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Show LOCAL OPTION IN OHIO. Ohio has had a township local option law for some time, under which a very large part of the state has become '"dry" territory. Last week the legislature passed a supplements ary measure providing pro-viding for county local option, under which it is confidently expected that between eighty and eighty-five of the eighty-eight counties of the state will be prohibition" territory within two years. This new legislation in Ohio is supplementary to the township local option law, and provision is made that the smaller territory voting "dry" cannot become be-come "wet" by the vote of the larger -territory. In other words, a township which is under prohibition rule by its own vote cannot be made open territory if, when the question is submitted to the vote of the county the county votes in favor of maintaining maintain-ing saloons. Ohio is not a freak state. Her statesmen compare com-pare with the best in the country. And the people of Ohio are blessed with intelligence which is quite equal to the enlightenment of people of other states. The rapid growth of the temperance cause in Ohio is therefore indicative of the sentiment of just about the whole nation. The wave of local option and prohibitive legislation legis-lation is growing in the east; it has already cap- tured the south, and is moving into the west. A few more evidences of the viciousness of the saloon bummers the hold-up men, robbers and murderer? and the good people of Utah will come to realize that there is a way to prevent those outrages, the perpetration of which is hatched in the saloons. It is not a question for politicians to handle. They have played with the evil, profited by it so long that no effective measures can be expected from them. It is a question for the people to decide, and i : fh-t step is the securing of a local option law from ihe next legislature. Is Utah to continue a bulwark of the liquor business, or is it to join the good company of states which have thrown the business overboard? The tax on tea which was the cause of the Boston Tea Party was incomparable to the tax levied on the American people by the saloon business. That the people of Utah will wake up to the enormity and uselessness of all the misery caused by liquor is indicated in-dicated by the fact that the people of other states . - - have done so. Inevitably, as Utah progresses, the state must enter the local option column, for progress prog-ress leads directly on that road, and no state is more progressive than our own. |