alarmed; that we are hunting a friend; that we are driving one from our
country without whose aid we can never check the ravages of disease, or
perform our labor, or have any hilarity. It is not, say they, a
poisonous foe. It is a pleasant cordial; a cheerful restorative; the
first friend of the infant; the support of the enfeebled mother; a sweet
luxury, given by the parent to the child; the universal token of
kindness, friendship, and hospitality. It adorns the sideboards and
tables of the rich, and enlivens the social circles of the poor; goes
with the laborer as his most cheering companion; accompanies the mariner
in his long and dreary voyage; enlivens the carpenter, the mason, the
blacksmith, the joiner, as they ply their trade; follows the merchant to
his counter, the physician to his infected rooms, the lawyer to his
office, and the divine to his study, cheering all and comforting all. It
is the life of our trainings, and town-meetings, and elections, and
bees, and raisings, and harvests, and sleighing-parties. It is the best
domestic medicine, good for a cold and a cough, for pain in the
stomach, and weakness in the limbs, loss of appetite and rheumatism,
and is a great support in old age. It makes a market for our rye and
apples; sustains 100,000 families who are distilling and vending, and
pours annually millions of dollars into our national treasury. Had the
wolf possessed the cunning of the fox, she would have told Putnam as
smooth a story as this. But it would have made no difference. The old
man's cornfields were fattened by the blood of his sheep, and he would
give no quarter. And the blood of our countrymen has been poured out at
the shrine of the demon Intemperance, and we must give none. Talk we of
alcohol as a friend! As well may a mother praise the crocodile which has
devoured her offspring.
Look, my countrymen, at the ravages of intemperance. Fix your eye on its
waste of property.
At the lowest calculation, it has annually despoiled us of a hundred
millions of dollars--of thirty millions for an article which is nothing
worth, and seventy or eighty millions more to compensate for the
mischiefs that article has done--money enough to accomplish all that the
warmest patriot could wish for his country, and to fill, in a short
period, the world with Bibles and a preached Gospel. What farmer would
not be roused, should a wild beast come once a year into his borders and
destroy the best cow in his farmyard? But 6-1/4 cents a day for ardent
spirit wastes $22 81 cents a year, and in 40 years nearly $1,000, which
is a thousand times as much as scores of drunkards are worth at their
burial.
See the pauperism it has produced. We have sung of our goodly heritage,
and foreign nations have disgorged their exuberant population that they
might freely subsist in this land of plenty. But in this granary of the
world are everywhere seen houses without windows, fields without
tillage, barns without roofs, children without clothing, and
penitentiaries and almshouses filled to overflowing; and a traveller
might write--BEGGARS MADE HERE. We are groaning under our pauperism, and
talking of taxes, and hard times, and no trade; but intemperance has
stalked through our land and devoured our substance. It has entered the
houses of our unsuspecting inhabitants as a friend, and taken the food
from their tables, and the clothing from their beds, and the fuel from
their fire, and turned their lands over to others, and drove them from
their dwellings to subsist on beggary and crime, or drag out a miserable
existence in penitentiaries and almshouses. Two-thirds, or 150,000 of
the wretched tenants of these abodes of poverty in the United States,
were reduced by intemperance. So themselves confess. It was rum, brandy,
and whiskey, that did it. And the Prison Discipline report tells of
50,000 cases of imprisonment for debt annually in the United States, in
consequence of the use of ardent spirits. O, its sweeps of property can
never be known.
Look at the crime it has occasioned.
It is said that there is a spring in China which makes every man that
drinks it a villain. Eastern tales are founded on some plain matter of
fact. This spring may be some distillery or dram-shop; for this is the
natural effect of alcohol. It breaks down the conscience, quickens the
circulation, increases the courage, makes man flout at law and right,
and hurries him to the perpetration of every abomination and crime.
Excite a man by this fluid, and he is bad enough for any thing. He can
lie, and steal, and fight, and swear, and plunge the dagger into the
bosom of his nearest friend. No vice is too filthy, no crime too
tragical for the drunkard. The records of our courts tell of acts
committed under the influence of rum, which curdle the blood in our
veins. Husbands butcher their wives; children slaughter their parents.
