"Yes, it is worse than thrown away, because every fair minded man must admit that the expenditure of this sum of money in the county for intoxicating liquor creates lawlessness, makes criminals, wrecks homes and brings trouble to innocent women and children"
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Moral arithmetic is doing heavy lifting here: Jarvis frames spending on alcohol not as a private indulgence but as a public misallocation with a body count. The line opens with a lawyerly concession - "Yes" - then escalates to "worse than thrown away", turning ordinary waste into civic sabotage. That jump matters. It lets him recast prohibition-minded reform as fiscal responsibility, not just piety. Money spent on drink becomes money spent on crime, on shattered households, on the downstream costs a county pays whether it wants to or not.
The phrase "every fair minded man must admit" is the tell. It's a rhetorical trap dressed up as common sense, positioning dissent as unfairness or moral blindness. Jarvis isn't inviting debate; he's declaring a standard of decency that conveniently matches his policy aim. "In the county" localizes the threat, shrinking the argument from abstract temperance to a ledger the listener supposedly recognizes: taxes, courts, jails, pauper relief.
His choice of victims is strategic. "Innocent women and children" pulls on a late-19th-century script of masculine guardianship: men drink, men vote, men are responsible for protecting dependents. That framing stokes urgency while sidelining women as political actors, even as temperance movements were increasingly powered by them. The subtext is social control with a humanitarian face - an appeal to order, productivity, and family stability in a period when industrialization, urban growth, and reform politics made "lawlessness" a catch-all fear. Jarvis turns liquor into a single, spendable cause of disorder, simplifying a messy social landscape into a solvable moral budget item.
The phrase "every fair minded man must admit" is the tell. It's a rhetorical trap dressed up as common sense, positioning dissent as unfairness or moral blindness. Jarvis isn't inviting debate; he's declaring a standard of decency that conveniently matches his policy aim. "In the county" localizes the threat, shrinking the argument from abstract temperance to a ledger the listener supposedly recognizes: taxes, courts, jails, pauper relief.
His choice of victims is strategic. "Innocent women and children" pulls on a late-19th-century script of masculine guardianship: men drink, men vote, men are responsible for protecting dependents. That framing stokes urgency while sidelining women as political actors, even as temperance movements were increasingly powered by them. The subtext is social control with a humanitarian face - an appeal to order, productivity, and family stability in a period when industrialization, urban growth, and reform politics made "lawlessness" a catch-all fear. Jarvis turns liquor into a single, spendable cause of disorder, simplifying a messy social landscape into a solvable moral budget item.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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