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It Was the Drink

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Aug 10, 1905

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 82, No. 32.

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It Was the Drink

MRS. MICHAEL KORNET, dying in a Cleveland hospital as the result of her husband's drunken fury, said in broken English:—
“I hold nothing against Michael. It was the drink. He used to be a good husband. Liquor made him a demon. I forgive him.”
The same old story.
It has been told again and again in every language. It is the heart-rending tale of many a death-bed scene the world over, and alas, it is the tale told in the tear-dulled eyes and care-worn face of many a wife not lucky enough to be murdered at one blow, but who must die the slow death of fear and despair.
“If it were not for my children,” this dying woman said, “I would be glad to go.”
Aye, no doubt.
To her, tied to a man whom liquor made a brute, death must have been sweet release. Drink, not Michael, was the devil who ever walked at her side, revolver in hand. Hers was a life of constant fear and hopelessness. It was hell on earth. At last it ended in the natural way—in the way she had long expected it to end. Is it any wonder that, but for the children, she would have been glad to go?
O, a mother's love!
She would stay in hell for that.
For her children she would gladly have gone on living in terror of that murderous demon which Michael again and again unloosed.
This poor woman's last words were to her son—to one of the children for whom she would have gone on in martyrdom if she could:—
“Good-by,” she said to him. “And William, don't drink! promise me!”
The boy William ought to have been impressed. Perhaps he will keep the promise that he made. Certainly the dreadful object-lesson came close home to him, with his mother dead and his father in jail for her murder, and all of it due to drink.
What a fool William would be to go off and get drunk!
William has learned no more than any sane man may learn who keeps his eyes open to the effects of drink.
The fate of this woman is the fate of thousands. The liquor that made her husband a brute has made brutes of millions. It is not a lesson for William alone.
“Dead!” exclaimed the husband, when he heard. “I did not mean to kill her!”
Of course not. Nothing was further from his sober intentions. But what could his intentions amount to after he had permitted his spirit to be bound in slavery to a demon?—Cleveland Press.