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To consider the question in its moral aspect: Suppose the fifty or more saloonsnow operating in Joplin were to be abolished!Would there spring up in their place, the blind tiger, the illegal drug store, the boot-legger? This is a question the voter muit decide for himself.The material side of the question:Supposing that prohibition in practice realises the promises of prohibition in theory! Are we ready for it just now?There is something like $500 in the city treasury with which to face the expenses of another year. Tf the revenue fro-m the saloon licenses is cut off how is the money going to be supplied?Are we going to increase taxes?The taxes are already up to their legal limit.It la eeey enough for a visitor to answer such question with a wave of the hand or a sentiment prettily expressed. But the city pay rolls are not met with gestures or rhetoric; they've got to be met with caah.The roeds of Jasper county are one of our very biggest assets. They are the arteries through which the blood of proepertty has been pumped into every city in this county. Without them, instead of a record-breaking ore production Id 1909, the mining district would be years and years behind the present date as an Industrial center. In every city in Jasper county there are beautiful churches which would not have been built but for our roads; flchool houses are here that would not be here but for those roads; there are homes Without number, traceable to the opportunity vouchsafed by those good roads.Those roads have been constructed with the money provided by dramshop licenses. ‘ You cannot argue away the fact that that is the way the great county betterment of good roads has been financed. And you can’t argue away the fact that if that fund is wiped out by prohibition the construction of our roads will stop, and stay stopped, until another source of revenue is devised.Those, surely, are the facts. It is with those facts that we are confronted. It is in the midst of those facts that we are living and must continue to live. It is the facts of life that form the common bond of citizenship. In that bond we meet and contest and settle the issues that present themselves from time to time. And when the polls close and the fight is over we wake up the next morning to resume the round of citizenship, its duties, its privileges, its obligations, individual, mutual, general.♦ * * * * * *It is in the spirit of citizenship this question of locai opi ion should be discussed,
Newspaper Details
Joplin Daily Globe
Joplin, Missouri, US
Sun, Jan 09, 1910
Page 16
Full Page
Clipped by
Joplin P.
MO, USA 30 Jan 2019
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