03.02. The Physical, Mental and Moral Evil

The Physical, Mental and Moral Evil As seen in the preceding chapter, alcohol, taken in any way, does not impart vitality to the system, but really depletes it. Men cannot endure as much fatigue, neither can they resist the heat or the cold as well, if they use alcohol, as they can if they do not use it. A very common error is that alcohol will assist in withstanding extreme cold. The Russian army furnishes positive proof to the contrary.

Also, it has been shown that the use of alcohol paves the way for any contagion to take hold and perform its work of death. Cholera, yellow fever, or any infectious disease whatever, marks the whisky and beer drinkers as a particular prey. They are the first attacked, and are most easily slain. Of the great number who have frozen to death on our frontiers, three-fourths, if not more, have been partially under the influence of alcohol. I speak of this from personal observation, having been on the frontier for twenty-six years. They are more easily bewildered, less competent to endure fatigue, less able to resist the cold, and on many other accounts are their dangers in­creased by the use of intoxicating drinks. It has been noticed, too, that the cases of sun-stroke follow the line of beer-drinkers very closely. But few men who are really temperate are ever seri­ously injured in this way.

Life insurance has sufficiently proven that the use of alcohol as a beverage shortens life and greatly increases the death-rate among men. I will again quote from Dr. Carpenter’s work on "Alcohol" (pp. 71, 72), on the "General Effect of the Excessive Use of Alcoholic Liquors on the Duration of Life:"

"69. We shall close this part of the inquiry by ex­amining into the general tendency of the excessive use of alcoholic liquors to shorten life; either by themselves giving rise to the diseases above enumerated, or by in­creasing the susceptibility of the system to other mor­bific causes. That such a tendency exists cannot for a moment be questioned. No life insurance office will accept an insurance on an individual whose habits are known to be intemperate; and if it be discovered after his death that he has been accustomed to the excessive use of alcoholic liquors, contrary to his statement in his proposal for insurance, the policy is declared void. And it is doubtless owing in part to the superior sobriety of the great bulk of insurers over that of the average of the population, that a lower rate of mortality presents itself among them than that which might be expected accord­ing to the calculations founded on the entire mortality of the country, to the great profit of the office. Thus, at the age of 40 years, the annual rate of mortality among the whole population of England is about 13 per 1,000; whilst among the lives insured in the Life Offices it is about 11 per 1,000; and in those insured in the Friendly Societies it is about 10 per 1,000. Now, the average mortality for all ages, between 15 and 70 years, is about 20 per 1,000; whereas in the Temperance Provi­dent Institution, after an experience of eight years, and with several lives above 70 years of age, the average mortality has been only 6 per 1,000 up to the present season, in which it has undergone a slight increase from the cholera epidemic. It is worthy of remark, however, that although many of the insurers in this office are of the poorer class, whose condition and employment ex­pose them much more than the middling classes gener­ally to the epidemic causes of cholera, no more than 8 have died of this disease out of the total of about 3,500 insurers. As a means of further comparison the following table may be subjoined, in which the mortality of the insurers in the Temperance Provident Institution for the first five years is compared with that of the insurers in other offices during the corresponding period of their existence:

Here it is seen that the total abstainers in the T.P. I. (Temperance Provident Institution) suf­fered less than half the mortality of the other companies—which permitted what they denominated a moderate use of alcoholic liquors.

E. Vivian, M.A., read a paper before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at its annual meeting in 1875, from which I get the fol­lowing facts respecting the mortality of total ab­stainers as compared with the death-rate of the people generally:

"RATE OF MORTALITY DURING THE LAST NINE YEARS,
ENDING 30TH DECEMBER, 1874. In the Total Abstinence section:

Expected deaths549 Actual deaths411 ______________________________ Difference 138 Or 25 percent below the average." But someone will be ready to urge that we are only comparing total abstinence with drunkenness, or the excessive use of alcohol. It should be re­membered, however, that this is not true, for we have given the difference between total abstinence and what the insurance companies permit, and they do not allow it used to "excess," or to drunkenness.

