Temperance | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 20, 1882

Temperance.

A Plain Drunk.

There were seventeen plain drunks before the Mayor to-day.—[Monday's News.]

SEVENTEEN plain drunks! A plain drunk means that a man has just poured poison into himself until his mind is blotted out, reason dethroned, his eyes two, wild, glassy, windowless abodes from whence come not one ray of reason—just a wild, vacant stare. His limbs, too, have lost their strength, his legs will not hold up his limp body, and he reels and totters and staggers, but he does not resist the officer as he jerks him roughly along. If when the officer cuffs and pushes him, he were to swear, that would be drunk and profanity; or if when he shoves him along he were to make the least resistance, then the officer would mash his skull with his mace, and that would be drunk and resisting an officer; or, if while crazed with liquor, the man were to go howling and roaring like a fiend into his home, and strike to the floor his poor, starved, broken-hearted wife, that would be drunk and wife-beating.

But these seventeen men were just drunk. They have drank liquor until it has become a disease with them. The sober, Christian people of the city have licensed men with “good moral characters,” to sell for money a deadly poison, and these men, with “good moral characters,” sell a slow, deadly poison until it takes possession of its victim, and literally eats him up, body, mind, and soul; it even tears his clothes off and covers him with filthy rags; it breaks his wife’s heart, and starves his little children until they cry for bread. All this the good, moral Christian men know. So do the men with “good, moral characters.” Last Sunday seventeen men, poisoned by this deadly stuff until they were as powerless to resist it as a man starving to death for a drink of water would be powerless to pass the well at the post-office, went into these good moral characters’ places of business, and mind you on Sunday, bought and drank poison until they were thrown into the calaboose, where they remained until Monday, when they were dragged before the Mayor and fined about fifteen dollars each. Some of them could pay it, but it took the bread out of their famished children’s mouths. Some of them have no money—they will go to jail, or the stone pile, while their wives wash to get money to buy food to keep the children from starving. All this in civilized, Christianized Indianapolis, with her more than seventy churches.

—Monitor Journal.