Temperance | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 17, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 16.

Temperance.

Liquors for Family Use.

THE Mendocino Beacon's San Francisco correspondent writes as follows:—

A singular wave of intemperance is holding sway just now. Arrests of drunks have been very frequent, and in connection with this it is astonishing how many women have been led to the cells for the abandonment of their helpless children. Liquor seems to be the one thing that can conquer a mother's love for her children. It is amazing to what a depth of degradation some of our female poor have descended. Not a day has passed lately but what arrests have been made of these outcasts, and their children found starving. I stepped into a saloon the other day to wait for a train, and called for a glass of beer to appease my thirst. I took up a paper to kill time. It was a barren place, containing a bar, table, a few Police Gazettes, and one or two chairs. The proprietor was smoking a huge old pipe. Leaning over the counter was a miserable rough-looking man. He was begging for liquor, or for credit for some. He finally went away and returned in about ten minutes with six eggs. These he bartered for a drink. The proprietor reluctantly took the eggs and placed out the liquor. It was barely down when a woman entered the place. She was a worn, old-before-her-time woman. Her face was stern and pained; her dress was shabby and ill-fitting; her hair was disheveled, and her eyes full of despair; her voice was really full of pathos.

"You had no right," she said, "to receive those eggs; my husband stole them from me; they are my food for myself and child. That man has not given me a cent of money for three years, but has eaten and drunk of my earnings. He lies in the house drunk half the time. He steals the very food out of our mouths, and you receive what belongs to me, and give him liquor."

The barkeeper smiled; her husband growled to her to get out.

She continued: "Last week he beat me because I had nothing for him to eat," and here she showed swells on her arm, and a bruise over her temple. "What can I do! for God's sake, what can I do for myself and child when everything is against me!"

As the train moved away a crowd was watching a despairing woman on the sidewalk; a half-drunken man was cursing her; a stolid saloon man was smoking a pipe with an unconcerned air; on the window of a grocery store across the way one could read, "Liquors for family use."