A sideboard without brandy or rum was an exception, while the jug was imperative at every log-raising and in the harvest field. It was said of even a Puritan community,
"Their only wish and only prayer,
In the present world or world to come,
Is a string of Eels and a jug of rum."
When Doctor Leonard Bacon was installed pastor of the First Congregational Church in New Haven, Conn., in 1825, free drinks were ordered at the bar of the hotel, for all visiting members, to be paid for by the church. Today all protestant churches declare against the drink habit and the drink sale. Pulpits are thundering away against the saloon. Children are studying the effects of alcohol upon the human system in nearly every state in the Union. Train loads of literature are pouring into the homes of the people. A mighty army of as godly women as ever espoused a cause is battling for the home, against the saloon. The business world is demanding total-abstainers, and fifty millions of people in the United States are living under prohibitory laws.
Not only in this but in every civilized land the cause of temperance is growing. Recently in France it was found there were more deaths than births, which meant France was dying. A commission was appointed to look into the causes. When the report was made, alcohol headed the list. Now by order of the government linen posters are put up in public buildings, and on these in blood red letters are these warnings: "Alcohol dangerous; alcohol chronic poison; alcohol leads to the following diseases; alcohol is the enemy of labor; alcohol disrupts the home!"
Who would have thought an Emperor of Germany would ever "go back" on beer? Emperor William in an address to the sailors recommended total-abstinence and forbid under penalty the giving of liquor to soldiers in the world's greatest war. The Czar of Russia has put an end to the government's connection with the manufacture of intoxicating liquors, and our Secretary of the Navy has banished it from the ships and navy yards. The New York Sun says: "The business world is getting to be one great temperance league." For many years it was confined to the realm of morals, but today it is recognized as a great economic question and the business world is joining the church world in solving the liquor problem.
While the temperance cause has been going up in character, the drink has been going down in quality. The old time distiller used to select his site along some crystal stream, that had its fountain-head in the mountains and ran over beds of limestone. With sound grain and pure water, he made several hundred barrels of whiskey a year, and after five to ten years of ripening, it was sent out with the makers' brand upon it. Now the North American of Philadelphia, one of our leading dailies says, rectifiers (and I would prefix one letter and make it w-r-e-c-k-t-i-f-i-e-r-s) take one barrel from the distillery and by a pernicious, poisonous process, make one hundred barrels from one barrel.
It is true the sting of the adder and the bite of the serpent were in the old-time whiskey, but it was as pure as it could be made. Doctor Wiley, Ex-Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry, says: "Eighty-five per cent. of all the whiskey sold in the saloons, hotels and club-rooms is not whiskey at all but a cheap base imitation." In the different concoctions made are found aconite, acquiamonia, angelica root, arsenic, alum, benzine, belladonna, beet-root juice, bitter almond, coculus-indicus, sulphuric acid, prussic acid, wood alcohol, boot soles and tobacco stems. No wonder we have more murders in this republic than in any civilized land beneath the sky in proportion to population.
Along with this adulteration of the drink has gone the degeneracy of the saloon and the seller. The day was when officers in churches could sell liquor and retain their membership. Today the saloonkeeper is barred from the protestant churches, barred from Masons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, Red Men, Woodmen, Maccabees and nearly every other fraternal organization of the world.