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Fifty Great Cartoons

Chapter 19: PROTECT THAT BOY.
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About This Book

A sequence of fifty cartoons paired with short essays and captions that employ satirical illustration and religious imagery to address moral, ecclesiastical, and civic concerns. The pieces criticize church complacency, commercialized worship, temperance issues, hypocrisy, and political corruption while urging spiritual renewal and practical reform. Many images juxtapose individual conscience and public life, dramatizing dilemmas such as poverty, immigration, and personal faith. The collection blends visual wit with didactic commentary to prompt reflection on virtue, duty, and the social role of religion.

PROTECT THAT BOY.

The controllers of the liquor traffic understand their business. They know that they are sending an army of drunkards each year to an untimely grave and to take the place of these fallen victims, they must gain recruits from the hosts of youth. But the Rum haunts are too hideous to beguile one of tender years. There must be less offensive sins offered to bridge that long leap from innocence to iniquity, from the home hearth to the dram shop. Therefore, the rum-seller goes in league with the vendor of cigarettes, and base literature, and evil pictures, and questionable games and entertainments. At last the youthful victims of these plotters find themselves on the threshold of ruin. Every avenue through crime and vice leads at last to the open saloon.

The days of his youth hast thou shortened: thou hast covered him with shame.    Psalms 89:45.

COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY FRED’K L. CHAPMAN & CO.

PROTECT THAT BOY.