PAYING THE PENALTY

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 19, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 25.

PAYING THE PENALTY.

A GLASS of beer can't hurt anybody! Why, I know a person—yonder he is now—a specimen of manly beauty, a portly six-footer; he has the bearing of a prince. He is one of our merchant princes. His face wears the hue of youth; and now, at the age of fifty odd, he has the quick elastic step of our young men of twenty-five, and none more full of wit and mirth than he; and I know he never dines without a brandy and water, and never goes to bed without a terrapin or oyster supper, with plenty of champagne; and more than that, he was never known to be drunk. So here is a living exemplar and disproof of the temperance twaddle about the dangerous nature of an occasional glass and the destructive effects of a temperate use of good liquors.

Now it so happened that this specimen of safe brandy-drinking was a relation of ours. He died a year or two after that with chronic diarrhea, a common end of those who are never drunk, but never out of liquor. He left his widow a splendid mansion uptown and a clear five thousand a year, besides a large fortune to each of his children; for he had ships on every counter, but which he never had occasion to use. For months before he died—he was a year dying—he could eat nothing without distress; in the midst of his millions he died of inanition.

That is not the half, reader. He had been a steady drinker, a daily drinker, for twenty-eight years. He left a legacy to his children which he did not mention. Scrofula has been eating up one daughter for fifteen years; another is in the mad-house; the third and fourth were of unearthly beauty—there was a kind of grandeur in that beauty—but they were blighted, and they paled and faded in their sweetest teens; another is tottering on the verge of the grave, and only to one of them is left all the senses.—Hall's Journal of Health.