“Ha! ha!” shouted the first devil; “and then of course, there will be murder, robbery, violence, and misery all over the land.”
“The devils have had their way,” the old man added his keen eyes glancing round the table to mark the effect of his vision.
He was indeed, as a writer called him, a “muscular teetotaler.”
“In his time,” a Temperance writer * records to his honour, “he must have attended thousands of temperance meetings, and at these few men were more welcome.
* The Temperance Record, February 7th, 1878.
The style of his advocacy was peculiar, he passed from grave to gay with facility, but he never lost sight of the great object he had in view. He seemed for years, to be deeply impressed at the numerous murders that were taking place, all of them, or nearly so, being in the last instance, if not in the first, attributable to drink. He used to exclaim, with deep fervour, ‘Can nothing be done to stop these dreadful murders?’ The clear remedy of total abstinence from that drink which was their inciting cause then came naturally from his lips; but though individuals responded to his appeal, the general mass of the public remained unmoved. Sometimes he would suggest a deputation to the House of Lords. But though this idea was not acted upon, yet he lived to see that august assembly collect evidence well fitted to be of service to them, and also to the public at large. Mr. Cruikshank’s powers of mimicry were also very great, and often has he convulsed his audience with his inimitable acting; but, at the same time, there was no mistaking his deep earnestness, and the sincerity with which he expressed the convictions of his heart.
He did his utmost, when the teetotalers had failed at the Crystal Palace, to establish a teetotal palace in the old Surrey Zoological Gardens; and he was drawn in state from the Hampstead Road to Walworth, in a carriage and four, to open a bazaar in aid of the scheme. He even prepared a design for the building. But although many went to cheer the honest, earnest old man, few remained to invest, and the design fell to the ground. It may have been some consolation to him and to his Temperance friends to mark, afterwards, the services which the Crystal Palace was destined to render to the cause of Temperance, for a drunkard has hardly ever been seen under its shining roof.
Cruikshank could never convert his mother to his views. She lived with him during the latter years of her life, and died under his roof, in the care of a most reverent and attentive son.. She had always been a careful, sober body, and would not be coerced, because her son could not take his beer or toddy without committing excesses. She had been a handsome woman in her days, a grandson records, and it was picturesque to see the lame old lady, leaning upon her crutch, and wrapped in a plaid,—with her shrivelled features and wild grey hair,—raise her withered arm, and with the old fire declare that she would not surrender her principles. A glass of beer with dinner, and a little toddy at bedtime, she had always taken, and she took them to the end, and George had to submit.
Addressing, on one occasion, a Temperance oration to a Bristol audience, he appealed to his female hearers not to believe that “nourishing stout” was necessary to nursing-mothers; and he pointed to himself as a melancholy example, saying, “My mother first lifted the poisoned chalice to my lips.” His aged mother read this in the morning paper. Her wrath was violent. “What!” she cried, “am I to be told publicly, at eighty years of age, that I, who always begged and prayed him to be sober, taught him to drink?” Her son did not return home for several days; but he heard of his speech in no uncertain tones when he presented himself to the old lady, who had, in his youth, often physically chastised him for his excesses.
Perhaps the best specimen of his manner of laying his subject before an audience is the speech which he delivered at the Grand Demonstration of the National Temperance League, in the Guildhall, on the 19th of November, 1864. It wants his by-play, his dramatic delivery, his grotesque movements, and then the solemn sounds of his voice, to be completely understood; but it is sufficiently original and suggestive as reported:—