Sir H. Thompson, a practitioner of very wide reputation, writes thus to the Archbishop of Canterbury:

"I have long had the conviction that there is no greater cause of evil, moral or physical, in the country, than the use of alcoholic beverages. I do not mean by this that extreme indulgence which produces drunk­enness. The habitual use of fermented liquors to an extent far short of what is necessary to produce that condition, and such as is quite common in all ranks of society, injures the body and diminishes the mental strength to an extent which, I think, few people are aware of. Such, at all events, is the result of observation during more than twenty years of professional life, devoted to hospital practice and to private practice in every rank above it. Thus I have no hesitation in attributing a large proportion of some of the most painful and dangerous maladies which come under my notice, as well as those which every medical man has to treat, to the ordinary and daily use of fermented drink taken in the quantity which is conventionally deemed mod­erate."

We could quote at any length from the best scientific and medical authorities in Europe and America, to show that alcohol, taken in any quan­tity, is an enemy to the human system; that only in a few extreme cases of disease can it be profitably used as a medicine; that even then there is danger of laying the foundation of a worse malady than is likely to be cured by the remedy; that in most cases it can be supplanted by other remedies that are not attended with its evils, and that while it may possibly save a few lives, it is certain that it destroys a thousand for every one it even tem­porarily heals.

We have seen, too, that one of the legitimate results of the habitual use of alcoholic liquors is the mental derangement, not only of the drinker, but the children, to the third and fourth gener­ation. Much of the insanity and idiocy of our land are from this parent of evils. That it shortens the lives of those who use it admits of no doubt. That even its moderate use increases the death-rate is proven beyond dispute. Our life-lease is worth very much more without it than with it. But look again at the host of those who are killed outright by the use of intoxicating drinks. Many also die from disease, or predisposition to sickness so remotely traceable to the use of alco­holic liquors that it would be difficult to prove that such habit caused their death, and yet very certainly attributable to that cause. The fighting, stabbing, shooting, by which not only the drinkers, but many sober and useful men are killed, are largely owing to the use of intoxicating drinks. Take a Chicago daily and cut out all the deaths, murders, etc., justly chargeable to rum, and you will find your paper badly injured. Then remem­ber that the work is being prosecuted in all our large towns and in most of our villages through­out nearly the whole country, and you will begin to form some idea of the work of death wrought by the rum fiend in this beautiful land of ours. Deaths by murders, deaths by disease, deaths by accidents, etc., etc., occasioned by intoxicating liquors, in the United States of America, have been variously estimated at from 60,000 to 120,000 annually. I presume to say that we are safe in adopting the first figures. A true account would be more likely to overrun than fall short of that number. In view of these incontestable facts, we are sur­prised at the indifference of the American people on this subject. But I am told that the great mortality occasioned by the use of these liquors in this country is largely due to the fact that they are poisoned. Perhaps it is true that, at the present time, ALL LIQUORS ARE POISONED. But it should be remembered that the medical decisions that we have quoted have been made respecting alcohol, and the supposition has been that these liquors were what they claimed to be. Hence these liquors are poisonous to the physical system. But now that they are universally drugged, they are doubly so. Some five years ago, in Lin­coln, Nebraska, the temperance men obtained twelve samples of liquors in that city and sub­mitted them to Prof. Aughey, of the State Uni­versity, for an analysis. Here is his report:

"LINCOLN, NEB., April 25, 1874. REPORT TO THE LINCOLN CITY TEMPERANCE SOCIETY.

"In accordance with your request, I have made a careful analysis of the liquors brought me two weeks ago. The following is the result:

[Author’s note: I omit the analysis of these liquors. There was not one of the samples that did not contain the most virulent poison, of various kinds, and in large quantities.]

"This analysis is not exhaustive, as I did not sep­arate the sugar which some of the liquors contained in the form of caramel, or the cayenne pepper which all the whiskies contained, more or less. The poisonous substances, however, I carefully separated. The abso­lute amount of sugar of lead, strychnine and strontia, was remarkably large. The poisonous qualities of these substances are so well-known that nothing here needs to be said about them.

