“He only said, ‘didn’t I tell you that some day that boy would disgrace us, now it’s up to you to straighten it out,’ and when they knew I told you why the card was sent back, that changed everything. I’ve been down here four times, father made me go.” His name was placed upon the books, a badge was given him, “with a lucky number,” and he left the office. A month later the president met him at one of the auxiliary meetings, and to the question, “How about the seven swear words,” he said: “We busted up swearing at our house. Everybody had to stop it.” No better worker on the street can be found than this boy. His whole soul is in the work for doing good among his associates. _PART FIFTH_ [Illustration: CARRIERS.] [Illustration: CARRIERS.] CHAPTER XXI. There is no subject that has received so much attention and has worried so many good people as the liquor question. Saloons and drinking never cease to be problems for our well-meaning temperance people. Why man created saloons, no one undertakes to answer. The strongest man is never too strong in a saloon, and the weak is to be pitied. The saloon is an evil that has been with us a long time and seems to be here to stay in one form or another. While we cannot eradicate the evil, especially by extreme methods, can we not modify its influence? We have tried the probation method, and failed. We have tried the open saloon, the clubs, the no-treating, the open reform saloon, the wet and dry division—but the saloons are still with us, and this because of the fact that the state, the city, property owners, recognize the saloon legally, through the assessment of heavy licenses and taxes, and good well-meaning people ask and receive money from the ever-willing giver, the saloonman, and use it for charitable as well as church purposes. The world today is heartless in its mad rush for money getting, and the “graft” is in the minds of thousands of well-meaning, but over-anxious to get-rich-quick men; among them the saloonman. Let us suggest to our saloonmen how they can stop a great deal of misery in the world. We have in mind a saloon that was “made good” by five newsboys. “A real live saloon, where politicians congregated to lay plans for work, and whose owner had an eye to making money, and saw nothing else, even to the ruining of boys and men.” “Say, pres.,” said a newsboy from the saloon district, and an officer of an auxiliary, “Jimmy Smith is drunk and laying in the alley at the saloon where politicians hold their meetin’s. The bar-tender throwed him out.” The books showed Jimmy Smith’s father was a “ward politician,” a good fellow who was often taken home drunk by his son, a newsboy. Jimmy was eleven years old, very bright and intelligent for his age. He learned to drink liquor through his father and mother sending him to the saloon for beer, and “dropping in the alley on the way home and tasting the beer, until he began to like it.”