OCR Text |
Show THE ELUSIVE WORM. The Effort to Suppress the Sovereign of the Still Encounters a Mild Objection. ALDEEMAN PEMBROKE'S POSITION. He Deprecates Anything That Discriminates Discrimi-nates Against One in favor of the Other. An ordinance was introduced in the council last evening to prohibit the presence of saloons within certain precincts pre-cincts and, if possible, to relegate them to the suburbs of the city. For a time Councilman Hall had it all their own way. They seemed to bo speeding along to easy victory, and amendments that were simply the the mask for prohibition fell thick and fast. Councilman James was in an illustrative il-lustrative mood. He believed in blackboard black-board demonstration apd had a fund of it. In depicting the horrors of tho demijohn he remarked with a sort of hypothetical rashness that if a saloon were to be installed on each side of a merchant's itore the business of the aforesaid merchant would sustain indeserlbab!) disaster. It would suffer, in fact, an attack of paralysis. Councilman Pembroke, who generally gener-ally views things in a conservative way, took the Iloor at this juncture to speak the sentiment of the conservative mind. In reply to Mr. James, wlio, by the way, rarely crooks his elbow, Mr.' Pembroke Pem-broke stated that while he did not oppose op-pose a petition for the establishmont of a saloon, he regarded the business of the saloon keeper as one of perfect legitimacy legiti-macy and propounded a question to the council that the lobby at last was capable capa-ble of answering. Provided, said he that two saloons were established, oue on each side of a Main street merchant, tho saloons paying tbo sum of $3100 a year against a license of $."0 a year would it be good policy to deprive the city of that revenue simply to increase the business of the individual merchant. mer-chant. As long as this is a "license" city, continued the gentleman, the city council must not permitted itself to be controled by any petty motive of selfishness self-ishness that any legitimate business man may bo deprived of his rights whether he operates a saloon or dry goods store. 'If this is to be a prohibition town," continued the speaker, "let us know it at once. Igoiuto a saloon semi-occa-sionally and 1 would at once leave a city where one individual liberty would be restricted even to the extent of such semi-occasional." There are now eighty-six saloons paying pay-ing revenue into the city at the rate of $1200 a year, and to shut off this source of nutriment would be to severely cripple crip-ple it. |