Far the greater part of the atrocities committed in our land, proceed
from its maddening power. "I declare in this public manner, and with the
most solemn regard to truth," said Judge Rush, some years ago in a
charge to a grand jury, "that I do not recollect an instance since my
being concerned in the administration of justice, of a single person
being put on his trial for manslaughter which did not originate in
drunkenness; and but few instances of trial for murder where the crime
did not spring from the same unhappy cause." Of 895 complaints presented
to the police court in Boston in one year, 400 were under the statute
against common drunkards. Of 1,061 cases of criminal prosecution in a
court in North Carolina, more than 800 proceeded from intemperance. Five
thousand complaints are made yearly in New York to the city police of
outrages committed by intoxicated persons; and the late city attorney
reports, that of twenty-two cases of murder which it had been his duty
to examine, every one of them had been committed in consequence of
intemperate drinking. "Nine-tenths of all the prisoners under my care,"
says Captain Pillsbury, warden of our own state prison, "are decidedly
intemperate men, and were brought to their present condition, directly
or indirectly, through intoxicating liquor. Many have confessed to me
with tears, that they never felt tempted to the commission of crime,
thus punishable, but when under the influence of strong drink." And the
Prison Discipline report states, "that of 125,000 criminals committed to
our prisons in a single year, 93,750 were excited to their commission of
crime by spirituous liquors."
Look at its destruction of intellect.
It reduces man to a beast, to a fool, to a devil. The excessive drinker
first becomes stupid, then idiotic, then a maniac. Men of the finest
geniuses, most acute minds, and profound learning, have dwindled under
the touch of this withering demon to the merest insignificance, and been
hooted by boys for their silly speeches and silly actions, or chained in
a madhouse as unsafe in society. Of eighty-seven admitted into the New
York hospital in one year, the insanity of twenty-seven was occasioned
by ardent spirit; and the physicians of the Pennsylvania hospital
report, that one-third of the insane of that institution were ruined by
intemperance. What if one-sixth of our maniacs were deprived of their
reason by the bite of the dogs, the friendly inmates of our houses, or
by some vegetable common on our table; who would harbor the dangerous
animal, or taste the poisonous vegetable? But, one-third of our maniacs
are deranged by alcohol. Indeed, every drunkard is in a temporary
delirium; and no man who takes even a little into his system, possesses
that sound judgment, or is capable of that patient investigation or
intellectual effort, which would be his without it. Just in proportion
as man comes under its influence, he approximates to idiotism or
madness.
Look at its waste of health and life.
The worm of the still, says the Missouri gentleman, never touches the
brute creation, but as if the most venomous of all beings, it seizes the
noblest prey. It bites man. And where it once leaves its subtle poison,
farewell to health--farewell to long life. The door is open, and in rush
dyspepsia, jaundice, dropsy, gout, obstructions of the liver,
epilepsy--the deadliest plagues let loose on fallen man--all terminating
in delirium tremens or mania a potu, a prelude to the eternal buffetings
of foul spirits in the world of despair. One out of every forty, or
three hundred thousand of our population, have taken up their abode in
the lazar-house of drunkenness, and thirty thousand die annually the
death of the drunkard. These sweeps of death mock all the ravages of
war, famine, pestilence, and shipwreck. The yellow-fever in
Philadelphia, in 1793, felt to be one of the greatest curses of heaven,
destroyed but four thousand. In our last war the sword devoured but five
hundred a year: intemperance destroys two hundred a week. Shipwrecks
destroy suddenly, and the country groans when forty or fifty human
beings are suddenly engulfed in the ocean; but more than half of all the
sudden deaths occur in fits of intoxication. It needed not a fable to
award the prize of greatest ingenuity in malice and murder to the demon
who invented brandy, over the demon who invented war.
Look at its murder of souls.
Not satisfied with filling jails, and hospitals, and graveyards, it must
people hell. Every moral and religious principle is dissipated before
it. The heart becomes, under its influence, harder than the nether
mill-stone. It has gone into the pulpit and made a Judas of the minister
of Christ. It has insinuated itself into the church, and bred
putrefaction and death among the holy. It has entered the anxious room
in seasons of revival, and quenched conviction in the breast of the
distressed sinner, or sent him, exhilarated with a false hope, to
profess religion, and be a curse to the church. It has accompanied men,
Sabbath after Sabbath, to the house of God, and made them insensible as
blocks of marble to all the thunders of Sinai and sweet strains of Zion.
