I Made That Man What He Was.
Some time ago a saloon-keeper in Dover, Delaware, who patronized his own bar very liberally, stepped into a back room where men were at work about a pump in a well. The covering had been removed, and he approached to look down, but being very drunk, he pitched in head foremost. He had become so much of a bloat, by the use of strong drink, that it was impossible to extricate him in time to save his life. There was great excitement in the town. Men and women who had never been inside his saloon before were the first to rush to the rescue, and offer sympathy to the bereaved family. As he was dragged from the well, and stretched out dead on the saloon floor, a wholesale liquor dealer from Philadelphia stepped in. After the first shock of finding one of his good customers dead, he turned to a prominent lady, and said, pointing to the wretched victim:— “I made that man what he was. I lent him the first dollar, and set him up with his first stock of liquors, and now he is worth $10,000 or $15,000.” Looking him square in the face, she replied:— “Yes you did make that man what he was—a drunkard, a bloat, a stench in the nostrils of society; and sent him headlong into eternity and a drunkard’s hell! What is $15,000 weighed against a lost soul, a wasted life, a wife a widow, and children orphans?” He turned deadly pale, and without a word left the house. What is all the revenue to the millions whose homes are destroyed, whose children are beggared, and whose loved ones are sent headlong to a drunkard’s grave?—The Christian Woman.