A Mocker and a Waster by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 20, 1906

A Mocker and a Waster

By C. M. S.

C. M. S.

FROM time to time we see statements in temperance journals, and in journals that are not special advocates of temperance, setting forth the great waste that comes to the nation each year from the use of intoxicants. We look at it in a general way, fail to comprehend the mighty amounts set before our eyes, and so fail to appreciate what the figures mean to the individual persons whose savings have been swallowed up in the mammoth totals.

For instance, we have in the United States some two hundred and forty thousand saloons, or about one saloon to every three hundred and fifty-four inhabitants. We spend about one billion two hundred million dollars annually for liquor.

That is the money outlay; but the real cost of the terrible depredation on the human race no figures can give. There is no formula for its expression. It means that nearly one and a quarter billion dollars have been turned out of the channels of legitimate use into the channel of abuse and waste. In hundreds of thousands of cases it means that the craving for liquor has been dulled for a few moments at the cost of the actual deprivation of food and clothing for those dependent upon the wages earned. It means in thousands upon thousands of cases that women who have placed the keeping of their lives and their little ones in the hands of one they loved, have had to stand and see that trust betrayed for the appeasing of an unnatural appetite. It means that children whose very birth is a legal lien upon the producing powers of the parents for their sustenance in many thousands of homes are sent ragged and breakfastless to school and hungry to bed year in and year out. It means that the laws which are for the guarding of life are in effect nullified by other laws which give to this breeder of crime the right to carry on its business at the expense of the peace and the lives of men, women, and children. It means the keeping of jails, State prisons, and asylums, and hospitals filled with men and women, who, but for the liquor business, would be filling the places designed for them in the affairs of the world. It means the outlay of millions of dollars every year in this country for the support of police, lawyers, courts, jails, prisons, and wardens.

And it means more than that. It means that every year thousands of young men and women are taught the way to the pit of death and perdition; that the light in the eyes of the soul is dulled, the hope in the breast of a multitude is chilled, and that the love for the things of God in the hearts of such ones is fast going out or has perished already. There is nothing good the traffic has ever done; there is nothing evil it has ever hesitated to do.

It has never stimulated a holy thought; but it has urged on the kingdom of darkness at a furious pace.

It has built no hospitals, established no foundling asylums or homes for the poor; but it has not hesitated to crowd the walls of all that have been established, as well as the jails, asylums, and penitentiaries, with the ripened fruit of its terrible planting.

It has lifted no burden of debt from the widow or fatherless; but it has pasted mortgages on millions of deeds, and hung the red flag of the auctioneer on the gate-post of many a drink-ruined home.

It has established no schools for the education of the young; but it has set the seal of imbecility on thousands of the unborn, and clothed the children of its victims in a garb of rags that has turned them into truants and tramps.

That is what it has done generally, and all know it. They read the figures and listen to the speeches, and forget the tragedies that it is enacting in millions of homes, each one with its terrible setting of blasted hopes and cruel heartaches. Never a home is established that is not built on hope and pleasant anticipation; but never a home has liquor entered that it has not torn hopes and heart-strings like a maddened bull. Once inside, it has never been satisfied until it has strewn the last timber of hope’s building upon the ground.

The individual deceives himself into the belief that he is enjoying, at little expense, a harmless pastime, which he can abandon at a moment’s notice. Never was there greater deception, and never a captor that continued so long to deceive so great a body of people at the same time.

In very many homes the husband comes to his family at the week’s end with every dollar of his wages squandered. The rent is past due, and the landlord obdurate; the grocery bills are unpaid, and the grocer will give no more credit; the children are too poorly clothed to attend church or school, and sometimes even to be seen upon the street; the very cheapest food is obtained, and the stomachs of the children cry for food, while their forms are emaciated and their eyes grow big with hunger. One does not have to draw upon fancy to conjure up a picture like this. There are no words that can paint the picture of such things as they actually exist in thousands upon thousands of homes in our own land.

“Wine Is a Mocker”

As a waster it has no equal; as a mocker it is beyond comparison. The holiest relations of life it handles with the most ruthless mockery. It laughs at domestic peace, and stirs up discord in its place. It promises the husband a pleasant evening with his friends, and then sends him home to abuse the best and most trusting friend he has. In the glow of the first glass it promises him temporal success; and then when it has wound its coils about him, it takes from him everything he did possess, and turns him and his family into the street. It promises him promotion in his occupation, and then takes from his hands the steadiness and skill that are necessary to enable him even to hold the position he has. It promises him fluency of speech; and then robs him of his brains, thickens his tongue, and gives him the speech of the lunatic. The army general needs it to “steady his nerves,” and he takes it, and loses the battle. The soldier needs it to brace him up for a dangerous duty; he takes it, forgets his duty, and is captured by the foe. The orator needs it to give him freedom of utterance; he takes it, and disgusts his audience. The financier needs it to help him consummate a deal; he takes it, and when the deal is consummated, his fortune is gone, and his friends desert him. The common man has needed it all his life as a stimulant; and while he imagined he was continually being stimulated to greater accomplishments, he was standing still and watching the procession

go past; and when he has looked back upon a life now nearly spent, he has found that he was farther back than when he started, and the grade of his path has been downward day by day. Every year nearly a hundred thousand persons can look back upon such a deceived and misspent life in this country alone; for that many new drunkards’ graves each year testify to the wasting and mockery of the demon of drink in the United States.

Because these things are terrible facts, no child should go out from under the parental roof until he has been thoroughly acquainted with the evils of drink. The girls should know it as well as the boys, and should be taught to shun the society of those who patronize the business.

The saloon jeopardizes every interest of the home. It can not live without sacrificing those interests. Souls are its victims, and it snatches them from rich and poor alike. There is no satiety to its appetite, no set boundary to its field of operation, no trust too holy for it to violate, no right too sacred for it to trample upon, no child so beautiful that it would hesitate to set the hot brand of ruin upon its forehead.

The Christian must ostracize it as the very embodiment of sin that it is. He can have no fellowship with it without being a part of it. He can not be guiltless before God if he fails to educate his children to look upon it as the leprosy of death and avoid it as they would the companionship of the evil one himself, whose advance agent and greatest reaper it is.