It has led to lying, profane swearing, Sabbath-breaking, tale-bearing,
contention; and raised up an army, I may almost say, in every village,
who wish for no Sabbath, and no Bible, and no Saviour, and who cry out
with stammering tongues, "Away with him, crucify him." It has, without
doubt, been the most potent of all the emissaries of Satan, to
obliterate the fear of the Lord, turn men away from the Sabbath and the
sanctuary, steel them against the word, the providence, and grace of
God, stupefy the conscience, bring into action every dark and vile
passion, and fill up with immortal souls the dark caverns of eternal
night. Let a man, day by day, hover around a dram-shop, and sip and sip
at his bottle, and the devil is sure of him. No ministers, no Sabbaths,
no prayers, no tears from broken-hearted and bleeding relatives, can
avail to save him. He holds that man by a chain which nothing but
Omnipotence can break.
And look, too, at its waste of human happiness.
Yes, look--look for yourselves. The woes of drunkenness mock all
description. Some tell of the happiness of drinking. O, if there is a
wretched being on earth, it is the drunkard. His property wasted, his
character gone, his body loathsome, his passions wild, his appetite
craving the poison that kills him, his hopes of immortality blasted for
ever; it is all
"Me miserable,
Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell."
And his family. I can never look at it but with feelings of deepest
anguish.
"Domestic happiness, thou only bliss
Of paradise that hast escaped the fall,"
thou art shipwrecked here. Sorrow, woe, wounds, poverty, babblings, and
contention, have entered in and dwell here. Yet we have 300,000 such
families in the land; and if each family consists of four individuals,
more than a million persons are here made wretched by this curse of
curses.
And his death. O, to die in our houses, amid our friends, and with the
consolations of religion, strips not death of its character as the king
of terrors. But to die as the drunkard dies, an outcast from society, in
some hovel or almshouse, on a bed of straw, or in some ditch, or pond,
or frozen in a storm; to die of the _brain-fever_, conscience
upbraiding, hell opening, and foul spirits passing quick before his
vision to seize him before his time--this, this is woe; this is the
triumph of sin and Satan. Yet, in the last ten years, 300,000 have died
in our land the death of the drunkard; rushing, where?--"Drunkards shall
not inherit the kingdom of God"--rushing into hell, where their worm
dieth not, and their fire can never be quenched. And if the demon is
suffered to continue his ravages, 300,000 more of our existing
population will, in the same way, rush into eternal burnings.
And his funeral. Have you ever been at a drunkard's funeral? I do not
ask, did you look at his corpse? It was cadaverous before he died. But
did you look at his father as he bent over the grave and exclaimed in
agony, "O, my son, my son, would to God I had died for thee, my son."
Did you look at his widow, pale with grief, and at his ragged,
hunger-bitten children at her side, and see them turn away to share the
world's cold pity, or, perhaps, rejected and forlorn, follow the same
path to death and hell?
Such are the ravages of the demon we hunt. Its footsteps are marked with
blood. We glory in our liberties, and every fourth of July our bells
ring a merry peal, as if we were the happiest people on earth. But O,
our country, our country! She has a worm at her vitals, making fast a
wreck of her physical energies, her intellect, and her moral principle;
augmenting her pauperism and her crime; nullifying her elections--for a
drunkard is not fit for an elector--and preparing her for subjection to
the most merciless tyranny that ever scourged any nation under heaven.
We talk of our religion, and weep over the delusions of the false
prophet and the horrors of Juggernaut; but a more deceitful prophet is
in our churches than Mahomet, and a more bloody idol than Juggernaut
rolls through our land, crushing beneath its wheels our sons and our
daughters. Woe, woe, woe to Zion. Satan is in Eden. And if no check is
put to the ravages of the demon, our benevolent institutions must die,
our sanctuaries be forsaken, our beautiful fields be wastes, and the
church will read the history of her offspring in the third of Romans:
_Their throat is an open sepulchre; their mouth is full of cursing and
bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood_--all, blasting our
bright hope of the speedy approach of millennial glory.
