Temperance by J. G. Holland

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Dec 13, 1883

Temperance.

By J. G. Holland

The Liquor Interest.

TRAMP, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching; how many of them? Sixty thousand! Sixty full regiments, every man of which will, before twelve months shall have completed their course, lie down in the grave of a drunkard! Every year during the past decade has witnessed the same sacrifice; and sixty regiments stand behind this army ready to take its place. It is to be recruited from our children and our children's children. "Tramp, tramp, tramp"—the sound comes to us in the echoes of the footsteps of the army just expired, tramp, tramp, tramp,—the earth shakes with the tread now passing; tramp, tramp, tramp, comes to us from the recruits. A great tide of life flows resistlessly to its death. What in God's name are they fighting for? The privilege of pleasing an appetite, and conforming to a social usage, of filling sixty thousand homes with shame and sorrow, of loading the public with the burden of pauperism, of crowding our prison-homes with felons, of detracting from the productive industries of the country, of ruining fortunes and breaking hopes, of breeding disease and wretchedness, of destroying both body and soul in hell before their time.

The prosperity of the liquor interest, covering every department of it, depends entirely on the maintenance of this army. It cannot live without it. It never did live without it. So long as the liquor interest maintains its present prosperous condition, it will cost America the sacrifice of sixty thousand men a year. The effect is inseparable from the cause. The cost to the country of the liquor traffic is a sum so stupendous that any figures which we should dare to give would convict us of trifling. The amount of life absolutely destroyed, the amount of industry sacrificed, the amount of bread transformed into poison, the shame, the unavailing sorrow, the crime, the poverty, the pauperism, the brutality, the wild waste of vital and financial resources, make an aggregate so vast, so incalculably vast, that the only wonder is that American people do not rise as one man, and declare that this great curse shall exist no longer. Dilettante conventions are held on the subject of peace by men and women who find it necessary to fiddle to keep themselves awake. A hue-and-cry is raised about woman suffrage, as if any wrong which may be involved in woman's lack of the suffrage could be compared to the wrongs attached to the liquor interest.

Does any sane woman doubt that women are suffering a thousand times more from rum than from any political disability?

The truth is that there is no question before the American people to-day that begins to match in importance the temperance question. The question of American slavery was never anything but a baby by the side of this; and we prophesy that within ten years, if not within five, the whole country will be awake to it and divided upon it. The organizations of the liquor interest, the vast funds at its command, the universal feeling among those whose business is pitted against the national prosperity and the public morals—these are enough to show that, upon one side of this matter, at least, the present condition of things and the social and political questions that lie in the immediate future are apprehended. The liquor interest knows there is to be a great struggle, and is preparing to meet it. People, both in this country and Great Britain, are beginning to see the enormity of this business—are beginning to realize that Christian civilization is actually poisoned at its fountain, and that there can be no purification of it until the source of the poison is dried up.

Meantime, the tramp, tramp, tramp sounds on—the tramp of sixty thousand yearly victims. Some are besotted and stupid; some are wild with hilarity, and dance along the dusty way; some reel along in pitiful weakness; some wreak their mad and murderous impulses on one another, or on the helpless women and children whose destinies are united to theirs; some stop in wayside debaucheries and infamies for a moment; some go bound in chains, from which they seek in vain to wrench their bleeding wrists; and all are poisoned in body and soul, and all are doomed to death. Wherever they move, crime, poverty, shame, wretchedness, and despair hover in awful shadows. There is no bright side to the picture. We forget; there is just one. The men who make the army get rich. Their children are robed in purple and fine linen, and live upon dainties. Some of them are regarded as respectable members of society, and they hold conventions to protect their interests! Still the tramp, tramp, tramp, goes on.—J. G. Holland, in Scribner's Monthly.