Temperance | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 8, 1881

Temperance.

REAPING THE WHIRLWIND.

FOR ages the people of Great Britain have been noted for their generous convivial hospitality. All classes have indulged in alcoholic beverages of various kinds. The custom has been almost universal in public and in private life; the British public occupying upon this question a position quite similar to that occupied by the American public fifty years ago, before the agitation of the temperance question, when drinking was universal. This practice was held to be innocent, healthful, proper, and Scriptural. The best men indulged moderately in the use of strong drinks.

What has been the result? To-day the vice of intemperance permeates the nation, and the statesmen and philanthropists of England are roused to a sense of impending national peril, and are seeking to hold the people back from the gulf of drunkenness. Terrible as are the ravages of intemperance in America, they seem much greater, and are more universal in England. We have very rarely seen a drunken woman in an American city, but a friend of ours, an Englishman, reported that in walking the streets of London for an hour or two one night, he met forty-six drunken women upon the side of the street on which he walked, and that after an absence of some twenty years, on revisiting London, and walking its streets by night as he had often done before, he judged that in temperance had increased more than two hundred per cent. We have hardly ever seen a woman entering a dram shop in America; no doubt there are many who do it; but we have seen such places in London crowded and thronged with men and women who are drowning reason and virtue in the cup. Mr. Wm. Saunders writes to the London Daily News, that having obtained from the chief of the bureau of statistics in Washington a detailed account of the consumption of alcoholic liquors in the United States, he found it amounted to ninety-three million pounds sterling per year, or about fifteen dollars for each of the forty-five millions of inhabitants of the United States, and that at the same rate Great Britain with a population of thirty-three millions should consume liquors amounting to about sixty-eight million pounds sterling per annum; "whereas the consumption is actually one hundred and forty two million pounds sterling, showing an excess of seventy-four million pounds sterling, and that the consumption of alcoholic liquors in the United Kingdom is more than double that of the same population in the United States. Since 1870 the consumption in the United States has diminished, whereas during the same period that of the United Kingdom has grown from one hundred and eighteen million pounds sterling, to one hundred and forty-two million pounds sterling."

These terrible statistics tell us the dire results of the popular convivial habits of the British people. They have sown the wind, they are reaping the whirlwind. Not only are the working people, the bone and sinew of every nation, becoming demoralized, but the extremest poverty is grinding them into the very dust. The bread that is given by a bountiful God is turned to poison by the deadly process of distillation, and the food which he gives to supply the wants of the people and preserve them in strength and virtue, is used to debase them and incapacitate them for labor, and sink them in the depths of vice. Says the London Times: "There is something exceedingly irritating in the fact that a great part of the harvest, raised with infinite care and pains, instead of adding to the national wealth and bringing rich returns, is poured, in the shape of liquid fire, down the throats of the nations who produce it, and instead of leaving them wiser and happier, tends to impoverish them by vicious and debilitating indulgence."

Beside all this, crimes of a most brutal description, are continually on the increase, and every vice which rots down physical, moral, and national life follows in the wake of the intoxicating cup. It is high time for Christians, both in Great Britain and in the United States, to lift up their voices and in trumpet tones warn men of their danger and their sin. Let those who are yet free from the dire enchantment of drink beware of the tempter’s wiles; and let those who are taking the first steps in this downward course, turn at once to secure their own safety and avoid leading others to their ruin.—Christian.