"In many of these liquors there is strychnine enough in a quart to kill a man if it were taken separate from any other mixture and at one dose; the same is true of the sugar of lead.

"In good whisky, the amount of alcohol should be from 4o to so percent. But in these liquors, it ranged only from is to 25 percent, the larger percentages belonging to the brandies and gin.

"As good liquors as some of these whiskies could be profitably manufactured for thirty cents a gallon; and none of these liquors are what they purport to be.

"If any one doubts that these poisons are found in common liquors, if such doubter will come to the Uni­versity laboratory in the afternoon I will separate and precipitate lead, strontia, etc., in his presence.

"Respectfully submitted, "SAM’L AUGHEY,
" Prof. of Chemistry in University of Nebraska." When this report was published there was "no small stir" in the city. Some saloon-keepers declared that they did not know that they had been dealing out such poisons. But the wholesale dealers, and some of the druggists were involved. Some of the most interested denied the correct­ness of the analysis, but they did not dare to put it to the proof.

We implead the rum trade in the name of our "wasted resources," of two billions burned; in the name of a drunken Congress and an injured people; and we charge it with rape, theft, prostitution; with the crushing of every diamond virtue, and the cultivation of every vice. Let bleary-eyed, blackened, bloated, and blistered humanity, testify as to the causes of their ruin; let the drunken dead arise and state the temptations, the snares, and the slippery ground from which they fell into the vortex of eternal ruin. Bring forward the three millions of children, now withheld from our common schools because of rum and the pov­erty, stupidity and disgrace that result from its use, who run the streets in rags, who live from filthy gleanings and theft, many of whom have been cursed into being by drunken brutes in human form, and permit them to tell the story of woe-begone, and describe the scenes of incip­ient hell, so familiar to their eyes. Awake, O Pot­ter’s Field, and tell of the slaughtered innocents thou hast kindly hidden in thy bosom, that were murdered outright by the red hand of the rum power. Thou gentle zephyrs, who sigh so plain­tively, tell us of the burden of sorrow with which thou art freighted from all lands because of the vice and wretchedness that have been occasioned by the sale of rum. Let all intelligences, who know the sad results of intemperance, tell the story, and the sum of evils in the world because of the rum trade, and all will acknowledge that murder is a minor evil compared with the work of drunkard making, which is the parent of nine-tenths of all crime, murder included.

I have no doubt of the average integrity of the Lincoln rum-sellers. The poisons found in those liquors are to be found in them all over the coun­try; and he who presumes to drink them must assume the responsibility of taking the rankest poison in the dark.

BEER IS SUPPOSED TO BE A WHOLESOME DRINK.

It is thought to have been first manufactured by the ancient Egyptians, several centuries before Christ; but from some cause its manufacture was discontinued and forgotten, till it was introduced from France during the French invasion. The Grecian poet Archilochus, 700 B.C., and the tra­gedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, 400 B.C., speak of the wine of barley. The ancient Germans were quite noted for beer, which was called cerevisia--from Ceres, the goddess of grain, and vis, power, Whether the beer of those times was like that which is now in use we have but little means of knowing. I suppose, however, it then, as now, contained the power to intoxicate, and, because of that quality, that it was sought after by the people.

It is argued that beer and ale, as now used, are healthful drinks; and multitudes of men, and even women, drink it regularly, supposing it to be nutritious and wholesome.

I DIFFER FROM THIS OPINION AND WILL TELL YOU WHY.

1. In the barley from which it is made there is nutritive aliment, but with every change in the process of beer-making we lose those God-given qualities of the grain that make it valuable to the consumer; and when the work is completed there is but little left that can be beneficial to the human system.

2. There is a percent of alcohol in beer vary­ing from 2 to 9, which, taken as a beverage, is always injurious. Whatever else we shall find in any kind of beer the two facts named are sufficient to cause me to reject it as being inefficient for any particular good, but competent to do much harm. THE PROCESSES IN BREWING PROVE MY POSITION TO
BE CORRECT.

1. The steeping or sprouting. The grain is cov­ered in water. In this condition it remains for about two days. In this time the grain is sup­posed to germinate. The grain now exhibits starch sugar qualities, but in the soaking it has lost much of its original power—the same as our grain that sprouts in the stack or germinates before being ground.

