The New Northwest

What's the Remedy?

Our brother of the Dallas Republican gives the Advocate the following good advice:

We agree with the Advocate, that no people of which we have any record reliable, since the creation of man, ever degenerated so fast, or allowed the wheels of destruction to roll on with such rapidity without check, in consequence of these two great apparent and acknowledged evils, twin agents in crime, obscene literature and intemperance, as the American people. The Advocate thinks our State Legislatures ought to follow the example of our National Legislature on the subject of obscene literature, and punish severely the offenders; so we think, and they ought to act as rationally concerning the evils of intemperance, in which opinion we believe the Advocate would agree with us. We hold that the people have the power to put an end to both these shocking, fast spreading evils, and the great question is, will they do it? We answer "no," not under the present organized state of things. Why? Because of the natural disposition and peculiar organization of men and women, and because the American people are constantly playing the hypocrite.

We have already suffered great injury by our hypocrisy in the cry of "liberty," while we held, arbitrarily, in chains of steel, four million human beings; and we shall suffer still more injury and wrong by our eternal hypocritical cries of "exact justice and equal rights," so long as we arbitrarily say, to the most religious and naturally moral half of our own blood and citizens: You may with us desire the right, but you shall take no part in raising the standard of virtue, religion and morals, or in driving from our fair land, this ocean of vice, iniquity, degradation and crime. The natural propensity of women to good morals are much greater than that of men, consequently you must give them the privilege to assist directly in the establishment of good morals, or your community will be immoral. We say to the Advocate, from this on, advocate the cause of equal justice, in plain English, woman suffrage, and when that is accomplished your great and protracted battle against obscenity and bad whisky, so long fought without hope of success, will soon be over, and victory will perch upon the banner of temperance and morality all over this fair land; the continuing curse, so justly administered for our hypocrisy, will be removed; and this hideous car of iniquity and sin, running so rapidly in our midst, screaming requiems of her unnumbered victims, impelled by her monstrous power the dying will be thrown from the track in one blackened mass of irretrievable ruin.