"Billy" Sunday, the Man and His Message: With his own words which have won thousands for ChristEllis, William T. (William Thomas)
Religion
"Billy" Sunday, the Man and His Message: With his own words which have won thousands for Christ
Ellis, William T. (William Thomas)
Baseball players -- United States -- Biography; Evangelists -- United States -- Biography; Sunday, Billy, 1862-1935
Now I have followed probably three of the thirty-six pints of the
farmer's product of a bushel of corn and the three of them have struck
down seven lives, the three boys who committed the murders, the three
persons who were killed and the little mother who died of a broken
heart. And now, I want to know, my farmer friend, if this has been a
good commercial transaction for you? You sold a bushel of corn; you
found a market; you got fifty cents; but a fraction of this product
struck down seven lives, all of whom would have been consumers of your
products for their life expectancy. And do you mean to say that is a
good economic transaction to you? That disposes of the market question
until it is answered; let no man argue further.
More Economics
And say, my friends, New York City's annual drink bill is $365,000,000
a year, $1,000,000 a day. Listen a minute. That is four times the
annual output of gold, and six times the value of all the silver mined
in the United States. And in New York there is one saloon for every
thirty families. The money spent in New York by the working people for
drink in ten years would buy every working man in New York a beautiful
home, allowing $3,500 for house and lot. It would take fifty persons
one year to count the money in $1 bills, and they would cover 10,000
acres of ground. That is what the people in New York dump into the
whisky hole in one year. And then you wonder why there is poverty and
crime, and that the country is not more prosperous.
The whisky gang is circulating a circular about Kansas City, Kansas. I
defy you to prove a statement in it. Kansas City is a town of 100,000
population, and temperance went into effect July 1, 1905. Then they
had 250 saloons, 200 gambling hells and 60 houses of ill fame. The
population was largely foreign, and inquiries have come from Germany,
Sweden and Norway, asking the influence of the enforcement of the
prohibitory law.
At the end of one year the president of one of the largest banks
in that city, a man who protested against the enforcement of the
prohibitory law on the ground that it would hurt business, found that
his bank deposits had increased $1,700,000, and seventy-two per cent
of the deposits were from men who had never saved a cent before,
and forty-two per cent came from men who never had a dollar in the
bank, but because the saloons were driven out they had a chance to
save, and the people who objected on the grounds that it would injure
business found an increase of 209 per cent in building operations;
and, furthermore, there were three times as many more people seeking
investment, and court expenses decreased $25,000 in one year.
Who pays to feed and keep the gang you have in jail? Why, you go down
in your sock and pay for what the saloon has dumped in there. They
don't do it. Mr. Whisky Man, why don't you go down and take a picture
of wrecked and blighted homes, and of insane asylums, with gibbering
idiots. Why don't you take a picture of that?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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