2. It is now taken out and thrown into a heap, and left to heat and further complete the process of germination. Here it has to be changed from the inside out several times that the growth may be evenly continued. In this acrospire it is con­tinued for about fourteen days. By this time the germ is supposed to reach the end or point of the grain and the sweetening process is done. But in these two weeks of heating, stirring and cooling, much of the original strength and power of the grain is exhumed.

3. The growth is now suddenly stopped by spreading the whole mass upon a kiln, or a perforated floor, with a fire beneath. Here the life of the grain is thoroughly destroyed. Again by the dampness and growing condition and now the heating and drying process, the original qualities of the grain are still further evaporated and made to disappear.

4. The barley is next to be crushed between rollers, and then mixed up with hot water. Thus the starch sugar is dissolved, and we have as the result a sweet liquor, called wort. We yet have the mucilage, starch, and sugar of the grain—not all, but most of it. Hence, to prevent a putrefactive fermentation, it is boiled. Here it passes another evaporating process. The mucilage is co­agulated and gotten rid of. A portion of hops is added, which is thought to add wholesome quali­ties, because the beer is made bitter. It is dis­agreeable until the taste has become depraved.

5. After the worts are sufficiently boiled, they are poured out into coolers, in which the mucilage is deposited. Here again is another depart­ure of properties of barley.

6. The next, and last change that I notice, is the fermentation in vats, and the addition of yeast. In this change the alcohol is produced, and the remaining properties of the barley are now almost entirely dissipated.

What have we, then, in all this malting, sweet­ening, sprouting, germinating, heating, sweating, spreading, cooling, cooking, drying, evaporating, crushing, watering, mixing, dissolving, boiling, fermenting, hopping, yeasting, that is competent to furnish anything that is fit for the stomach of a man?

Prof. Liebig declares it to be demonstrable that there is no more nutriment in eight quarts of beer than there is in the amount of good wheat flour that can be had to lie on the point of a table-knife.

Besides, lager beer not only contains nothing really advantageous to man, but it is poisoned, just the same as all other liquors. There are three gallons of beer sold to where the maltsters have received barley enough to make one. A farmer adds a little sand to his timothy seed. He injures no one’s health, nor does he destroy any one’s life; he only cheats a dealer out of four or five dollars. For it, however, the State employs him at hard labor for ten years. What, then, shall be done with the creatures that poison our sons? In 1866, four houses in New York City palmed off two millions of these deadly compounds. They buy the meanest whisky or spoiled cider, and "drug" it into the rarest wines in a few hours. It not infrequently happens that a country seller drives in a few barrels of his poorest drinks, sells it to a manufacturer, does his shopping, and in a few hours drives back with a part of the same stuff "drugged" into wine or brandy, for which he paid an advance of four or five gallons. A French­man, pointing to a barrel, said: "Tell me what kind of wine or brandy you want, and give me three hours, and I will draw it out of that barrel." The more costly the liquor the more certain the fraud. The whole champagne district is only twenty thousand acres, and produces only about 800,000 baskets per annum. Of this Russia consumes 160,000 baskets, France 162,000, England 220,000, Germany 146,000; leaving for America and the rest of the world only 112,000. Yet Yan­kees consume more than 1,000,000 baskets yearly. How dull it is in England and Germany, and France and Russia, to imagine that they get any champagne when they consume twenty-five percent more than is produced.

Only 30,000 barrels of wine are produced on the Island of Madeira. America buys 50,000 barrels, and the rest of the world has a full share.

