p. 11 | DRUNKARD’S SONS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 3, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 31.

DRUNKARD’S SONS.

Of the 420 boys committed to the Industrial School at Lancaster during the past year, 120, or nearly one-third of the whole, had intemperate fathers; five had intemperate mothers. Of boys without either father or mother there were 31, and of those with father dead there were 93, while 82 had lost a mother, and 10 knew nothing of either parent. There is food for abundant reflection in these cases cited. There is no single cause, it appears, which sends a boy to the bad quicker than an intemperate father. This sort of parent is worse than none at all, according to the statistics.

The records of the hospitals, asylums, prisons, reformatories, all show that the man who indulges in liquor is unfit to be a father. The drinker’s children are cursed with parental taints, which crop out in insanity, imbecility, vice, and crime. Even tho a line of good ancestry, and the opposing power of purity in the mother shield the children of a drinking father from the worst of his traits, the evil influence of the drunkard in the home yet mars the masterpiece. The boys and girls of a drunken father or mother go to the bad in appallingly large proportion.

The worst of the drinking habit is its cumulative effect. The father may, because his father and mother were temperate be able to drink with impunity, apparently, but his son has a greater craving and less vitality. The evil that the drinking man does to his energies impairs the powers of his offspring, and they fall easy victims to the liquor habit. — American Issue.