p. 551 | The Saloon-Keeper’s Gains by John Bartholomew Gough

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 11, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 35.

The Saloon-Keeper’s Gains.

By John Bartholomew Gough

“I HAVE made a thousand dollars during the last three months,” said a saloon-keeper, boastfully, to a crowd of his townsmen.

“You have made more than that,” quietly remarked a listener.

“What is that?” was the quick response.

“You have made wretched homes—women and children poor, and sick and weary of life. You have made my two sons drunkards,” continued the speaker, with trembling earnestness; “you made the younger of the two so drunk that he fell and injured himself for life. You have made their mother a broken-hearted woman. Oh, yes; you have made much—more than I can reckon up, but you’ll get the full count some day—you’ll get it some day!”

A minister of the gospel told me one of the most thrilling incidents I have heard in my life. A member of his congregation came home, for the first time in his life, intoxicated, and his boy met him upon the door-step, clapping his hands and exclaiming, “Papa has come home!” He seized that boy by the shoulder, swung him around, staggered and fell in the hall. That minister said to me: “I spent the night in that house; I went out, bared my brow, that the night dew might fall upon it and cool it. I walked up and down the hill. There was his child dead! There was his wife in convulsions, and he asleep. A man about thirty years of age asleep, with a dead child in the house having a blue mark upon the temple where the corner of the marble steps had come in contact with his head as he swung him around, and his wife on the brink of the grave. “Mr. Gough,” said my friend, “I cursed the drink.” He had told me I must remain until he awoke, and I did. When he awoke he passed his hand over his face and exclaimed, “What is the matter? where is my boy?” “You cannot see him.” “Stand out of my way! I will see my boy.” To prevent confusion I took him to the child’s bed, and as I turned down the sheet and showed him the corpse, he uttered a wild shriek, “Ah, my dear child!” That minister said further to me: “One year after, he was brought from the lunatic asylum to lie side by side with his wife in one grave, and I attended the funeral.” The minister of the gospel who told me this fact is to-day a drunken hostler in a stable in the city of Boston. Now tell me what rum will not do? It will debase, degrade, imbrute, and damn everything that is noble, bright, glorious and godlike in a human being. There is nothing drink will not do that is vile, dastardly, cowardly, and hellish. Then are we not to fight till the day of our death?—J. B. Gough.