Port wine is manufactured in Douro Valley, in Portugal. The valley is narrow, and only sixty miles long. Yet all the world drinks from these vineyards. London alone drinks more than twice as much port wine as is produced, both good and bad. There is consumed annually more than one hundred times as much as is produced. Follow a gallon of pure juice from the press on the banks of the Douro. In the warehouse in Oporto, by the aid of beet whisky, elder-berry juice and water, it is made into five gallons. In the London Dock warehouse, by the aid of potato whisky, red saun­ders, and the like, it swells up into twenty gallons. In New York it takes a dose of strychnine, bella­donna, and spoiled cider, and puffs up into thirty gallons. In the wholesale house in Chicago, bad whisky, stramonium, and drugs, enlarge it to forty gallons. In the retailer’s back room it gets another dose, and comes out eighty gallons. We receive one drop in eighty, and that is twenty-five percent better than the average. With these facts before us, it would seem that nothing but the most uncompromising perverseness, or the most uncontrollable ignorance, can account for the stupidity necessary to continue the use of these drinks.

Already we have seen the depletion of the hu­man stock because of the poisons received through alcoholic liquors. The body is weakened, the blood is poisoned, the children are depraved—liable to insanity, idiocy, and vice of every de­scription. Alcohol is the leech that draws away the virtuous blood of our nation, corrupts the fountains of family and social life, blights our public morals, and leaves us, to the extent of its influence, a community of plunderers and crim­inals. It causes…

ALCOHOL,
FOUR-FIFTHS OF THE CRIME OF THE NATION. The Annual Report of the Board of Inspectors of the Massachusetts State Prison to the Legislature (of 1868) is equally explicit against license. The Inspectors say, pp. 7, 8:

"Intemperance, as a most fruitful cause of crime, has been frequently referred to in past reports of the warden and inspectors, and the general fact is undeniable that a very large proportion of offenses against law which bring men to prison for punishment are committed through the agency of intoxicating liquors, and that their increased public sale adds to the number of crimes committed and the number of persons convicted. We are not called upon to discuss this matter separate from our observation as supervisors of the prison, and there­fore simply call attention to the fact of the increased number of commitments made during eight months of the present year, when the sale of spiritous liquors has been almost wholly unrestrained, over those of the same time in the preceding year, when the public sale was prohibited, and, to a great extent, stopped."

Warden Haynes speaks as follows, in his "Pic­tures from Prison Life," p. 272:

"Since I have been connected with the prison, we have had twenty-one here for killing their wives, two for killing their fathers, and one for killing his mother. Of these twenty-four, all but one were not only habitual drunkards, but actually drunk when they committed the crime. Not one of this number was born a drunkard; not one but was once a temperate drinker; not one but what at some period in his life would have been indignant had it been intimated that he might become a drunkard, much less a murderer; not one but was as secure against becoming a drunkard as any other man who is in the habit of drinking occasionally.... I repeat, these were not bad men, except when under the influence of liquor."

Even in 1670, Sir Matthew Hale, Chief Justice of England, said:

"The places of judicature I have long held in this kingdom have given me an opportunity to observe the original cause of most of the enormities that have been committed for the space of nearly twenty years; and, by due observation, I have found that if the murders and manslaughters, the burglaries and robberies, the riots and tumults, the adulteries, fornications, rapes, and other enormities that have happened in that time, were divided into five parts, four of them have been the issues and product of excessive drinking—of tavern or ale-house drinking." The Irish Republic, a Roman Catholic journal of New York, recognizes this fact, and accounts for the same precisely as do the official reports which we have introduced. It says:

"The curse of intemperance has been the great cause of all our misfortunes as a people. To it can be traced the loss of our independence at home, and the cause of all our miseries abroad. It is the basis of all crime, and the man or men who make our people temperate, will obliterate Irish crime. We assert and defy contra­diction, that a sober Irishman scarcely ever commits a crime. There may be exceptions, but they are of no consequence. It is whisky, then, that brings shame into the Irish household, that whets the knife of the in­furiated madman, that abuses the wife and sends the children adrift on the world. It fills the prisons and poor-houses, and gives the enemies of our race a whip to lash us. It is the duty, then, of all men to take measures to destroy this monster that has destroyed our people.

"We have received the Annual Report of the New York Board of Police for the year ending October 31st, 1868, and turning to the column of arrests, we find that during the year 78,451 persons were arrested. Of this number, 25,957 were Americans; 8,281 were Ger­mans; 37,014 were Irish.

