THE CUP OF DEVILS by D. T. Taylor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 22, 1874

“THE CUP OF DEVILS.”

By D. T. Taylor

RASCALITY REVEALED.

Before me, as I write, lie five printed works relating to the adulteration of alcoholic liquors. Two were written by able physicians, one by a colonel in the army, one by a Methodist clergyman, and one by a religious society in Philadelphia. All are of recent date. All are highly authoritative and crammed full of irrefutable evidence. The most damaging information they present is derived from the oral and printed testimony of the liquor men themselves. Analysis, fact, legal testimony, etc., complete the chain of damning evidence. These volumes tell a terrible tale of fraud, drugging, and poisoning by the whisky party. They reveal the astounding fact that over one hundred and fifty different drugs, chemicals, and poisonous substances, now enter into the composition of the various intoxicating beverages in universal use. And yet, these liquors are sent forth to each and every town in the Union as pure ardent spirits. Wholesale druggists make a specialty in that branch of importation for the use of the liquor trade. Chemists, first and second rate, prepare the recipes for mixing, and circulars, secretly printed and secretly circulated, state names, prices, and quantities. These are scattered over the land like the frogs of Egypt. Extracts, oils, ethers, flavors, etc., for immediately turning one drink into another, go out from the “Wholesale Liquor Dealer,” and that fraternal rummy is green who never heard of them.

In this kind a Philadelphia firm deals. One of their secret circulars with price-list, &c., is before me. On it I count one hundred and fifty-four kinds of such, used, says the circular, “in the manufacture of liquors, wines, cordials.” Remember that, to make these, all that is needed is common rectified corn whisky and drugs! And these fellows tell their customers that “liquors made according to these recipes” so closely resemble the genuine that they often cannot be distinguished.” Skillful swindlers, these. And now comes Professor Babcock, who in a late number of the Laboratory, tells us so skillfully are the spurious liquors prepared that it is about impossible to tell them from the genuine, even by chemical analysis. What next?

The “Table of Contents” of the Philadelphia man’s book is also on my table. By its aid I am fully initiated into the mysteries of the cup of devils. Ethers and flavoring oils of a powerful and deleterious kind are used. By their use, in a few minutes’ time, and at a cost of but a few dollars, I am shown how to convert forty gallons of common whisky into any and every kind of liquor to suit the taste of the million. Just one-half a pint of “liquor flavor” will complete the metamorphose. Any quantity of the best “French brandy” can be made for about one dollar a gallon. This is sold for $15 and $20 per gallon, at a profit of 1500 and 2000 per cent. Great is King Alcohol and drug poisons are his profit! These keen sharpers who send out their book to every part of the country, urge the retailers to buy it, and “we save hundreds of dollars which,” they add, “you are now paying to others for preparing whiskies, brandies, gins, &c.” Our clerical author (who knows) writes: “These circulars have been sent all over the country, and that, too, through many years; hence, we may safely infer that nearly all the dram-sellers make their own liquors.” The book was copyrighted in 1851, and has reached its fourth edition. For all that the people know, every retailer in Clinton County is to-day using similar receipts.

The author tells us that “all the most popular German, French, and American liquors can be made by these receipts.” No doubt of it. He also tells the ladies how to make a “perfect love cordial;” also, other cordials, by the use of such delectable substances as absinthe, prussic acid, and the like. He is very kind to the ladies. He gives receipts for restoring “flat wine, musty wine, or ropy wine, or sour wine.” No doubt this magician could take the 400 barrels (some 14,000 gallons) of colored slop ycleped wine, that passed through this Custom House to New York during the last week in September, and which had, as shown by actual test, an alcoholic strength of only two per cent, and transmute it into splendid Port or Madeira in a twinkling. As it was, it baffled the wisdom of the officers to tell what the stuff could be, that $6,000 duties were paid on, where it came from, or what use could be made of it. The whiskyites know. The red slop won’t have to stay but one night in the cellar and vats of a Gotham wholesaler before it will be resurrected sparkling and strong with the whisky spirit, and tasting as if a half a century old. These fellows will take new, raw, weak wine, and by adding to it fifty cents’ worth of their “age and body preparation,” noted in the “circular,” can quickly change its taste to that of rare old wine. Fifty cents’ worth changes forty gallons;—no grape juice is needed. The same with the liquors. Your memory, reader, will perhaps readily go back to those half dozen or more casks of beautiful imported French brandy, seized and detained by our officers a few years ago in transit over the Ogdensburgh railroad. How the owner claimed his property, and to save it, revealed his rascality, and when the case went to court, defended himself against the United States, and successfully proved there was not a drop of his wretched compounds imported; everything about it, barrels and all, were made in New York. Nevertheless, Champlain and Plattsburgh druggists, and experts, tasted the drugged water and pronounced it nice French brandy. Ah! the liquor man was ahead of you, gentlemen. You marveled. But he got his strychnine water back and chuckled over his sagacity. He should have gone to the penitentiary, and you should be posted on Beelzebub’s beverages.

