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204
Temperance
nights of debauchery, days of stupor, imbecility, and wretchedness.
Thus, step by step, the work goes on, until the man who was once a
good citizen, a kind husband and father, seems changed to a demon.
Suppose those officials who at the beginning of [the year] granted
license to liquor dealers, could [at the end of the year] behold a faith-
ful picture of the results of the traffic carried on under that license.
It is spread out before them in its startling and frightful details, and
they know that all is true to life. There are fathers, mothers, and
children falling beneath the murderer’s hand; there are the wretched
victims of cold and hunger and of vile and loathsome disease, crim-
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inals immured in gloomy dungeons, victims of insanity tortured
by visions of fiends and monsters. There are gray-haired parents
mourning for once noble, promising sons and lovely daughters, now
gone down to an untimely grave....
Day by day the cries of agony wrenched from the lips of the
drunkard’s wife and children go up to Heaven. And all this that
the liquor seller may add to his gains! And his hellish work is
performed under the broad seal of the law! Thus society is corrupted,
workhouses and prisons are crowded with paupers and criminals,
and the gallows is supplied with victims. The evil ends not with
the drunkard and his unhappy family. The burdens of taxation are
increased, the morals of the young are imperiled, the property and
even the life of every member of society is endangered. But the
picture may be presented never so vividly, and yet it falls short of
the reality. No human pen or pencil can fully delineate the horrors
of intemperance.
Were the only evil arising from the sale of ardent spirits the
cruelty and neglect manifested by intemperate parents toward their
children, this alone should be enough to condemn and destroy the
traffic. Not only does the drunkard render the life of his children
miserable, but by his sinful example he leads them also into the
path of crime. How can Christian men and women tolerate this
evil? Should barbarous nations steal our children and abuse them
as intemperate parents abuse their offspring, all Christendom would
be aroused to put an end to the outrage. But in a land professedly
governed by Christian principles, the suffering and sin entailed upon
innocent and helpless childhood by the sale and use of intoxicating