p. 87 | A Fatal Mistake

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 14, 1878

A Fatal Mistake.

A MAN may drink moderately but steadily all his life, with no apparent harm to himself, but his daughters become nervous wrecks, his sons epileptics, libertines or drunkards, the hereditary tendency to crime having its pathology and unvaried laws, precisely as scrofula, consumption, or any other purely physical disease. These are stale truths to medical men, but the majority of parents, even those of average intelligence, are either ignorant or wickedly regardless of them. There will be a chance of ridding our jails and almshouses of half their tenants when our people are brought to treat drunkenness as a disease of the stomach and blood as well as of the soul, and to meet it with common sense and a physician, as well as with threats of eternal damnation, and to remove the ginshop and rum sellers for the same reason that they would stagnant ponds or unclean sewers.

—Trade List.