"Am I my Brother's Keeper?"
By T. W. Brown
"Go, ye who deal out the drunkard's dram for paltry gain, go where night is the blackest, and poor weary hearts, are slowly breaking under their weight of woe, tell them you have joyous news. Tell them that, for all this bitter desolation, your palm is filled with gold. Tell the smitten victims of the household, that out of their mouths, off their backs, and from their blighted fields, you have gathered a harvest of gold. Tell the pale, wasting wife and mother that you have a paltry percentage of all that was noble in the husband or kind in the father in yellow gold. Tell the drunkard, as he dreams perchance that he can yet beat back the red billows which toss and consume him, that for his poor body's and soul's death you have gold. Stand at the threshold of the poorhouse and taunt the squalid, the deformed, and the idiotic, with the news that, out of their ruin, you gathered gold. Tell the murderer that you made him a murderer for gold. Stand by the new graves of the last twelve months in our land, and whisper to the fifty thousand sleepers—victims of your 'regulated' traffic—that you slew them for gold. Enter the vestibule of perdition, and with Bible in hand, read that no drunkard can inherit the kingdom of God, and as uncounted thousands charge you with their damnation, comfort them with the assurance that you did it for gold. Follow your slaughtered host to the judgment, and when He who called the first fratricide to account, shall call for your brother, answer that you slew him for gold.—T. W. Brown, on a death by delirium tremens."