p. 249 | Temperance

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 31, 1883

Temperance.

Sentence of Saloon-Keepers.

Hon. N. M. Hubbard, District Judge of the Eighth Judical District of Iowa, in passing sentence upon some liquor-dealers for violation of the prohibitory laws of the State, said:—

"While there are greater crimes known to the law, which are punishable with great severity, there are none which involve more of those qualities known as despicable meanness and audacity than the selling of intoxicating liquors."

"There is something in the taking of human life by violence so instantaneous that it shocks and terrifies the minds of all, and yet we look upon the man who takes human life quite as surely, but by a slow lingering process—if not without condemnation, at least with horror. You who stand before the Court for sentence are in every moral sense murderers, and you are within the spirit, if not the letter, guilty of manslaughter; for the law says that whoever accelerates the death of a human being unlawfully, is guilty of the crime. Your bloated victims upon the witness-stand, and who undoubtedly committed perjury to screen you from the law, not only abundantly testify that you are accelerating death, but that you are inducing men to commit still greater crimes than your own."

"You still maintain the appearance of respectability, but how morally leprous and scrofulous you are inwardly! The ruin, poverty, and idleness which you are inflicting upon this community declares as from the house-tops: You are living in idleness, and eating the bread of orphans, watered with widow's tears; you are stealthily killing your victims and murdering the peace and industry of the community, and thereby converting happy, industrious homes into misery, poverty, and rags."

"Anxious wives and mothers watch and pray in tears nightly, with desolate hearts, for the coming home of your victims, whom you are luring with the wiles and smiles of the devil into midnight debauchery."

"In fine, one can have no adequate conception of a cataract until he has seen the Niagara, nor of the terrible fury and grandeur of a storm in mid-ocean until he has witnessed one; so no one can know the utter degradation and total depravity to which his species can be brought, until he looks upon the desolate ruin caused by your hellish traffic."

"You are persistent, defiant law-breakers; and shamelessly boast that in defiance of the law and moral sense of the community, you will continue in your wicked and criminal practices."

"It has therefore now become the imperative duty of this Court to let fall upon you so heavily the arm of the law, that you shall either be driven from your nefarious traffic, or ruined in your fortunes or wicked prosperity. You have become a stench to the nostrils of the community, and all good men are praying that you be speedily reformed or summarily destroyed. By the providence of God and the favor of his Court, these prayers shall be speedily answered by signal and exact justice for your crimes."

"And finally, let me entreat you, if you are not lost to every sentiment of humanity, to desist from your criminal vagabond traffic and betake yourselves to some honest calling for a livelihood; and you may yet become virtuous, useful citizens, and entitled to the respect of a Christian community; while if you persist in this way your ruin is certain, and you will receive, as you deserve, the execration of mankind."

"You may think that the sentence of the Court is harsh and unjustly severe; but the Court assures you that, compared with your crimes and the desolation you have already brought upon the community, it is mild in the extreme."