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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 1, 1883

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 9, No. 9.

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Temperance.

By Col. Jesse Harper

The Danger of the Liquor Traffic.

1. THE liquor traffic is dangerous, because it menaces civilization and is the mortal enemy of Christianity. The law protecting and giving legal existence to the liquor traffic is a devilish yahoo who takes all that is deformed in man and energizes it until every part becomes a genii. These demons go about strong in the support of law, dragging to death—not only temporal but eternal—all on whom they lay their infernal hand. The legalized liquor traffic is a danger, indeed.
“It is a strange, a woeful sprite As ever frightened human sight.”
2. The danger is infinite, because the liquor traffic destroys the physical, intellectual, and moral powers. Drunkenness is surely burning out the very germs of manhood, permeating the coming generations with the virus of death. The baleful effects are becoming hereditary. The fearful law of transmission is showing itself in the degeneracy of the race wherever intoxicants are used. A high medical authority says: “The vitality and the physical and mental organization of the infant proceed directly from the parent.” In regard to drunkenness the transmitted virus may show itself in the child, grandchild, or great-grandchild.
3. The liquor traffic is dangerous, because it is the greatest social evil that affects the human race. Sir James Greenwood says: “Whatever difference of opinion of other causes, no sane man will contest the fact that drunkenness has wrought more mischief than all other social evils put together.” Again: “There is not a form of human sin and sorrow in which it does not play a part.”
The celebrated Dr. Guthrie, of London, in a letter to a committee of the House of Commons, says: “Believe me, it is impossible to exaggerate, impossible truthfully to paint the effect of this evil either on those who are addicted to it or those who suffer from it. Crushed husbands, broken-hearted wives, and, most of all, those poor, innocent children, that are dying under cruelty and starvation, that walk unshod the winter snows, and with their matted hair and hollow cheeks and sunken eyes glare on us wild and savage-like from patched and filthy windows. Nor is the curse confined to the lowest stratum of society. It has cost many a servant her place, and yet greater loss, her virtue. It has ruined trades, despoiled the coronet of its luster, and damned without number.”
4. The liquor traffic is dangerous because of the poisonous adulterations of all intoxicants. The belief that there is now any such thing as pure liquors is a myth. But if there were, what of it? Nothing; for the consequences that flowed from the drinking of pure liquors in the day of their existence, were fearful indeed. And now, when we add to this dark picture this—the drinking of adulterated liquors—and they are all the kind we have—then the picture becomes a wide-spread ruin, a very valley of the shadow of death.
5. The liquor traffic is dangerous because it encourages the use of intoxicants as a medicine, thereby cultivating a taste for drinks, which may ultimate in the destruction of both soul and body.
6. The liquor traffic is dangerous, because it promotes drunkenness; drunkenness is aberration, and constant drinking ultimates in delirium, and finally insanity. Says a noted medical writer: “One of the most terrible results of drinking is the inducing of that kind of insanity which takes the name of delirium tremens.” He describes this insanity thus: “The casualties of the disease are convulsions, coma, which, if not immediately fatal, are apt to leave the sufferer a wreck for the remainder of his life.”
7. The liquor traffic is dangerous, because it creates an appetite that at last becomes irresistible. We would speak now briefly of the pathological, or, as it is called, the proximate cause of drunkenness. No impression from any source can affect the mind except through the brain. In drunkenness, therefore, it is the brain that is principally affected. It is only through a healthy brain that healthy manifestations can emanate. Intoxicants destroy the cerebral texture; and the act is now well established that habitual drunkards have always more or less cerebral disease. And so this voluntary habit, long indulged in, becomes master, and overpowers the will and forces the victim down to death. At the last not a sound tissue or particle of flesh can be found from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head.
8. The liquor traffic is dangerous, because it destroys our statesmen and the distinguished among us. We have witnessed the sad sight of a drunken President drivelling the silly vaporings of a drunkard in the presence of the titled representatives of the governments of the world. No class of officials, sacred or secular, has escaped the blight of drink; and since the legalization of the traffic the scourge in high places has increased.
Some of the brightest names of our history have fallen victims to strong drink. Vice-President Wilson says: “In this country, and in this age of light, we have an army of five hundred thousand drunkards; fifty thousand of this number annually sink into drunkard’s graves. An army of half a million in Christian America! How fearful the thought, how appalling the spectacle!”
