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.