. Hardman, author of the Senate bill,
profoundly impressed the people with his earnest
common sense; Senator Williford vivified and
glorified the legal side of the question, and Seaborn
Wright (it would be a travesty to use the prefix
“Hon.”) didn’t do a thing but set four thousand
people about as crazy with enthusiasm as any
speaker ever did since time began. And these four
thousand people sprang to their feet to endorse
the ringing resolutions calling for state prohibi
tion.
The liquor power is at work. Fabulous sums of
money have been subscribed by the saloon-keepers
and their backers and abettors to help win the
fight, but it is useless. The Georgia Legislature
cannot be bought. There is a clear majority in
both branches, and while here and there some
weak-kneed, dark-souled representative may fall
a prey to their “boodle,” the overwhelming ma
jority of true-hearted men will stand bravely by
the home and the children against the saloon.
Listen, ye prohibition friends from afar, and you
will hear the boom of cannon in good old Georgia,
and then the shouts of victory. •
The Golden Age for July 11, 1907.
A Nightmare in the Daytime.
State Prohibition is Democratic.
That is a plaintive appeal which the opponents
of state prohibition are making to the “rock-ribbed
sons of Democracy.”
They are good citizens. They declare that in
private practice and in public expression they are
“agin liquor” and nearly always have been—and
always expect to be “when the thing is handled
right.” But the dethronement of the basic princi
ple of Democracy is what gives them a night-mare
in the day-time! They invoke the spirits of the
fathers and the loyalty of their sons to protect tV?
tottering principle of that “ideal Democracy”
which they declare is wrapped up in county “local
option”!
Alas! Alas!! Then if it is not democratic for
the legislature to pass any measure affecting coun
ty laws without referring it to the vote of the
people in that county, then tell us, pray, what be
comes of all local legislation passed by a sovereign
body of law-makers? What becomes of every
county court that has been planted, every institu
tion that has been incorporated and every civic
measure that has been enacted? What becomes of
that good old “three-mile law” (Georgia’s first
real prohibition legislation a quarter of a century
ago), which allows no whiskey sold in rural dis
tricts within three miles of a church?
If it is undemocratic to pass any kind of whis
key law or anti-whiskey law without the voting
voice of the county, what becomes of that $20,000
license passed by the last Legislature for Irwin
county which shut up the dispensary in Ocilla and
the barrooms in Fitzgerald?*
What becomes of a dozen local laws granting dis
pensaries and other devilment here and there? A
state campaign is rarely ever waged on more than
one or two leading issues on which the people real
ly give their voice. And yet there are hundreds of
bills affecting the public good, either in local or
general legislation, which arise in the legislature
and are forever settled there. If it is not demo
cratic then why in the name of common sense and
Democracy has a Democratic legislature been doing
these things all these years?
Dr. T. T. Paton.
America has lost a distinguished citizen, Chris
tianity a powerful champion and Southern Baptists
a loyal leader in the death of Dr. T. T. Eaton, of
Louisville, Ky. Pastor for more than twenty years
of Walnut street church, Louisville, and founder
and editor of that stalwart “defender of the
faith,” the Western Recorder, he occupied a posi
tion of commanding influence. His like will not
soon be seen again.
Some years ago when the city of Louisville would
take him and make him a congressman he ans
wered: “No. I thank you, my fellow citizens, for
the honor, but God has called me to a greater hon
or —to preach the gospel and be pastor of a
church. ’ ’
Dr. Eaton died suddenly last week at Grand
Junction, Tenn., en route to make several address
es at the Blue Mountain, Mississippi, Encampment.
Great gloom fell upon the encampment and ov«r
the South where Dr. Eaton was known for his
greatness and loved for his nobility.
Senator Clay Tor State Prohibition.
That would be an inspiring spectacle—a United
States Senator “stumping the state” against the
liquor traffic! But that is what we would see in
Georgia if we have an election for statewide pro
hibition.
Senator A. S. Clay told the Editor of The Gold
en Age recently that if a battle for state prohibi
tion is launched he will take the field in behalf of
that great and burning issue. We rejoice in this
statement from a man of such calibre and promi
nence as Senator Clay. It shows that Senator
Clay’s heart is not only on the right side, as far
as inclination is concerned, but that, unlike many
men who say they are for temperance and probit
Where have these latter-day champions of Demo
cratic consistency been keeping themselves that
they should allow such shocking and disrupting
proceedings ?
Bah! The thing is too palpable. And how in
the world a big, smart paper like The Atlanta
Journal or The Atlanta Constitution can take such
an untenable and indefensible position we simply
cannot understand!
They seem to think that when the Georgia Legis
lature some twenty years ago granted counties the
privilege of “local option,” right then and there
the last word was spoken and the sacred volume
of Democratic “law and gospel” was forever
sealed.
Good men so strangely blind as this must not
complain if we remind them that in this Republi
can-Democratic form of government with its leg
islative branches of “checks and balances,” we
have been, and are now, proceeding beautifully
along time-honored Democratic lines when we are
preparing to obey the known will of a vast major
ity of the good people of Georgia and give them
state-wide and absolute prohibition of the liquor
traffic!
Don’t fuss, gentlemen—don’t “cuss.” Don’t
have a night-mare in the day-time! That would be
very “un-pretty,” as a little girl of our acquaint
ance used to say. Just “keep sweet.”
Realize your mistake. Get ready to bow to the
known will of the majority —and be part of that
majority yourselves.
You used to say in local option elections that you
believed in prohibition if you could “get it in
the whole state.” And now some of you seem fran
tic when the wish you never rightly wished is about
to be realized. Good men make mistakes. You
have made one thus far. Now don’t make another
by continuing in this. Get ready with your heart
and ballot. It is coming anyhow. See, then, Hie
beauty of duty. Vote with conscience, wife, child
ren, mother! Then thorns will come out of your
pillow and gladness will bless you and your pos
terity !
bition, he believes in positive and aggressive ac
tion.
For a member of congress to say he believes the
Panama canal is necessary to the national welfare
and then not labor faithfully for its completion,
is to confess himself nothing less than an unfaith
ful public servant.
And for a man in public or private life to say
he is against the saloon and not “roll up his
sleeves” and go after its extermination, is to con
fess himself an indolent cowayd.
We believe that this definite declaration from
Senator Clay will have a. wholesome effect on the
spinal columns of other public men who, whether
in the state or the halls of national legislation,
will give themselves more actively and fearlessly
to the extermination of America’s greatest curse.
I or, blot out the saloon and labor troubles and
the race problem will be a thousand miles nearer
solution than they are today.
A boy in Deep River, Connecticut, was shot
while playing Wild West with a companion the
-other day. The bullet struck a button his mother
had just sewed on his trousers and his life was
saved.. Let this serve as an example to all mothers
and wives. Who knows when a button in the right
place will save an undertaker’s bill?
•5
It was rumored some days ago that Mark Twain,
who is m London, was engaged to marry his sec
retary. A reporter asked him about it at his hotel,
and Mr. Clemens’ written reply to the question will
do much to give him a warmer place, if that be
possible, than he already has in the affections of
the American people. This is what he wrote: “I
have not known, and shall never know, anyone who
could fill the place of the wife I have lost. I shall
pot marry again,”
tion.