CONSERVATION OF HUMAN LIFE.

White Ribbon, Volume 22, Issue 254, 18 August 1916, Page 15

CONSERVATION OF HUMAN LIFE.

(Kxtracts from an Addres- given at National Convention, 1915, by Texas President.) Why are children born defective? Why are they born blind, etc., etc. ? If stock and cattle raisers were continually forced to take* care of blind pigs, blind calves, and colts, our lawmaking bodies would appoint t live sto< k commission, w ith a large appropriation, to find out the cause and remove it. Let no one believe that they would build pens and tax the people to take care of them. The unerring voice of science de< lares that th»*rc are only two causes for defective children —alcohol and impurity. Society is so intricate, so firmly bound by the ties of life, that no man or set of men can engage in am evil without bringing harm to others. Yet theie are people so morally perverted, so intellectually senseless, to claim that the red-light district is a necessary evil. There is no necessary evil. What is necessary to life is not evil, and what is evil is not necessary. Yet the fact remains that this evil has laid terrible tribute upon the unborn, and we arc forced to make a publ c fight for the private right of even child that of being well born —for even physician knows that no child can be assured of a sound heritage of mind or body whose parents, or either parent, have paralysed their higher faculties or narcotised their system by a drug so destructive to the protoplasm of life, the development of brain and nerve cells, as alcohol. Too long has man forced woman to weep in silence ovei her blind babies. Too long has she peopled the insane asylums and homes for the feebleminded with the pangs of her body and soul while she prayed to God 10 send the angel of death to bear away the fruit of her murdered love. Too long has her heart broken when manacles clasped the limbs of her erring child, and turned with streaming eyes from prison doors and gates of infamy as they closed for ever upon her lost hopes. Too long has she gazed in abject despair upon her children clad in the rags of poverty and pinched with hunger, only because man demands his personal liberty, and that the red-light district

shall be* protected. I say to you, it any man should persist in perpetuating and protecting a breeding place fen smallpox and yellow fever, because of the revenue it would bring the me d * cal profession, that man would be* mobbed. If any political party protected any suc h place* it would be* hissed into oblivion by an enraged and outraged public. Hut 1 say to you, and *can prove it by records, that such a place is safe and sane compared w ith your politically protec < d redlight districts and the* blood-stained bar rooms of our countiy, for they leave their scars in the blind eyes of our babies, and their blighting, withering fevers in the feeble-minded and insane of our homes. We have 310,000 insane* and if»5,000 feebleminded, according to some statistics. We are told that 30,000 of these are in asylums and homes, leaving something like* 2»So,ooo of them free to multiply their kind. Add to this the hundreds of thousands of paupers, tramps, criminals, and sexual pervens caused by alcohol, and we face a tremendous loss of character, ability and life. Who shall say that God is a liar, and that He did not mean what He said whe n He declared that “not a sparrow should fall to the ground without His knowledge”? How much more important is human life. God also saiu, “Vengeance* is Mine*. 1 w II repay.” Woe to that nation that for gold and selfish lust crushes out the life*, the opportunities, the moral vision of its people. We shall reap what we sow; we must pay what we owe.