NOT THE RIGHT KIND OF HORNS.
“Rights!” says Thomas Jefferson, jumpin’ upon his feet the minute he set down. “Rights! The first right and law of our nature, is self-preservation, and what safety has any man while the streets are filled with men turned into crazed brutes by this traffic you are upholdin’? Every one knows that a drunken man entirely loses for the time his reasoning faculties, his morality and his conscience, and is made ripe for any crime. That he is jest as ready to rob and murder innocent citizens as to smoke his pipe. So if you and I lend our influence and our votes to make intemperance legal, we make arson, burglary, rape, robbery, murder, legal. Tell me a man has a right to thus plant the seeds of crime and murder in a man’s soul, and imperil the safety of the whole community. Why, the Bible says, that if a man let loose a wild ox, and it gored men with its horns and killed them, the men that let it go loose should surely be put to death.”
Here Simon Slimpsey got up, kinder hangin’ on to the bench, and made a dretful simple sort of a wink with one eye, and says he:
“Them haint the kind o’ horns we are a talkin’ about, we are talkin’ about takin’ a horn of whisky now and then.”
“Yes,” said Thomas J. “there was never a more appropriate name; for if there ever were horns that gored, and stabbed, and killed, it is these.”
Elder Easy spoke out, and says he,—“The Bible says: ‘take a little wine for the stomach sake.’”
But Elder Morton jumped up, and says he,—“There was two kinds of likker in earlier times; one that was unfermented and harmless, and contained no alcohol or any principle of intoxication, and another that contained this raging mocker.”
Then old Peedick spoke up. Says he,—“Likker would be all right if it wasn’t for the adultery in it: poison stuff, wormwood, and etcetery.”
But Dr. Bombus jumped up, and says he,—“Nothing that can be put into it, can be worse poison than the pure alcohol itself, for that is a rank poison for which no antidote has ever been found; useful for medical purposes, like some other poisons: arsenic, opium, laudanum, and so 4th.”
But old Peedick kep’ a mutterin’,—“I know there’s adultery in it;” and kep’ a goin’ on till Cornelius Cork, the President, sot him down, and choked him off.