p. 365 | Health and Temperance by Theodore L. Cuyler

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 16, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 23.

Health and Temperance.

By Theodore L. Cuyler

A PLAIN TALK ON TEMPERANCE.

As a prohibitionist I feel entirely confident that temperance reformers are committing a most serious error in giving such excessive prominence to the civil and political aspect of the reform. The temptation to do this is peculiarly strong. The drinking saloon confronts us on every side, as the visible embodiment of the drink curse; it flaunts its bloody flag in our faces, and it seems to be a very short and summary way of disposing of it, to pass stringent laws for its suppression. This temptation is made stronger by the specious assertion that negro slavery was removed by a political party. The simple truth is that the Free Soil party, by the election of Lincoln, drove the slave oligarchy up to the point of committing suicide by armed secession. If the rum oligarchy were now confined to a single section of the land, and if it should, in sheer desperation, fire on the flag, and attempt to destroy the nation's life, then it would speedily be laid in the same tomb with the defunct institution of slavery. But there is really a very slight analogy between the political conflict with the drink traffic, and the political conflict which was waged under the banner of "Free Soil, free speech, and free labor." Negro slavery was essentially a temporary civil institution, the creature of unjust civil law. The dram-shop is not a temporary institution created by statute; it is the creature of the drinking usages of society. Set it down as an incontrovertible truth that liquor saloons are not the creations of license laws, or of any other civil enactments. (The original purpose of requiring a license was to limit the number and curtail the mischief of dram-shops.) Drinking saloons do not owe their existence to a few lines on a statute-book; no, nor are they to be entirely and permanently uprooted by simply enacting a few opposite lines on a statute-book. If so, the problem would be very simple and manageable. The liquor traffic, whether it be conducted by the hogshead or the gill, whether in the marble hotel or in the vilest cellar, is the creature of the drinking usages. To fight dram-shops without any moral efforts to keep people from drinking intoxicants, would be as ridiculous folly as it would be to organize police forces and build jails without ever teaching a human being that it is a crime to steal.

The only way to reach an evil is to go to its fount-head. The fount-head of liquor selling is liquor drinking. Deeper down than any civil enactments—whether high license, low license, or no license—lie the drinking usages, and every remedy is transient and superficial that does not reach them. I do not dispute that the saloon tempts thousands to drink intoxicants who might not be tempted otherwise; but it is also true that even the worst dram-seller does not open a saloon from sheer malice to kill off his neighbors. He opens it simply to make money by ministering to appetite, and by supplying his whiskies and wines to his customers, and the most effectual way to break up the liquor traffic is to get away its customers and starve it out. It is certain as gravitation that if any large number of persons in any community are determined to have intoxicants they will somehow manage to get them, even if we pile our prohibitory laws as high as the Brooklyn bridge towers. They will get them either by stealthy evasions of law, or by importing liquors for their own private use, or by some other process. Righteous and beneficial as are laws of prohibition when well enforced, yet to rely on law alone, without any moral efforts against liquor drinking, would be as insane as to dam up a torrent at its mouth while neglecting to dry up its fount-head. That fount-head, we repeat again, is the drinking usages, which demand, which create, and which maintain the hotel bar and the dram-shop. Prohibitory laws help us, and many good people claim that "high license" laws aid us also; but the one permanent cure for dram-selling is to break up the habit of dram-drinking. If nobody wants whisky, nobody will offer whisky. This is the happy case in the town of Bassbrook, Ireland, where four thousand sober, sensible people keep everything like a liquor shop out of their town. Prohibition is automatic in such a community.

By this time my readers will understand why—even as a prohibitionist—I insist that it is fatal folly for us temperance reformers to direct our efforts entirely, or even chiefly, in the line of civil enactment or political action. Votes and laws are the product of human convictions of duty; neither votes nor laws are efficient without conscientious convictions behind them. To awaken, to solidify, and to maintain these convictions, is the sure key and the only key to permanent success in the great conflict against the bottle, whether that bottle stand on a private table or on the counter of a gin-shop. We must address ourselves, therefore, to the individual consciences of people, old and young, and ply them with arguments and persuasions to let the bottle alone. The best days the temperance movement ever saw were the days in which its chief effort was to make people conscientious abstainers from every kind of intoxicants, to make them unwilling to enter a drink-shop, or to let the drink from the shop enter them. The temperance reform is not a political movement; it is a grand moral and social reform, which only invokes the aid of civil law to accomplish its beneficent results.

Right here comes in the prodigious power and responsibility of the Christian church. Drunkenness and grog-selling are sins; it is the province of God's church to lay the ax to the root of all sins. The church has no more right to blink these sins than it has to blink blaspheming, adultery, falsehood, or dishonesty. Nor can minister or Christian people shirk their duty and relegate this vital question to the politician and the policeman, without treason to God. The bottle damns souls! Let the pulpit, therefore, make no truce with it; let conscientious parents banish it from their tables and social gatherings; let every boy and girl be instructed to practice total abstinence.

Prevention of drinking is vastly safer, stronger, surer than prohibition of selling. It goes to the root, because it cuts up the drinking usages. I rejoice also that temperance school-books are being introduced into public and private schools, to warn every child against the serpent of alcohol. This, too, goes to the root; save the children and you in time save the nation. Brethren and sisters, in this glorious reform, let us use civil law as a powerful auxiliary; but let us not forget that deeper down than legal penalties lie conscience and custom. When conscience is reached and customs are reformed, the reform is permanent. Above all we need God's help, God's gospel, and God's almighty Spirit. Death to the bottle is the only sure death to the dram-shop; and the bottle can only be broken by appeals to the consciences, hearts, and habits of our fellow-men. You may build only a political castle in the air, if you will. I, for one, prefer to build solid results on a solid rock.—Theodore L. Cuyler, D. D., in Independent.