A Monument Wanted by Ellet Joseph Waggoner

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 15, 1882

A Monument Wanted.

By Ellet Joseph Waggoner

THE following item we clip from a city paper of recent date:—

“John Bechtel is a name not yet known to fame, but which should be commemorated by a monument which will endure indefinitely. He was the apostle of lager beer; he started the first beer saloon and erected the first brewery in the United States, thirty years ago. He has just died at Brooklyn, and the announcement of what he has done for humanity was coupled with the report of his demise. It really seems astonishing that within the lifetime of one individual, such an enormous business could have been developed, and such a change wrought in the habits of the people.”

The paper continues that in introducing this nauseating stuff, and creating an appetite for it, he “has been the most effective temperance worker of his day, though he may have been wholly unconscious of the tremendous influence he had exerted.”

Noble man! Content to pass through life, unappreciated, and even himself unconscious of doing anybody any good, so long as he could fill his pockets with money at the expense of the souls of those whose appetite was stronger than their reason. This traffic, of which he was an “apostle,” has developed a wonderful amount of self-denial among its patrons. Men have denied themselves even the necessaries of life, and have allowed their families to go without respectable clothing or nourishing food. The struggles of Palissey in his search for the mode of producing white enamel on earthern vessels,—how he was reduced to the necessity of burning his own furniture for fuel, and to listen to the cries of his children for bread,—are thought to be worthy of a place in history; but thousands of men unknown to fame, have done the same thing in their self-sacrificing desire to help along this “temperance movement.” “The end crowns the work;” surely, then, the thousands of bloated forms, bleared eyes, and battered noses, to say nothing of the cheerless homes and broken hearts, ought to be a monument sufficient to gratify any man’s ambition, however depraved he might be.

If men are ever made temperate by the use of beer, it is in the same manner that men’s lives have been saved by pins: “by not swallowing ’em.” E. J. W.