WHY HE SIGNED THE PLEDGE.
“My reasons for taking the temperance pledge were partly general and partly special,” says Dean Farrar. “1. I became convinced that the use of alcohol in any form was not a necessity. I saw that whole nations have lived and flourished without it. I believed that the whole race of man had existed for centuries previous to its discovery. “2. I was struck by the indisputable fact that in England fifty thousand inhabitants of our prisons, accustomed to strong drink all their lives, and the majority of them brought into prison directly or indirectly by it, could be, and were, from the moment of their imprisonment, absolutely deprived of it, not only without loss, but with entire gain to their personal health. “3. I derived from the recorded testimony of our most eminent physicians that the use of alcohol is a subtle and manifold source of disease even to thousands who use it in quantities conveniently deemed moderate; also that all the young, and all the healthy, and all who eat well and sleep well, do not require it, and are better without it. “4. Then, the carefully drawn statistics of many insurance societies convinced me that total abstinence, so far from shortening life, distinctly and indisputably conduced to longevity. “5. Then I accumulated proof that drink is so far from requisite to physical strength or intellectual force that many of our greatest athletes, from the days of Samson onward, ‘whose drink was only of the crystal brook,’ have achieved without alcohol mightier feats than have ever been achieved with it. “6. And besides all this, I knew that the life of man always gains by abolishing needless expenses and avoiding artificial wants. Benjamin Franklin said, a hundred years ago, ‘Temperance puts wood on the fire, meat in the barrel, flour in the tub, money in the purse, credit in the country, clothes on the bairns, intelligence in the brain, and spirit in the constitution.’”