The Liquor Interest

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 12, 1873

The Liquor Interest.

TRAMP, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching: how many of them? Sixty thousand! Sixty full regiments, every man of which will, before twelve months shall have completed their course, lie down in the grave of a drunkard! Every year during the past decade has witnessed the same sacrifice; and sixty regiments stand behind this army ready to take its place. It is to be recruited from our children and our children’s children. “Tramp, tramp, tramp”—the sounds come to us in the echoes of the footsteps of the army just expired; tramp, tramp, tramp—the earth shakes with the tread of the host now passing: tramp, tramp, tramp, comes to us from the camp of the recruits. A great tide of life flows resistlessly to its death. What in God’s name are they fighting for? The privilege of pleasing an appetite, of conforming to a social usage, of filling sixty thousand homes with shame and sorrow, of loading the public with the burden of pauperism, of crowding our prison-houses with felons, of detracting from the productive industries of the country, of ruining fortunes and breaking hopes, of breeding disease and wretchedness, of destroying both body and soul in hell before their time.

The prosperity of the liquor interest, covering every department of it, depends entirely on the maintenance of this army. It cannot live without it. It never did live without it. So long as the liquor interest maintains its present prosperous condition, it will cost America the sacrifice of sixty thousand men every year. The effect is inseparable from the cause. The cost to the country of the liquor traffic is a sum so stupendous that any figures which we should dare to give would convict us of trifling. The amount of life absolutely destroyed, the amount of industry sacrificed, the amount of bread transformed into poison, the shame, the unavailing sorrow, the crime, the poverty, the pauperism, the brutality, the wild waste of vital and financial resources, make an aggregate so vast—so incalculably vast—that the only wonder is that the American people do not rise as one man, and declare that this great curse shall exist no longer. Dilettante conventions are held on the subject of peace, by men and women who find it necessary to fiddle to keep themselves awake. A hue-and-cry is raised about woman suffrage, as if any wrong which may be involved in woman’s lack of the suffrage could be compared to the wrongs attached to the liquor interest!

Does any sane woman doubt that women are suffering a thousand times more from rum than from any political disability? *

The country is to be sincerely congratulated on the fact that the wine interest of the United States does not promise much. Little native wine, after all our painstaking, finds its way to a gentleman’s table. The California wines are a disappointment and a failure, and the Western wines are the same. Neither the dry nor the sparkling Catawba takes the place of anything imported. They are not popular wines, and we congratulate the country that they never can be. The lager beer interest is endeavoring, in convention, to separate itself from the whisky interest, claiming to be holier and more respectable than that. They are all to be lumped together. They are all opposed to sobriety, and, in the end, we shall find them all fighting side by side for existence against the determined indignation of a long-suffering people.

A respectable English magazine reports, as a fact of encouraging moment, that of the fifty thousand clergymen of the Church of England as many as four thousand actually abstain from the use of spirits! So, eleven-twelfths of the clergymen of the English Church consent to be dumb dogs on the temperance question! How large the proportion of wine-drinking clergymen may be in this country we do not know, but we do know that a wine-glass stops the mouth on the subject of temperance, whoever may hold it. A wine-drinking clergyman is a soldier disarmed. He is not only not worth a straw in the fight; he is a part of the impedimenta of the temperance army. We have a good many such to carry, who ought to be ashamed of themselves, and who very soon will be. Temperance laws are being passed by the various Legislatures, which they must sustain, or go over, soul and body, to the liquor interest and influence.

Meantime, the tramp, tramp, tramp—sounds on, the tramp of sixty thousand yearly victims. Some are besotted and stupid, some are wild with hilarity, and dance along the dusty way, some reel along in pitiful weakness, some wreak their mad and murderous impulses on one another, or on the helpless women and children whose destinies are united to theirs, some stop in wayside debaucheries and infamies for a moment, some go bound in chains from which they seek in vain to wrench their bleeding wrists, and all are poisoned in body and soul, and all are doomed to death. Wherever they move, crime, poverty, shame, wretchedness, and despair, hover in awful shadows. There is no bright side to the picture. We forget: there is just one. The men who make this army get rich. Their children are robed in purple and fine linen, and live upon dainties. Some of them are regarded as respectable members of society, and they hold conventions to protect their interests! Still the tramp, tramp, tramp, goes on, and before this article can see the light, five thousand more of our poisoned army will have hidden their shame and disgrace in the grave.—Scribner’s Monthly for August, 1873.