Leadership Quote by Thomas Jordan Jarvis

Jarvis is doing something shrewdly political: he isn’t arguing with a saloon, he’s arguing with a system. By stretching "bar-room" into a catchall for "every means" of liquor sales, he collapses distinctions that temperance opponents loved to hide behind: the "respectable" hotel bar, the private club, the medicinal bottle, the genteel grocer who happened to keep whiskey in the back. The phrase "under what name or guise" is the tell. He’s warning voters that the liquor trade survives by rebranding, laundering itself through new labels and exemptions.

The intent is mobilization, not nuance. "Earnestly appeal to the people" frames this as democratic self-defense rather than elite moral scolding. Jarvis is trying to pull the issue out of church-basement exhortation and into public policy: a trade that must be ended, not managed. The moral force is in "traffic", a word that makes liquor sound less like a consumer choice and more like an organized commerce with human costs. It’s the same linguistic move used for gambling dens or later for narcotics: turn a habit into an industry, then make the industry indictable.

Context matters. Jarvis, a North Carolina governor in the post-Reconstruction South, is speaking into a world where local option laws, licensing schemes, and loopholes created a patchwork of enforcement and plenty of room for corruption. His line anticipates the coming logic of statewide prohibition: if regulation is porous, abolition is cleaner. The subtext is a challenge to pragmatists: if you tolerate "just one kind" of bar-room, you’re endorsing the whole machine.