THE BUSINESS OF ALCOHOL.
By Justus Albor
In the minds of all earnest, thoughtful people there is an abhorrence of the manufacture of alcohol, because from the time it issues from the coiled and poisonous worm in the distillery until it empties itself into the grave, it demoralizes every one with whom it comes in contact. Can one stand by and calmly contemplate this thing unmoved? Look at the stream of death banked on either hand by dishonor and crime and thronged with the wrecks of humanity! Behold the ignorance, the insanity, the destitution, the suicides! See the wee babes who turn with a piteous, unsatisfied wail from faded and withered breasts, the weeping and despairing mothers, the wives asking for bread! See the man of genius it has wrecked, now struggling with imaginary serpents produced by this vile thing! Think of the jails, the almshouses, the asylums, the prisons and the scaffolds built upon the banks of this river of death, and do you wonder that every thinking man and woman turns shudderingly away from this vile stuff—alcohol? Intemperance cuts down youth in its vigor, manhood in its strength, old age in its weakness; it breaks the father's heart, bereaves the doting mother, extinguishes natural affections, erases conjugal love, blots out filial attachment, blights hope and brings down mourning age in sorrow to the grave! It produces weakness not strength, sickness not health, death not life! It makes wives, widows; children, orphans; fathers, fiends; and all of them paupers and beggars! It feeds rheumatism, invites cholera, imports pestilence and embraces consumption. It fills the land with idleness, misery and crime. It fills the almshouses and demands the asylums, populates the penitentiaries and furnishes victims for the scaffold! It engenders controversies, fosters quarrels and cherishes riots! Alcohol is the life-blood of the gambler, the element of the thief, the prop of the highwayman and the support of the midnight incendiary. It invites the father to butcher his helpless children, helps the husband to massacre his wife, and the child to grind the paracidal ax. It burns up men, consumes women, detests life, curses God and despises heaven! Intemperance suborns witnesses, nurses perjury, defiles the jury box, and stains judicial ermine. It degrades the citizen, debases the legislator, dishonors the statesman, and disarms the patriot. It brings shame, not honor; misery, not happiness; despair, not hope; danger, not safety; and with the malevolence of a fiend it calmly surveys its frightful and unsatiated havoc! It poisons felicity, kills peace, ruins morals, blights confidence, slays reputation, wipes out national honor, then curses the world and laughs at its ruin! It does all this and more—it murders the soul, blotting out that divine image in which man was created, imprinting in its stead the diabolical likeness of "that old serpent, the devil." All this and more is the business of alcohol in this world. Knowing this, can we harbor it in our homes? Can we deal it out to our friends, neighbors, and loved ones? Can we assist it in its devastating work by helping to make it legal or respectable? He who compromises with it in any way yields to it, and in that yielding encourages the baleful business.