There is a prophecy abroad that prohibition will be the issue of a national election.  If the question is squarely put, there are enough farmers and church-people to drive the saloon out of legal existence.  The women’s vote, a little more puritanical than the men’s vote, will make the result sure.  As one anxious for this victory, I have often speculated on the situation when all America is nominally dry, at the behest of the American farmer, the American preacher, and the American woman.  When the use of alcohol is treason, what will become of those all but unbroken lines of slum saloons?  No lesser force than regular troops could dislodge them, with yesterday’s intrenchment.

The entrance of the motion picture house into the arena is indeed striking, the first enemy of King Alcohol with real power where that king has deepest hold.  If every one of those saloon doors is nailed up by the Chautauqua orators, the photoplay archway will remain open.  The people will have a shelter where they can readjust themselves, that offers a substitute for many of the lines of pleasure in the groggery.  And a whole evening costs but a dime apiece.  Several rounds of drinks are expensive, but the people can sit through as many repetitions of this programme as they desire, for one entrance fee.  The dominant genius of the moving picture place is not a gentleman with a red nose and an eye like a dead fish, but some producer who, with all his faults, has given every person in the audience a seven-leagued angel-and-demon telescope.

Since I have announced myself a farmer and a puritan, let me here list the saloon evils not yet recorded in this chapter.  They are separate from the catalogue of the individualistic woes of the drunkard that are given in the Scripture.  The shame of the American drinking place is the bar-tender who dominates its thinking.  His cynical and hardened soul wipes out a portion of the influence of the public school, the library, the self-respecting newspaper.  A stream rises no higher than its source, and through his dead-fish eye and dead-fish brain the group of tired men look upon all the statesmen and wise ones of the land.  Though he says worse than nothing, his furry tongue, by endless reiteration, is the American slum oracle.  At the present the bar-tender handles the neighborhood group, the ultimate unit in city politics.

So, good citizen, welcome the coming of the moving picture man as a local social force.  Whatever his private character, the mere formula of his activities makes him a better type.  He may not at first sway his group in a directly political way, but he will make himself the centre of more social ideals than the bar-tender ever entertained.  And he is beginning to have as intimate a relation to his public as the bar-tender.  In many cases he stands under his arch in the sheltered lobby and is on conversing terms with his habitual customers, the length of the afternoon and evening.