W. C. T. U. Column

     Listen: It was the common murderer Government Licensed Alcohol! Hear me: The official trial records show that the plot to assassinate President Lincoln and his cabinet was hatched in Mrs. Surratt’s government licensed saloon, fourteen miles south of Washington City; that there the assassins drank the liquor poison that inspired the plot; that all the conspirators with the possible exception of two—Mrs. Surratt and Dr. Mudd—were confirmed inebriates, and that Dr. Mudd frequented the bar of Mrs. Surratt; that Booth was a heavy drinker, and that he and the others designated to carry out the plot had just made the round of Washington’s licensed saloons, where they drank the alcoholic poison that nerved his hand for that fatal shot and made the rest too drunk to do their part successfully.
     And remember that McKinley also was a victim of our Government’s licensed liquid poison traffic. I have a picture of the saloon kept by the father of Czolgosz, where, in a rear room, the boy Czolgosz heard the vile speech of the anarchists who met there, and later he worked in the Stroh Brewery, East Cleveland, and when he went to Buffalo to assassinate McKinley he was harbored in John Nowak’s government Licensed saloon. And remember that all over the world the chief instigator and incentive to crime is Alcohol!