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A Mission of Ruin

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 9, 1914

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 91, No. 28.

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A Mission of Ruin

By C. M. S.

FROM time to time we see statements in temperance journals, and in journals that are not special advocates of temperance, setting forth the great waste that comes to the nation each year through the use of intoxicants. We look at these statements and figures in a general way, but do not comprehend the mighty amounts set before us, and so fail to appreciate what the figures mean to the individual persons whose savings have been swallowed up in the mammoth totals.
For instance, there are in the United States over two hundred thousand saloons, or about one saloon to every four hundred persons. The people spend about one billion seven hundred and fifty million dollars annually for liquor.
That is the money outlay; but the real cost of the terrible depredation on the human race no figures can give. There is no formula for its expression.
It means that about one and a quarter billion dollars have been turned out of the channels of legitimate use into the channel of abuse and waste.
In hundreds of thousands of cases it means that the craving for liquor has been dulled for a few moments at the cost of the actual deprivation of food and clothing for those dependent upon the wages earned.
It means in thousands upon thousands of cases that women who have placed the keeping of their lives and the lives of their little ones in the hands of those they loved, have had to stand and see that trust betrayed for the appeasing of an unnatural and insatiate appetite.
It means that children, whose very birth is a legal lien upon the producing powers of the parents, are, in many thousands of homes, sent to school breakfastless and insufficiently clad, and go hungry to bed year in and year out.
It means that laws which are for the guarding of life are in effect nullified by other laws which give to this breeder of crime the right to carry on its business at the expense of the peace and the property and the lives of men, women, and children.
It means the keeping of jails, State prisons, asylums, and hospitals filled with men and women, who, but for the liquor business, would be filling the places designed for them in the affairs of the world.
It means the outlay of millions of dollars every year in this country for the support of policemen, lawyers, courts, jails, prisons, and wardens, which would, were it not for the liquor business, remain in the pockets of the people.
And it means more than that. It means that every year thousands of young men and women are taught the way to the pit of perdition; that the light in the eyes of the soul is dulled, the hope in the breast of a multitude is chilled; and that the love for the things of God in the hearts of such ones is fast going out or is perished already. There is nothing good the liquor traffic has ever done; there is nothing evil it has ever hesitated to do.
It has never stimulated a holy thought, but it has urged on the cause of the kingdom of darkness at a furious pace.
It has built no hospitals, established no foundling asylums or homes for the poor; but it has not hesitated to crowd the walls of all that have been established, as well as the jails, asylums, and penitentiaries, with the ripened fruit of its terrible planting.
It has lifted no burden of debt from the widow or fatherless; but it has pasted mortgages on millions of deeds, and hung the red flag of the auctioneer on the gatepost of many a ruined home.
It has established no schools for the education of the young, but it has set the seal of imbecility on thousands of the unborn, clothed the children of its victims in a garb of rags, and turned them into truants and tramps.
That is what it has done generally, and all know it. They read the figures and listen to the speeches, and forget the tragedies that it is enacting in millions of homes, each one with its terrible setting of blasted hopes and bitter heartaches. Never a home is established that is not built on hope and pleasant anticipations; but never a home has liquor entered that it has not torn hopes and heartstrings like a maddened bull. Once inside, it has never been satisfied until it has strewn the last timbers of hope’s building upon the ground.
The individual deceives himself into believing that he is enjoying, at little expense, a harmless pastime, which he can abandon at a moment’s notice. Never was there greater deception, and never a captor that continued so long to deceive so great a body of people at the same time.
In very many homes the husband comes to his family at the week’s end with every dollar of his wages squandered. The rent is past due, and the landlord obdurate; the grocery bills are unpaid, and the grocer will give no more credit; the children are too poorly clothed to attend church or school, and sometimes even to be seen upon the street; the very cheapest food is obtained, and the stomachs of the children cry for food, while their forms are emaciated and their eyes grow big with hunger. One does not have to draw upon fancy to conjure up a picture like this. The cities are full of them. There are no words that can paint the picture of such things as they actually exist in thousands upon thousands of homes in our own land.
As a waster strong drink has no equal; as a mocker it is beyond comparison. The holiest relations of life it handles with the most ruthless mockery. It laughs at domestic peace, and stirs up discord in its place. It promises the husband a pleasant evening with his friends, and then sends him home to abuse the best and most trusting friend he has. In the glow of the first glass it promises him temporal success; and then, when it has wound its coils about him, it takes from him everything he did possess, and turns him and his family into the street. It promises him promotion in his occupation, and then takes away from his hands the steadiness and skill that are necessary to enable him to hold even the position he has. It promises him fluency of speech, and then robs him of his brains, thickens his tongue, and gives him the speech of the lunatic.
The army officer needs it to “steady his nerves,” and he takes it, and loses the battle. The soldier needs it to brace him up for a dangerous undertaking; he takes it, forgets his mission, and is captured by the foe. The orator needs it to give him freedom of utterance; he takes it, and disgusts his audience. The financier needs it to help him consummate a deal; he takes it, and when the deal is consummated, his fortune is gone and his friends desert him. The common man has needed it all his life as a stimulant; and while he has imagined he was being stimulated to greater accomplishments, he was standing still and watching the procession go past; and when he looks back upon a life now nearly spent, he finds that his progress has been retrogression, and the grade of his path has been downward day by day.
Every year nearly a hundred thousand persons can look back upon a life thus misspent and wasted in this country alone; for that many new drunkards’ graves each year testify to the wasting and mockery of the demon of drink in the United States.
Because these things are terrible facts, no child should go out from under the parental roof until he has been made to understand clearly the awful dangers and evils of drink. The girls should know it as well as the boys, and should be taught to shun the companionship of those who either conduct or patronize the business.
The saloon jeopardizes every interest of the home. It cannot live without sacrificing those interests. Souls are its victims, and it snatches them from the homes of rich and poor alike. There is no satisfying of its appetite, no set boundary to its field of operations, no trust too holy for it to violate, no right too sacred for it to trample upon, no child so beautiful that it would hesitate to set the red brand of ruin upon its forehead.
The Christian must ostracize it as the very embodiment of sin and ruin that it is. He can have no fellowship with it without being a part of it. He cannot be guiltless before God if he fails to educate his children to look upon it as the leprosy of death, and to avoid it as they would the companionship of the evil one himself, whose advance agent and greatest reaper it is.
C. M. S.