Another, and if possible, more urgent reason why the saloon must go, has recently been brought home to the people of this country with convincing force. Americans have believed that this was the freest, happiest land under the sun, and it is. Its government is the perfection of human wisdom. It is, as the greatest of our Presidents has said, “a government of the people, for the people, by the people.” No limitations or restrictions are placed on the rights or liberty of any citizen, except such as are necessary to protect the rights and liberty of all other citizens. The humblest man in the land may aspire to the highest official place, and it is a fact that a vast majority of those citizens who have attained the loftiest honors sprang from the humblest walks in life. Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Blaine, Logan, and thousands of others who might be named, are conspicuous illustrations of this truth. Ours is a government of liberty, regulated by law. Its delegated and reserved powers embody the ripest fruits of man’s experience with and knowledge of man’s weakness and strength, selfishness and generosity, cruelty and justice—embody, in fact, the experience of thirty centuries of human progress. Only a few brief years ago, the people gladly and proudly sacrificed 500,000 lives, and billions of treasure, in order to preserve, for themselves and their children, this heritage of free government. But within the past decade there has been spawned upon our hospitable shores a school of depraved and vicious foreigners, who are poisoning and polluting the very atmosphere they breathe. Incapable of comprehending the difference between absolute despotism and republican freedom, confounding liberty with license, regarding all restraints of law as tyranny, and denouncing all government as oppression, these apostles of anarchy are sedulously sowing the seeds of discord, envy, hate, rapacity, and murder. And where do these miscreants find the most willing converts to their atrocious theories? Where do they assemble to plot, to declaim, to conspire, and to argue? Read the reports of the trial of the anarchists in Chicago, and you will ascertain. Read, in the journals of any of our large cities, reports of anarchist and socialist assemblies. Follow Most, and Schwab, and Spies, and Fielden, and Parsons, to their favorite haunts. Do this, and you will find that the saloon is always and everywhere the assembly room, the school house, the tabernacle of these wild, vicious and dangerous apostles of lawlessness. There they teach their ferocious doctrine, “burn, and murder, and plunder, in order to live.” There they find the ignorant and brutalized human beings whose besotted minds and deadened consciences make them ready converts to the monstrous theories that property is robbery, that law is oppression, that government is tyranny, that religion is a cheat, and that everything mankind has been taught to revere should be proscribed and destroyed.