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The Ministry of Health and Healing
that earth or hell can devise is employed to draw human beings under
his power. In the city and the country, on the railway trains, on the
great steamers, in places of business, in the halls of pleasure, in the
medical dispensary, even in the church on the sacred Communion
table, his traps are set. Nothing is left undone to create and to foster
the desire for intoxicants. On corner after corner stand taverns or
night clubs, with their brilliant lights, welcome, and good cheer,
inviting the working man, the wealthy idler, and the unsuspecting
youth.
In private lunchrooms and fashionable resorts, women are sup-
plied with popular drinks containing alcohol. For the sick and the
exhausted, there are the widely advertised tonics, consisting largely
of alcohol.
To create the liquor appetite in little children, alcohol is intro-
duced into confectionery. Such confectionery is sold in the shops.
And by the gift of these candies the liquor seller entices children
into his resorts.
Day by day, month by month, year by year, the work goes on.
Fathers and husbands and brothers, the hope and pride of the nation,
are steadily passing into the liquor dealer’s haunts, to be wrecked
and ruined.
More terrible still, the curse is striking the very heart of the
home. More and more women are forming the liquor habit. In many
a household, little children, even in the innocence and helplessness of
babyhood, are in daily peril through the neglect, abuse, and vileness
of drunken mothers. Sons and daughters are growing up under the
shadow of this terrible evil. What outlook for their future but that
they will sink even lower than their parents?
From so-called Christian lands the curse is carried to developing
nations. The poor and ignorant are taught the use of liquor. Men and
women of intelligence recognize and protest against it as a deadly
poison, but their efforts to protect their lands from its ravages have
been in vain. By civilized peoples, tobacco, liquor, and opium are
forced upon various nations. The ungoverned passions of the people,
stimulated by drink, drag them down to degradation unknown before,
and it becomes an almost hopeless undertaking to send messengers
of the gospel to these lands.