Two Supreme Foes of the People, and One Supreme Privilege [excerpt]

The Saloon and Crime

     Are we interested in abolishing crime? All the persons implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln were drunkards, and had been drinking the night that the great President was killed. The reason which Andrew Johnson gave for refusing executive clemency to Mrs. Surratt was: “The whole plot to murder Lincoln was hatched in Mrs. Surratt’s saloon.” President [164][165] Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, was a drunkard. The man who killed President McKinley was the direct spawn of the saloon. Czolgosz was an ex-bartender, was reared in a saloon, and was at a saloon just before the assassination, and confessed before his execution that it was the talk he had heard in his father’s saloon that determined him to murder President McKinley. I have recalled the murder of these illustrious men only for the sake of emphatic illustration. Eighty-five per cent. of all the murders committed in Philadelphia last year were due to drink.
     Divorce the evil of commercialized vice from the liquor business, and you have cut its tap-root.