The Cup of Devils by D. T. Taylor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 21, 1875

The Cup of Devils.

By D. T. Taylor

“Wretched compound,” so Accum, the London chemist, in 1820, styled the wines and liquors. “Stuff” was the contemptuous epithet used by Appleton’s Cyclopedia forty years later. “Infernal stuff,” indignantly echoes D. L. Moody. “Alcohol and its vile associations,” are the words of the Boston Journal of Chemistry. Dr. Charles A. Story calls modern liquors “adulterated, poisoned, counterfeited slop.” And Dr. Hiram Cox proved that nine gallons of every ten sold and drank had in its composition “the most pernicious and poisonous drugs.” Could the devil himself invent worse beverages for human beings to drink?

Now I have said that tobacco is put into the drinks. Near Chicago for twelve years was an immense brewery. The son of the brewer worked in it. He told Dr. Story that the largest bills his father had to pay were not for malt nor hops, but for tobacco! He put the dirty weed into the beer. Nausea, narcosis, and paralysis, are among its two hundred and fifty pathological effects. A little opium will antidote the nausea, and a little jalap will antidote the constipating effects of the opium. All those go into malt beer. And for fear the beer-guzzlers won’t guzzle down enough, alum is put into this “stuff” to increase the thirst of the drinker. Alum is a dryer. The drinker is always dry. The alum makes him crave more beer, then whisky. Tobacco is found in the red wines and red brandies. It goes into the whisky also. Five hundred northern volunteers were witnesses to the taking of fifteen or twenty pounds of dog-leg tobacco out of the bottom of a whisky barrel at Savannah, Ga., the contents of which had just been drained off into the stomachs both of rebel and Union soldiers. Our boys in blue had got drunk on the dirty fluid, and the sight of that mass of “devil’s weed” was not a little disgusting.

Worse. An extensive wine-maker at Philadelphia told Rev. T. P. Hunt, of Wyoming, Pa., that in order to procure the nutty flavor for which “Maderia” was so much admired, he put a bag of cockroaches into the liquor and let them remain there till they were dissolved. He furthermore declared that this was a general custom with his fraternity. Now cockroaches are the special horror of most people. The excrement of this voracious bug has an unbearable odor. How delicious must be that “Maderia” of which its abominable juice forms a part! Cochineal also, a red powder used for dyeing, made of the dried bodies of an ugly, swollen insect, goes into the liquors to give them the right color. Will you have a glass of bug Maderia, O wine bibber?

Perhaps you prefer something stronger. Then, import Swedish brandy and quaff the juice of black ants. Thomas McMullen is the author of “A Hand Book of Wines.” It is a text-book and guide with all wine-makers. On page 323 he says, “Swedish Brandy is made of corn whisky and black ants.” One ant in the sirup cup spoils it all for me. Now take ten bushels, crush them, macerate them, squeeze the juice out, and put it into your pipes of brandy. Sweet, isn’t it? “I drink nice foreign brandy,” said a gentleman; “I don’t use any of the spurious stuff.” You drink the kind perhaps that passed through the Custom House at this port the past summer. Splendid “Antwerp” brandy, in case, was invoiced at $2.25 per case, which is eighteen and three-fourth cents a bottle! When it comes back from New York into a retailer’s hands you will pay $1.50 per bottle for it.

Liquor men have fertile brains. The Scientific American, adverting to the fact that the poisonous potato-bug is used in some quarters as a substitute for the Spanish Fly, wants to know why this horrid insect can’t be further utilized. I commend the suggestion to the whisky and wine-makers. Gather them up by the ton (locusts and all) and convert them into daily drinks for the people. Old topers will swallow down a barrel full to get at one pint of alcohol, just as a cow drinks a whole barrel of swill to reach one potato in the bottom!

Worse and worse. What would you say were I to sell you cider, vinegar, molasses, etc., in barrels soaked in dissolved barn-yard manure? Yet the liquor casks are advised to be thus treated. If you ask, “What for?” you get the answer from the books, “To sweeten them.” “The Wine and Spirit Merchant’s Companion,” by J. Hartley, London, 1835, on page 144, says: “Boil fresh cow manure and soak the casks with it.” A sweet business truly is this liquor traffic. Reader, how many glasses have you emptied into your stomach, drawn from those “sweetened” casks?

In boyhood I used to think that the mission of logwood was to dye garments, not human insides. But white wines and fresh-made spirit need to be colored. Logwood will do it. Professor Parkes, in his work on “Hygiene,” says, “Logwood is the great coloring matter for wines.” It is mild astringent and rather harmless, but it would go in if needed were it oil of vitriol. A lady at Rouse’s Point used as a vinegar barrel for several years a cask obtained of a liquor vender. On it was the lying brand “Port Wine.” On knocking in the head she took out a ten quart pan full of logwood chips. They had rattled about within the cask for years. One of our most reliable citizens informs us that he has seen quarts of logwood chips and shavings in barrels once filled with wine, and now piled in the back yard of one of the best hotels in the town of Champlain. In one he saw nearly half a bushel! Our churches, our invalids, and our gentry had drunk it all for nice, pure, “Port.” The red “slops” never saw Oporto, perhaps never saw a grape. I can make of a few drugs just as good wine for less than twenty-five cents a gallon.

Mr. Delevan never forgot his last cask of wine. He purchased it for the pure article. Tested by taste, and smell, it was by the best judges in Albany County pronounced pure. Only a few days later he discovered it was made in the secret loft of a wine-seller. Every gallon was doctored whisky and drugs—there was not a drop of grape juice in it. Mr. Delevan never bought another cask of wine. War against the infamous liquor traffic was ever after his life-work. He died at his post.

James Duane, of S——, N. Y., bought a cask of Port wine. It had come directly from Oporto. The importer said it was pure. Mr. D., alas, confided in the honesty (?) of a liquor man. He chuckled over his prize. He drew off and bottled the fluid for his choicest friends to quaff with him. He dreamed of the social hour when

“The bubbles would swim on the beaker’s brim, And break on his lips while meeting.”

Alas, for human hopes! In an evil hour he sawed the cask in two. In the bottom were the lees, composed of logwood shavings, alum, and a dirty residuum of other unnameable drugs. Wasn’t he an astonished man? Pure, imported, foreign wine; you never saw it. Only last May the authorities of Paris during a single week threw into the river Seine three hundred barrels of spurious, poisonous wine. The whole world is flooded with such stuff. In T. McMullen’s “Hand Book of Wines,” on page 172, he says, “One wine shipper in a single year shipped from Cette and Marseilles more than 80,000 bottles of Champagne wine,” not the product of grapes, but “wholly fabricated.” There is no end to this work.

Now, which do you prefer? Western tobacco beer, or Southern tobacco whisky? Or will you have foreign black-ant brandy, or foreign logwood wine; or United States cockroach wine? or it may be sulphuric acid or strychnine in a brandy cask “soaked in fresh cow manure” would suit you better. “You pays your money and you takes your choice.” But if we should put these abominations and infernal drugs into your chests of tea and coffee, your barrels of flour and fish, and sirup, vinegar, &c., what would you say? what do?

How long, O Lord, how long?—D. T. TAYLOR in Plattsburgh (N. Y.) Sentinel.