Health and Temperance by Mrs. Mary H. Hunt

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 16, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 16.

Health and Temperance.

By Mrs. Mary H. Hunt

It Is Our Children They Want.

OUR Government is only as strong as the moral character back of the hands that drop the ballot. The keystone of its whole great arch is the capacity of the individual citizen for self-government. We expended and consumed, last year, nearly one thousand millions of dollars for beverages aptly styled "Satan in solution," because of their power to destroy the self-governing capacity of the drinker. Why are we spending our money thus? Asking all along the line of the consumers, when we get an honest answer, it is, "I like it." The evil, then, is one of appetite, personal, imperious appetite for a chemical poison.

Tradition tells us that some four thousand years ago the emperor of China issued an edict forbidding the citizens of his kingdom to drink alcoholic beverages for a given time, and that thereafter it rained gold for three days. It would rain gold for three hundred and sixty-five days in a year if we could forbid it in this country. But the old English adage, that "A man's house is his castle," describes the circle around the individual over which law in a republic cannot go. It cannot say to a man, "You shall not drink." It can say, "You shall not sell to your neighbor." But what if a majority of the neighbors want to buy what the man has to sell? It is a government of majorities. If these drinking habits are unchecked, the limitations before us as a nation are fixed by certain scientific laws. In our trouble we appeal to the Government, only to find ourselves confronted with the fact that when the majority of the men on the outside of the saloon want what the man on the inside has to sell, we are in an embarrassing situation. A republic has no power with which it can coerce majorities.

If the conscience and understanding are enlightened, the individual citizen will be capable of self-government, was the foundation idea of the republic. Vermont, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, and Rhode Island propose to test the power of enlightened understandings and consciences to control this evil; for the laws of these States make the study of the effects of alcoholic drinks and other narcotics in connection with physiology, mandatory in all their public schools. A brighter to-morrow is dawning for the inhabitants of those States.

That which we would have appear in the character of citizenship, should be wrought into that character through the schools, is an axiom of education.

Who have been the opposers to this movement? Not the saloon men.

This legislation is found to be in harmony with natural law, in its appeal to two great forces in the human heart:—

First, self-preservation in the pulpit, and second, paternal instinct, even in the traffic itself; for if a man keeps a saloon, he does not want his boy to keep a saloon. If a man drinks, he does not want his boy to drink. Saloon-keepers have signed petitions for these laws again and again. Who, then, are the opposers? The brewers! Why? Because they have vested interests,—real estate and money invested in breweries. They are looking out for their dividends, ten, fifteen, and twenty years hence. The children of to-day are wanted by the brewers for the drunkards of to-morrow. It is our children they want. They do not want them thus taught, but left in ignorance to buy their beer, to be the beer-bloats of to-morrow. A self-governing people must be a sober people, training its children to sobriety. The death knell of the possibilities of Washington's ideas dominating not only our country, but pervading other nations, is sounded when a State refuses such education.

The mothers of Massachusetts are petitioning their Legislature, now in session, for this temperance education law. I stand here to represent that motherhood. The brewers are competing for our children. Who shall win? Shall the brewers?—Mrs. Mary H. Hunt.