"It is useless to attempt to shut out these figures; they have gone before the world, and we must acknowl­edge that they are disgraceful to us as a people. Every man of our race, no matter what his standing may be in society, the name of our country and every principle in which our nation takes pride, is pressed down to the level of the gutters by the strong arm of that demon which has dragged thirty-seven thousand of our people to the watch-houses of New York, and pilloried the de­graded wretches before the public gaze.

"We are sure that out of the 37,000 Irish arrested for the year, 35,000 were for drunk and disorderly. It matters not, as far as public scandal is concerned, whether they were arrested for drunkenness or for heavier crimes. The public does not look behind the figures on the Police Board, and those figures convict us of supplying almost one-half of the entire crime of New York!" On page 175, the Board of Charities for Massa­chusetts, 1868, we read:

"The prison registers indicate that more than two-thirds of the criminals in the State are the victims of intemperance; but the proportion of crime traceable to this great vice must be set down, as heretofore, at not less than four-fifths. Its effects are unusually apparent in almost every grade of crime. A noticeable illus­tration appears in the number of commitments to the State Prison, which, during eight months of the present year, in which the sale of intoxicating liquors has been almost wholly unrestrained, was 136, against 65 during the corresponding months of the preceding year. Similar results appear in nearly all the prisons of the Common­wealth."

Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, of England, says:

"That his experience as a jurist has shown that crimes of violence almost without exception were traceable to drunkenness."

Judge Patterson says:

"If it were not for drink, you and I would have nothing to do."

Judge Addison says:

"If all men could be per­suaded from the use of intoxicating drinks, the office of judge would be a sinecure."

Chief Justice Davis, of New York, says:

"The saloons and groggeries have had full swing, and filled the city with a huge amount of misery and crime.... More than seven-eighths of the crimes committed in this country, which involve personal violence, are traceable to the use of in­toxicating liquors."

Judge Garney says:

"Almost every crime has its origin more or less in drinking."

Judge Wrightman says:

"Three-fourths of the cases of crime have their origin in public houses and beer houses."

Judge Coleridge says:

"But for the offenses brought on by the excessive use of intoxicating liquors, the courts of justice might nearly be shut up."

J.P. Newman, in a sermon recently preached in New York, very correctly points out the true course of vagrancy and crime, He says:

"Let us demand of the Legislature such a law as will strike at the fruitful cause of more than two-thirds of all the vagrancy, pauperism and crime in our city—that is, the license system. I hold that system responsible for the following facts: Of the 9,000 adult paupers in this State who are permanently dependent upon public charity, 6,000 are intemperate; 93,000 arrests in this city in 1877--62,000 were for intoxication and disorderly con­duct; and much of the insanity and idiocy came from the same cause. There are seventeen miles of rum-shops in New York. Our city receives annually $300,000 for license fees, and expends annually $8,000,000 —charge­able directly or indirectly to the liquor traffic. We have a right to demand a legal deliverance from supporting the poor whose poverty comes from intemperance." In a very interesting sketch of the Albany Pen­itentiary and of the labors in connection therewith of Superintendent Pillsbury, and of his father, the late General Pillsbury, by Wilbur Arliston Wor­lock, Esq., it is stated that during the period of ten years ending with 1876, there have been incarcerated in that prison 13,413 prisoners. "Of that number," it is added, "10,214 have admitted that they were of intemperate habits, while 3,199 claimed to be temperate." Mr. Worlock thinks it "would prove a hard task indeed to furnish a more damning evidence of the curse of intemper­ance that so prodigally thrives within our midst," and that these significant figures "furnish the true key with which to unlock and reveal the scourge from which so large a portion of crime emanates." We fully concur in his view, and also that it is a "disgrace to humanity, to a Christian people, that public sentiment has become so blunted as to license crime in this direction "—a guilt shared by the national, state, municipal, and local gov­ernments, and by the voters of the country who create and perpetuate them.

