A GLASS OF BRANDY

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 27, 1881

A GLASS OF BRANDY.

It can't hurt anybody! Why I know a person — yonder he is now — a specimen of manly beauty, a portly six-footer. He has the bearing of a prince, for he is one of our merchant princes. His face wears the hue of health, and now at the age of fifty odd, he has the quick, elastic step of our young men of twenty-five, and none more full of mirth and wit than he, and I know he never dines without brandy and water, and never goes to bed without a terrapin or oyster supper with plenty of champagne, and more than that, he was never known to be drunk. So here is a living example and disproof of the temperance twaddle about the dangerous nature of an occasional glass, and the destructive effect of a temperate use of liquor.

Now it so happened that this specimen of safe brandy-drinking was a relative of ours. He died a year or two after that of chronic diarrhœa, common end of those who are never drunk, nor ever out of liquor. He left his six children; he had ships at every sea, and credit at every counter, which he never had occasion to use.

Four months before he died — he was a year in dying — he could eat or drink nothing without distress, and at death the whole alimentary canal was a mass of disease; in the midst of his millions he died of inanition. This is not the half, reader. He had been a steady drinker, a daily drinker, for twenty-eight years. He left a legacy to his children, which he did not mention. Scrofula had been eating up one daughter for fifteen years; another is in the mad-house; the third and fourth of unearthly beauty — there was a kind of grandeur in that beauty — and they blighted and paled, and faded in their teens; another is tottering on the verge of the grave, and only one is left with all the senses, and each of them as weak as water.

—Hall's Journal of Health.