MUCH is said of the devastation of our fairest and brightest by the Drink Demon. This is mainly nonsense. It was more nearly true in former generations, when intemperance was an almost universal vice. As

Hamlet says:

“it is a custom
More honor’d in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and tax’d of other nations:
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition.”

[{26}] Morals has made wonderful progress since then, in all directions, and heavy drinking has been more and more restricted to those who are

“Marked cross from the womb and perverse.”

With few exceptions every one who goes to perdition by the alcohol route would reach that destination by some other highway if the alcohol line were not running.

Every man whose sloth or improvidence has brought himself and his family to beggary, every thieving tramp upon the highways, every rascal in the penitentiary, every murderer upon the gallows, hastens to plead “whisky brought [{27}] me to this!” because he knows that such a plea will bring him a gush of sloppy sympathy unobtainable by other means.

Whisky makes no man lazy, shiftless, dishonest, false, cowardly or brutal. These must be original qualities with him. If he has them he will probably take to whisky—though not inevitably—which then does the community the splendid service of hurrying him along to destruction, and of abridging his infliction upon the public. [{28}]

PEOPLE who have done much in the way of reforming drunkards have been astonished to find how little real manhood remained after eliminating whisky from the equation. They had supposed the manhood to be only obscured, and were disheartened to find how frequently it happened to be demonstrated that there never was enough of it to pay for the trouble of “saving the victim of intemperance.” Like the cherubim before the throne of God, the Temperance orators “con- tinually do cry,” the burden of their song being that hundreds of thousands are annually slain by the monster Intemperance. [{29}] Quite singularly these figures are probably not exaggerated. Myriads of times kindly-hearted physicians write in the death certificate “pneumonia,” “heart-failure,” “diabetes,” etc., when truth demands “beer” or “whisky.”