Judge Davis, of New York, in sentencing Joseph P. Wall to fifteen years’ imprisonment for kick­ing his wife to death, said that the prisoner must have been intoxicated when he bought the whisky which encouraged the crime, and says the children thus doubly orphaned could bring suit against the liquor dealers for damages sufficient to support them, and advised Wall to take the proper steps for such action. In closing, Judge Davis said:

"I should rejoice to see such an example made, for, in my judgment, and I believe in the eye of God as well as humanity, the consequences which fall so ter­ribly on you, and vastly more on your children, are traceable to the misconduct of men who, for the paltry, gain of a few glasses of liquor, deal it to men whom they must know it will make still more drunk, and ex­pose to terrible consequences." In our efforts to remove this enemy of morals we now have the sympathy of the purest and best and most thoughtful men and women of our nation. Here are some resolutions from a body of Congre­gationalists:

"Resolved, That we believe entire abstinence from the use of all intoxicating beverages to be a Christian duty, alike necessary to a pious life and a consistent example, and therefore binding upon all disciples of Jesus.

"Resolved, That we heartily approve all appropriate moral agencies to advance the temperance cause, such as temperance sermons and lectures, the introduction of the pledge into the Sabbath and public schools, as well as among adults, the circulation of temperance lit­erature, the organization of temperance societies, both for the young and old, and all other instrumentalities necessary to advance the cause of total abstinence.

"Resolved, That since the traffic in intoxicating bev­erages of all kinds is antagonistic both to the moral agencies used to promote the temperance reform and to the means of grace employed by the Church to save men, we hereby record our uncompromising hostility to said traffic, and pledge our support to its legal pro­hibition." The following resolutions were unanimously adopted at a Methodist Conference in Massa­chusetts:

"Resolved, That we recommend the employment of the pulpit and the press, and all other means coming under the head of moral persuasion, for the promotion of the cause of temperance.

"Resolved, That inasmuch as the prohibitory law of 1867 is a most efficient instrument of moral persuasion, destructive alike to the opportunity of indulgence and the temptation to it, we will do all we can to secure its re-enactment and enforcement.

"Resolved, That the magnitude of the financial, moral and religious interests imperiled by the beverage use and sale of intoxicating drinks, properly introduces the whole question into the sphere of politics; and it be­comes our duty, as Christian citizens, to demand of each political party that it shall incorporate in its plat­form the principle of prohibition."

These speak for themselves, and show the conclusions to which God-fearing and thinking people are coming.

Mr. John W. Ray’s reports of Indiana a little more than two years ago, furnish a lesson for everyone:

It will be seen that in the eighteen counties where saloons prevailed they had one resident in the penitentiary for every 72 ½ voters; in the nine counties where there was no saloon they sent only one to this assembly of criminals for every 721 ½ voters. So the criminal docket of the saloon coun­ties was ten times that of the prohibitory coun­ties, in proportion to the whole number of voters in each. Now, if you want drinking and gambling, debauchery and crime of every shade and hue, license this thing, Both facts and reason show that these things are to be had in that way. But if you prefer sobriety, prosperity, and civilization, then prohibit this traffic:

"Licensed to make the strong man weak,
Licensed to lay the strong man low;
Licensed the wife’s fond heart to break,
And make the children’s tears to flow.

"Licensed to do thy neighbor harm,
Licensed to kindle hate and strife;
Licensed to nerve the robber’s arm,
Licensed to whet the murderer’s knife.

"Licensed thy neighbor’s purse to drain,
And rob him of his very last;
Licensed to heat his feverish brain,
Till madness crown thy work at last.

"Licensed, like spider for a fly,
To spread thy nets for man, thy prey;
To mock his struggles, suck him dry,
Then cast the shattered hulk away.

"Licensed, where peace and quiet dwell,
To bring disease, and want, and woe;
Licensed to make this world a hell,
And fit man for a hell below." This is what the saloon-keeper is licensed to do. Nay, it is what you licensed him to do when you voted for those whom you knew would license him. Nay, more: this work of death and ruin, desolation and shame, is your work, if you sup­port the license system, or the men who will sup­port it. What a man does by the hand of another, he does as really as if he operated without the intervening agency. And I appeal to the peace-loving, and especially the God-fearing, to stand clear of the blood of this martyred host, sent to an untimely death by the rum power.