There is cause, then, for the general alarm that has been excited in our
country; reason for this extensive and powerful combination to hunt and
destroy the monster. Much, by divine help, has been done. He has been
routed and brought to the light of day; the mischief he has done has
been exposed; his apologists have been confronted; he is driven into his
den, and now how can he be destroyed? That he must be destroyed there
can be no question. The man who does not wish for the suppression of
intemperance must have the heart of a fiend; especially, if he wishes to
grow rich on the miseries of his fellow-men. And he must be destroyed
now. It is now or never. Men may say enough has been done, and talk
about his being held where he is. He cannot be held there. He has the
cunning of a serpent, and he will escape through some fissure in the
rock. He is now in our power. The temperance movement, which has on it
the impress of the finger of God, has brought him within our grasp; and
if we let him escape, the curse of curses will be entailed upon our
children. How then can he be destroyed? I answer, and thousands answer,
by starvation. No weapon can reach him so long as you feed him. But who
has a heart so traitorous to humanity as to feed this monster? Every man
who now, in the face of the light that is shed upon this subject,
distils, or vends, or uses intoxicating liquor; every distillery, and
every dram-shop in the land, nourishes this foe to human peace; every
man who takes the alcoholic poison into his system, or imparts it to
others, except as he takes and imparts other poisons to check disease,
gives life to the beast. I need not stop to prove it. It is manifest to
the child. Let every distillery in the land cease, and every dram-shop
be closed, and total abstinence become the principle of every
individual, and the demon will be dead; yes, take away from him his
wine, his brandy, and his whiskey, and he will perish for ever. But here
is the very brunt of the battle. We have hunted the monster through the
land, and driven him into his den; and now we must stand at the very
mouth of the cavern, and contend with our fellow-men and
fellow-sufferers--yes, and fellow-Christians too--who are either afraid
to attack the monster, or are determined he shall live.
And first, we are met by a body of men who tell us that alcohol is
useful. And what if it is? What if every benefit that the moderate and
immoderate drinker can think of, flows from it? What will this do to
compensate for its giant evils which are desolating our land? Is man so
bent on self-gratification that he will have every sweet, though it be
mingled with poison? Will he exercise no reason; make no discrimination
between unmixed good and good followed by desolating woes? Tea was good.
But, said our fathers, if with it we must have all the horrors of
British tyranny, away with it from our dwellings. My countrymen, "the
voice of your fathers' blood cries to you from the ground, 'My sons,
scorn to be slaves!'" Away with the shameful plea that you cannot do
without an article which subjects you to an evil ten thousand times
worse than all the horrors of British tyranny. You kindle the fires of
liberty by pointing to the woes of the prison-ship, and the bones of
your countrymen whitening on the shores of New Jersey. O, crouch not to
a tyrant who binds a million in his chains, and demands thirty thousand
annually for his victims. I blush for the imbecility of the man who must
have an article on his farm which eats up his substance and his vitals,
and may turn his son into an idiot and a brute. Better have no farm.
Better go at once, with his family, into the poor-house, and be
supported by public charity.
Next comes canting Hypocrisy, with his Bible in his hand, telling us
that "every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be
received with thanksgiving." What does he mean; that ardent spirit is
the gift of God? Pray, in what stream of his bounty, from what mountain
and hill does it flow down to man? O, it is in the rye, and the apple,
and the sugar, and the Mussulman has taught us Christians how to distil
it. And so the poet tells us Satan taught his legions how to make
gunpowder. "There are," said he,
"Deep under ground, materials dark and crude,
Of spirituous and fiery spume.
These, in their dark nativity, the deep
Shall yield us, pregnant with internal flame;
Which, into hollow engines, long and round,
Thick ramm'd, at th' other bore with touch of fire
Dilated and infuriate, shall send forth
From far, with thundering noise, among our foes
Such implements of mischief as shall dash
To pieces and o'erwhelm whatever stands
Adverse.
Th' invention all admired; up they turn'd
Wide the celestial soil; sulphurous and nitrous foam
They found, they mingled; and, with subtle art
Concocted and adjusted, they reduced
To blackest grain."
And now, to carry out the argument, gunpowder, and guns, and swords, are
the gift of God, and men must needs use them, and kill one another as
fast as possible.
