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Show SACRAMENTO JUST TO MERCHANT (Continued from Page 7.) preserve at times a broad spirit of tolerance which is too seldom met with in small inland towns in America. What pains the Bee is that any saloon should get $3,000 for its business when its stock in trade might not have been worth ?500. The Bee thinks saloon men should be compensated only for the actual cash cost of their stock on hand. The good will of the business and the right to earn i. living, valued at millions of dollars by all other merchants and bought and sold by them daily, the Bee would deny to the merchant who sells beer. On the same principle, if a man's cow were run over by a train, the Bee would give him as damages dam-ages only the value of the meat which happened to be cut off the cow. In Sacramento the licenses of the saloon men were increased recently for the express purpose of providing a fund by which those liquor merchants mer-chants who remained in business should compensate compen-sate the unfortunates who were forced out under what the Review considers to be an entirely fruitless fruit-less public policy. San Francisco has 2,000 saloons sa-loons and Los Angeles has 200, yet the criminal courts of OLos Angeles have quite as many criminal crim-inal cases as those of San Francisco, and they have far more crimes of pruiency, more offenses against little boys and little girls, and also far more cases of fraudulent investments personally conducted by pious church workers. The Sacramento Bee should not worry its head off because for once a saloon man, conducting a decent business in response to a public demand, happened to obtain the actual appraised value of his business when forced into discard for no fault of his own. |