City of Hell | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 23, 1882

City of Hell.

MAJOR FRANK BAIRD delivered his famous lecture “The City of Hell” in Whitney’s opera house on Sunday last, at 3 P. M. The speaker said by way of introduction, “It is impossible to appreciate the greatness of an army by seeing it in detail, a company here, a regiment there, and a battalion yonder. The same is true of the liquor traffic. We cannot judge it by seeing it in detail.” The speaker then proceeded to take his audience to an imaginary height and show them this traffic concentrated. He first showed them a vast country devoted to the growing of grain and fruit which is rotted in the production of strong drink. He then pictured “The City of Hell” in the center of this vast country with its long streets lined with distilleries, breweries, and grog-shops, a city which is emphatically a manufacturing city. He pictured the army of moderate drinkers, closely followed through the streets of the city by the army of confirmed drunkards; also the army of tramps made so by strong drink; the army of 75,000 fallen women, the legitimate outgrowth of the liquor traffic; and the army of 200,000 starving and almost naked children made so by the traffic. He described a Sunday morning with no church bell or churches but with 10,000 beer gardens all in full blast; a court-house ten stories high, with 500 court rooms in which cases growing out of the liquor traffic are constantly being tried, a poor-house containing 150,000 inmates all of whom were comfortable and happy until strong drink had made them otherwise; an insane asylum with 80,000 insane and idiots, made so through this same traffic; a hospital with 160,000 sick and maimed, a penitentiary twenty stories high, near which were 200 raised platforms for the execution of rum criminals. He conducted his hearers through the valley of suicide; showed them a great cave two miles long where innumerable victims were suffering with delirium tremens, and took them down by the river of death where 60,000 of the victims of the cup die every year. We are sure that we do no injustice to the facts in the case when we say that Major Baird’s address was one of the very best of the course. It was compact, forcible, well delivered and well received.—The Lever.