Temperance Speech at a Wine Banquet.
Recently the freeholders assembled in the new extension of the county jail, Paterson, New Jersey, to celebrate the expenditure of $30,000 for that purpose, and to partake of a banquet provided by the officers of the board and the contractors. After drinking a number of toasts, Judge Woodruff offered as a volunteer toast, “The Temperance Cause,” and called upon W. H. H. Bartram to respond, which he did as follows:— “Gentlemen: I thank you for this invitation, and I recognize its fitness. You have assembled to celebrate the enlargement of this jail, rendered necessary by the use of strong drink, in which you are so freely indulging this day. Down stairs the cells and corridors are crowded with criminals who have but changed places. A few years ago they were respected citizens, some of them occupying as responsible positions as those filled by yourselves; but they commenced as you have commenced, and they continued as many of you are continuing, and to-day they are reaping the harvest in a career of crime, and paying the penalty with a period of punishment.” At this moment another bottle was opened, and Mr. Bartram said:— “I hear the popping of the cork. I listen to the merry voices and the praises you are singing to the infernal spirit of wine; but there comes to me the sad refrain, from the prisoner’s cell, who is shedding penitential tears over his folly, and accompanied by the still sadder wail of anguish uttered by the broken-hearted wife, worse than widowed through the traffic in strong drink, which, as a judge in one of your courts said, ‘is the great promotive of crime,’ a traffic licensed by your votes, and sustained by the patronage you are this day giving it. It is with inexpressible sadness that I discover that there can be found in Passaic County so many men with hearts so hardened, feelings so calloused, sensibilities so blunted, that, in a place like this, under circumstances like these, they dare raise to their lips that which depraves the citizen and endangers the State. “Thanking you, gentlemen, for this unexpected privilege, I take my seat, fully conscious that you will never again call on me under similar circumstances.”—Selected.