He seemed to be a pryin’ into what the chief glory and pleasure of gettin’ drunk consisted in; he said the shame, the despair, and the ruin of intemperance anyone could see. And he pictured out the agony of a drunkard’s home, till there wasn’t a dry eye in my head, nor Josiah’s nuther. And he said in windin’ up, (I shan’t put down the hull on’t, for it would be too long) but the closin’ up of it was:
“I don’t believe there is a sadder sight for men or angels, than to see a man made in the image of God willfully casting aside his heritage of noble and true manhood; slipping the handcuffs over his own wrists; and offering himself a willing captive to the mighty but invisible wine spirit.
“No slave bound to the chariot wheels of a conqueror is so deplorable a sight as the captive of wine. His face does not shine like the face of an angel, as did a captive in the old time—but with so vacant and foolish an expression, that you can see at once that he is hopelessly bound, body, mind and soul to his conqueror’s chariot. And a wonderful conqueror is he, so weak in seeming as to hide beneath the ruby glitter of a wine cup, and yet so mighty as to fill our prisons with criminals, our asylums with lunatics—and our graveyards with graves. Mightier than Time or Death, for outstripping time, he ploughs premature furrows on the brow of manhood and alienates affection Death has no power over.
“I have often marvelled where the chief glory of dissipation came in. Its evil effects were always too hideously palpable to be misunderstood; but in what consists the gloating pleasure for which a man is willing to break the hearts of those who love him, bring himself to beggary, endow his children with an undeserved heritage of shame, destroy his intellect, ruin his body, and imperil his soul, is a mystery.
“I have wondered whether its chief bliss consisted in the taste of the cup; if so, it must be indeed a delicious enjoyment, transitory as it is, for which a man would be willing to loose earth and heaven. Or if it were in that intermediate stage, before the diviner nature is entirely merged in the animal—the foolish stage, when a man is so affectionately desirous of doing his full duty by his hearers, that he repeats his commonest remarks incessantly, with a thick tongue and thicker meaning, and if sentimentally inclined, smiles, oh how feebly, and sheds such very foolish tears. In lookin’ upon such a scene, another wonder awakens in me, whether Satan, who with all his faults is uncommonly intelligent, is not ashamed of his maudlin friend. Or is the consummation of glory in the next stage, where with oaths and curses a man dashes his clenched fists into the faces of his best friends, pursues imaginary serpents and fiends, thrusts his wife and children out into the cold night of mid-winter, and bars against them the doors of home. And home! what a desecration of that word which should be the synonym of rest, peace and consolation, is a drunkard’s home. Or is the full measure of pleasure attained when he, the noblest work of God, is stretched out at his full six feet length of unconsciousness, stupidity and degradation.
“If there be a lonely woman amid the multitude of lonely and sorrowful women, more to be pitied than another, I think it is a wife lookin’ upon the one she has promised to honor, lying upon the bed with his hat and boots on. Her comforter, who swore at her as long as he could speak at all. Her protector, utterly unable to brush a fly from his own face. Her companion, lying in all the stupor of death, with none of its solemn dignity. As he is entirely unconscious of her acts, I wonder if she never employs the slowly passing moments in taking down her old idol, her ideal, from its place in her memory, and comparing it with its broken and defaced image before her. Of all the poor broken idols, shattered into fragments for the divine patience of womanhood to gather together and cement with tears, such a ruin as this seems the most impossible to mould anew into any form of comliness. And if there is a commandment seemingly impossible to obey, it is for a woman to love a man she is in deadly fear of, honor a man she can’t help bein’ ashamed of, and obey a man who cannot speak his commands intelligibly.”
It was a proud moment for Josiah Allen and me, to hear Thomas J. go on; and to have the hull house so still, while he was makin’ his eloquent speech, that you could hear a clothes-pin drop in any part of the room. And though my companion, perfectly carried away by his glad emotions, hunched me several time harder than he had any idee of, and almost gored my ribs with his elbo, I didn’t, as you may say, seem to sense it at all. And though in hunchin’ and bein’ hunched, I dropped more’n 20 stitches in Josiah’s socks, I didn’t care for that a mite; I had plenty of time to pick ’em up durin’ the next speech, which was the Editor of the Auger’es, (he has got over the zebra, so’s to be out.)
I have said, and I say still, that I never see a man that would spread a idee out thinner than he will,—cover more ground with it. Talk about Ingy Rubber stretchin’,—why that man will take one small thought and pull it out and string on enough big words to sink it, seemin’ly.
Howsumever, his talk did jest about as much good on Thomas J’s side, as on hisen, for he didn’t seem to pay any attention to the subject, but give his hull mind to stringin’ big words onto his idees, and then stretchin’ ’em out as fur as human strength can go. That, truly, was his strong pint. But jest as he bent his knees and begun to set down, he kinder straightened up again and said the only thing that amounted to a thing. He said,—“Keepin’ folks from sellin’ likker, is takin’ away their rights.”