9. The liquor traffic is dangerous, because it destroys our wealth. Much has been shown of its waste, so details will not be given here. Remember that the annual cost, as shown, is $2,550,000,000 in this country. In the city of New York, in the single year 1878, $60,000,000 were spent for intoxicating drinks. In 1877, a distinguished lord shows that for intoxicating drinks in the British Isles, more than $700,000,000 were expended in a year. This was more than $20 to every man, woman, and child in the kingdom; and this was for the liquor drank by the common people, and does not include that drunk by the aristocrats and upper classes, they drinking wine, etc., which cost a much larger sum during the year. Gerrit Smith, a few years ago, in Richmond, said to the colored people: “If you will not drink a drop of liquor for thirty years, I will guarantee that you will own half the land in Virginia.” Mr. Greeley, just before he died, said that during the forty years he had lived in New York, the poorer classes of the working people had spent enough for whisky to have given them half the property in the city.
10. The liquor traffic is dangerous, because it corrupts the ballot-box and demoralizes our politics. J. G. Gurney once said that “a pint of whisky in a politician’s hand on election day would control more votes than a pint of brains in a sober man’s head.” Daniel Webster, although addicted to the fearful vice, said in a speech in 1835, “Intoxicating liquors are a danger to the ballot-box, a menace to our institutions without an equal.” And yet we are told to keep temperance out of politics—that is a moral question. Well, we will consent to keep temperance out of politics if the other side will keep intemperance out. Dr. Dick says: “When intemperance prevails a barrier is interposed to every attempt to raise man from the moral and intellectual degradation into which he has sunk; and where it is so, no power can irradiate his mind with knowledge. With his passions stimulated, his moral powers enervated, he has no faculty for self-government, and is dangerous to society.”
The debauchery of our times, the corruption of our ballot-box, are proof beyond cavil of this truth. In large cities the elective franchise is no better than a farce. Drunkenness has turned this highest privilege of a freeman into a two-edged sword that is being used by bad men to cut down and destroy forever self-government. The scenes often occurring in the two houses of Congress are sickening to think of. In July, 1878, sixteen Senators, in a public place, were drunk at one time, and four times that number of Representatives were under the influence of strong drink. A noted writer for one of the largest journals in the country, says, “Drunkenness is proving the cause of death to many Congressmen.”
11. The liquor traffic is dangerous because it produces 87 per cent. of the crime in the whole country. And to punish legally-produced crime, 50 per cent. of the cost of maintaining the courts is expended.
12. The liquor traffic is dangerous because it produces more misery than all the other crimes combined. The suffering of women and children, brought on them by it, no pen can describe. The misery in the world to-day, by this dragon of death, drapes all Heaven in black, and stirs to wild outbreak the chambers of hell. This curse is insatiable. The soul is ruined by it, and death crowned a king. The grave is robbed of hope, and on the fretted arch of the celestial its endless work is written: “No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
13. Finally, the liquor traffic is dangerous because it is in direct violation of the commands of God. This is its great, its infinite danger. That which violates moral law is wrong—is crime of the highest degree. But that which is allowed by custom and law of the creature, which is directly prohibited by the Creator, is sin—deep and deadly sin, and brings a ruin temporal and eternal. Such a sin is the legalized liquor traffic of modern civilization.
In the light of the foregoing, every consideration of humanity urges us to rise in our majesty and rescue the perishing. Every impulse of the heart, which beats in love for man, urges us to save the dying. The bodies of unnumbered multitudes are wasting away amid the slow fire of this consuming traffic. The best hopes of the race are imperiled—sorrow is surely settling down upon the weeping soul. The danger is infinite, the results eternal. The longing cry of the lost at this shrine appeals to us in agony to reach forth in the strength of God and snatch them from the very jaws of death and the gates of hell. Shall we falter; shall we sleep; shall we count the cost when both temporal and eternal life are in the balance? No, no, a thousand times no! But with leaning on Omnipotence, and hand strong in the Almighty, let us lift the fallen from the lazar-house of sin, and place them securely on the Everlasting Rock. And as the traffic goes down, down, down forever, let us thank God for his wondrous work. And as the saved come up, up, up from the squalor of death and the ruin of despair, singing the diapason of the Immortal King, let us thank God for his matchless love. Let joy supreme thrill our heart as the temperance banner shall crown the temple of our purified liberty; and as it rises to its holy place amid the perennial blue, fruited with Christian, temperance work, may an enfranchised nation ring out in anthem peal: “Grace, grace unto it.”—Col. Jesse Harper.