But nothing, it is plead, was made in vain. Spirit is good for
something, and to banish it from use, and promise that we will "touch
not, taste not, handle not," is contempt of the works of God. I should
like to have seen what the Pomfret hero would have done with a man who
should have stood before him, and said, Don't you destroy that wolf; God
made it, and it may be good for something.
Next, we are checked in our principle of starvation by a set of
thoughtless youth and presumptuous men, who say there is no danger from
the demon if we keep him low. All his ravages have been occasioned by
his being full fed. Let him sip but little, feed him _prudently_, and he
will do no harm.
"Good," says the demon, growling in his den; "that is all I want. The
doctrine of prudent use is the basis of my kingdom. Temperate drinking
has made all the drunkards in the land, and keep it up in all your towns
and villages, and I shall be satisfied."
O the delusion! Prudent use! What is the testimony of every chemist and
physician in the land? Alcohol is a _poison_.
"Not a bloodvessel," says Dr. Mussey, "however minute, not a thread of
nerve in the whole animal machine escapes its influence. It disturbs the
functions of life; it increases for a time the action of the living
organs, but lessens the power of that action; hence the deep depression
and collapse which follow preternatural excitement. By habitual use it
renders the living fibre less and less susceptible to the healthy
operation of unstimulating food and drink, its exciting influences soon
become incorporated with all the living actions of the body, and the
diurnal sensations of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, are strongly
associated with the recollection of its exhilarating effects, and thus
bring along with them the resistless desire for its repetition." More
than fifty per cent. of common spirits are alcohol, this deadly
substance, holding rank with henbane, hemlock, prussic acid, foxglove,
poison sumach. Nausea, vertigo, vomiting, exhilaration of spirits for a
time, and subsequent stupor, and even total insensibility and death, are
their accompaniments. Broussais remarks, "A single portion of ardent
spirit taken into the stomach produces a temporary phlogosis." Now, I
submit it to every considerate man, whether there can be any prudent use
of a poison, a single portion of which produces the same disease of
which the drunkard dies, and a disease which brings along with it a
resistless desire for a repetition of the draught.
Thoughtless, self-sufficient men say, they can control this desire, can
govern their appetite, can enjoy the exhilaration of strong drink, and
yet be temperate. Let them look at the poor inebriate wallowing in his
pollution. He once stood just where they stand; boasted just as they
boast; had as fair character, and as kind friends, and as precious a
soul and bright hopes of heaven as they have. Let them tell why he does
not control his appetite. Perhaps they say, he is a fool. Ah, what made
him a fool? Or, his reason is gone. And what took away his reason? Or,
he has lost his character. And what took away his character? Or, his
sense of shame is departed. And what took away his sense of shame? Ah,
here is the dreadful secret, which it may be well for all, boasting of
their power of self-control, to know. At the very moment when the man
thinks he stands firm, and reason can control appetite, his moral sense
departs, his shame is gone, and he turns, through the power of his
morning bitters and oft-repeated drams, into the brute and the maniac.
With the moral sensibilities laid waste, reason here has only the power
of the helmsman before the whirlwind. "Twenty years ago," says Nott, "a
respectable householder came in the morning with a glass of bitters in
his hand, and offered it to his guest, saying, 'Take it; it will do you
good. I have taken it for some years, and I think it does me good; and I
never want any more.' Time passed on, and presently the bottle of
bitters in the closet was exchanged for the barrel of whiskey in the
cellar; and the poor man was often at the tap for just as much as would
do him good, and he never wanted any more. Time passed on, and a
hogshead was needful; and its contents were exhausted with the same
intent, and the same self-deceivings. At length the home of his family
was relinquished to his creditors; his polluted body was lodged in a
jail, from which he presently issued a drunken vagabond, and wandered a
wretched being, until he found a drunkard's grave." It is but the
history of thousands. No laws of nature act with more uniformity than
the laws of intemperance. No inoculation sends with more certainty
disease into the system than drinking strong drink. Hundreds have made
an agonizing struggle to escape from perdition. They have seen their sin
and danger; they have walked the streets in agony; they have gone to
their homes and looked at their wives and children, and into the pit of
despair. But their feverish stomach has cried, Give, give! and they have
drank often and often, with the solemn promise that it should be the
last time; until they have exclaimed, with a once interesting youth, "I
know I am a ruined man, but I cannot stop."