Temperance | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 21, 1883

Temperance.

Whisky and Opium.

If society is right in licensing the sale of whisky it is wrong in not licensing the dens for smoking opium and the bagnios for the plying of an infamous vocation, and, conversely, if it be wrong to license opium-smoking and courtezanship, it is wrong to license the selling of whisky.

Within a few days a man named Walsh stood up before the criminal court of this county and plead guilty to an indictment for the murder of his wife. It was shown that he and his wife were in the habit of getting drunk together, and furthermore, that it was an agreed thing as to the mutual intoxication. When he was drunk, and she was drunk, he was in the habit, if, in his drunken fancy, he thought she had taken too much, of chastising her. The last time this chastisement took place he continued it until he killed her. He beat her with a heavy trunk strap until her strength was so reduced that she had no power left to recuperate. After having been beaten she crawled into bed, and soon after, in the sweet consciousness that he had performed an imperative duty, he followed her example. When he awoke the next morning he found a cold and stiff body beside him, and then he knew that he had spent the most of the night beside a corpse.

A little girl, an only child, stood by and saw the chastisement. Accustomed as she was to these whippings, even she was convinced that her father was going too far, and piteously said, "For my sake, papa, don't whip mamma any more!"

When Walsh pleaded guilty, he was weeping; when he came into court to receive sentence his eyes were red and swollen with weeping; when his lawyer made an appeal for a lenient sentence, he, too, was in tears; and had the little girl been there, she would also have added her share to the rivulets of grief which ran through the tragedy. The murderer asserted that he loved his wife devotedly and tenderly; that she was equally attached to him.

What more doleful tragedy has ever come before the courts and the public than this one? Now, suppose that this wretched husband had procured the stimulus which led to the crime from an opium den, would not denunciation of the iniquities of the opium den been developed with all the vigor of a righteous and universal indignation? Would not the police have suppressed the place within the very hour of the discovery of the crime? Would not public opinion have hotly demanded that every opium den in the city be instantly swept from existence? Why is the cause of the crime any the less tolerable because it is located in a whisky den instead of an opium den? Why is there not a public demand that a place which breeds such crimes should be suppressed instanter? Why look with indifference upon the whisky shop, which is in every possible aspect associated with crime of every quality, and become so indignant against an opium den, which, whatever its defects, has no crime of murder laid at its door?

It is right to suppress the opium dens; and, if this be so, it is ten times, a thousand times, more imperative to suppress the whisky dens with their unbroken inducements to hideous crimes.

— Chicago News.