Our whisky man in his private “circular,” frankly informs us of the existence of “a number of similar treatises,” “other books,” he calls them, like his own. Yes; we knew that before. We happen to know, and have corresponded of late with a talented legal gentleman, who owns, of different kinds, some forty works of this character. These forty volumes were privately got up, circulated everywhere, on the sly, and are written for the express purpose of showing the whisky men how to reduce, combine, imitate, drug and poison the whole brood of liquors. With their aid, wine can be made without grapes, and brandy without wine; every drink of our whisky is adulterated; corn and strychnine whisky, remember. Before me are the titles of some of these; for example, we have “The Brewer and Licensed Victualer’s Guide;” also, “Fermented Liquors;” and another, entitled, “The Liquor Dealer’s Guide;” both these last published in 1858. Then there is “The Wine Merchant’s Companion,” and again “The Complete Practical Distiller,” and still another, “Every Man His own Butler,” (no grape is needed.) And then there is “The Manufacture of Liquors, Wines and Cordials, without the aid of Distillation; Prepared expressly for the Trade.” This book contains no less than one hundred and thirty-five receipts. Chapter VI. tells how to take common, raw whisky and make it into “brandy, peach brandy, gin, rum, &c., at twelve cents a gallon.” All done, please observe, “without the aid of the still.” One more volume of this class of satanic literature I will notice. Its title is, “A Treatise on the Manufacture, Imitation, Adulteration, and Reduction of Foreign Wines, Brandies, Gins, Rums, etc., and all kinds of Domestic Liquors, based upon the French system: a Practical Chemist and experienced Liquor Dealer, Philadelphia, 1860.” It tells how to make one hundred and sixty-five kinds of intoxicating drinks, and whisky and cheap drugs is all that is required to do it! After this evidence, piled on the top of evidence, we may as well stop canting about pure liquors. There are none.

This last-named work of a little over 200 pages was published at $10, but in 1868 a whisky man in one of our Western cities offered the owner $109 for his copy. He did not know where to get another. I do n’t; neither do you. These villainous works are not printed, sold, or read openly. They are spread abroad as the filthy literature is that comes reeking with pollution out of the obscene press of that modern Babylon, New York city. Low-minded, hired minions, peddle these all about the land. The rum traffic has its secret pernicious literature; immorality also has its flood of evil books; one is as bad as the other.

In this town receipts for concocting spurious liquors have been sold, and down in dark cellars the stuff has been mixed like witches’ broth, and men have drank them until they died of slow poison. Some honest liquor dealers have been so astonished when these receipts were offered them and the various liquors made right before their eyes, that they at once abandoned the traffic forever. Of this class was Dr. R. B. Carswell, of East Weare, N. H. Honor to him. Others greedy, godless, and abandoned, buy at once and use them to make more profit. Only eight miles from me fifteen years ago a man commenced the manufacture of his own liquors with the aid of drug poison. His wife drank of them and became the first victim to their deadly effects. The wretched husband to his horror poisoned to death the companion of his bosom. Murdered for a little money!

The trade liquors are an imposition to the honest retailer; a huge fraud upon general public. Mr. V——, of Chazy, bought a quantity of a New York man. The bill was $600. He sold them out (so we have it) at retail; his customers drank them, but for some cause he failed to foot the bill. The New York man sued him for the pay. Our retailer employed as counsel, lawyer A. of P. The shrewd attorney understood the tricks of the trade, and subpoenaed as witnesses for his client the clerks in the establishment where the hot fluids came from, and putting them under oath, proved before the Supreme Court of the Empire State, that the entire lot was spurious. The New York man didn’t get the $600. He got six cents. He should be learning an honest, decent trade between some stone walls in a certain institution out west of the village of Plattsburgh. I always believed in 1 Timothy 1: 9, 10.

Makers and executors of law, are these things so? Is this traffic in poisonous drinking fluids wrong? If so, then, why not for God and humanity’s sake put away the Heaven-daring and soul-destroying evil? You punish a poor old woman if she adulterates a pound of butter by putting a little lard in it; why don’t you punish the criminals who adulterate with poisons and filth the daily drinks of forty-three millions of free people? You punish the man who counterfeits a true bank note, why don’t you punish the American Thugs, who are hourly and everywhere imitating with deleterious substances, the ardent spirits of commerce? Why?—D. T. TAYLOR, in Plattsburgh Sentinel.