Temperance | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 14, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 31.

Temperance.

Comfort for Drinkers.

IN New York recently, Maj. C. B. Cotton, vice-president of the Manhattan Temperance Association, made a revelation well calculated to startle liquor drinkers. After confessing that he had manufactured liquors for twenty-five years, he said:—

“We make champagne which you buy for the genuine article. It costs $4.00 a basket to manufacture it; we sell it for $10.00 to dealers. We make the stuff and put it in our own bottles, make a fac-simile label of the genuine, import Spanish corks for the bottles, and French straw and baskets to pack them in. We want to make a genuine imported wine. We buy one barrel of it. Our cooper takes the barrel as a pattern and makes ours by it. They are new and bright. We put them through a staining process, and they come out old and nasty and worn, just like the genuine importation. Thirty-two deadly poisons are used in the manufacture of wine. Not one gallon in fifty sold here ever saw France. We send thousands of gallons of whisky to France to have them come back to us something else. Of all poisonous liquors in the world Bourbon whisky is the deadliest. Strychnine is only one of the poisons in it. A certain oil is used in its manufacture eight drops of which will kill a cat in eight minutes, and a dog in nine minutes. The most temperate men in New York are the wholesale dealers. They dare not drink the stuff they sell.”—Sel.