Josiah Allen's Wife as a P. A. and P. I.: Samantha at the Centennial. / Designed As a Bright and Shining Light, to Pierce the Fogs of Error and Injustice That Surround Society and Josiah, and to Bring More Clearly to View the Path That Leads Straight on to Virtue and Happiness.

by Marietta Holley

“That’s so;” said Simon Slimpsey, “there he has got you; you can’t git round that.”

Then Thomas J. spoke and brought up facts and figgers that nobody couldn’t git over, or crawl round; proved it right out, that intemperance caused more deaths than war, pestilence, and famine; that more than half the crimes committed in the United States could be traced back to drink; and eighty out of every hundred was helped on by it. And then he went on to tell how they transmitted the curse to their childern, and how, through its effects, infant babes was born drunkards, idiots, and criminals, entirely unbeknown to them; that the influence of our free schools is destroyed by the influence of the other free schools the nation allows for the childern of the people—the dram shops, and other legalized places of ruin—that while the cries of the starving and naked were filling our ears from all sides, seven hundred millions of dollars were annually spent for intoxicatin’ drink. Instead of spendin’ these millions for food and clothin’ for the perishin’, we spent them for ignorance, beastliness, taxation, crime, despair, madness and death. Says he:

“The cost of likker-drinkin’, from 1861 to 1870, was six thousand millions of dollars. Add to that, the labor in raisin’ the grain to make it; all the labor of distillin’ it; all the loss of labor the drinkin’ of it entailed; the sickness, deaths and crimes that resulted from its use; the ships that went down in mid-ocean, through the drunkenness of their crews—engulfin’ thousands of lives; the ghastly railroad accidents that fill our newspapers with long death-lists; the suicides and thousands of fatal accidents, all over the land, caused by it; the robberies and murders, and the cost of tryin’ the criminals, buildin’ the prisons, penitentiaries and jails, and supportin’ them therein; the alms-houses for the paupers made by it; the asylums for the insane, and the hirin’ of officers and attendants to take care of them. Imagine the sum-total if you can, and add to it, the six thousand millions of dollars,—and all spent for that which is not only useless, but ruinous. And honest, sober citizens consent to have their property taxed to support this system.

“What if this enormous amount of money was spent by our government, for the compulsory education of the childern of the poor; takin’ them from their wretched haunts and dens—schools of infamy, where they are bein’ educated in criminality—and teachin’ them to be honest and self-supportin’. What a marvelous decrease of crime there would be; what a marvelous increase of the national wealth and respectability.”

He said he had been lookin’ upon the subject in a financial point of view, for its moral effects could not be reduced to statistics. Says he:

“Now, with our boasted civilization, we support four drinkin’ saloons to one church. Which exerts the widest influence? In one of the finest cities of New England, there are to-day, ten drinkin’ saloons to one church, and a buildin’ owned by the Governor of the state has two drinkin’ saloons in it, the rumsellers hiring directly of him. The Indians, Buddhists, and Brahmins, the savage and heathen races, whom we look down upon with our wise and lofty pity, are our superiors in this matter, for they know nothin’ of drunkenness still we teach them. How will it be looked upon by the Righteous Judge above, that with all our efforts to evangelize the heathen; our money offerin’s of millions of dollars; our life offerin’s of teachers and missionaries; our loud talkin’, and our long prayers; after all the efforts of the Christian world, the facts face us: that for one heathen who is converted to Christ by the preachin’ of the tongue of our civilized race, one thousand sober heathen are made drunkards by the louder preachin’ of our example; are made by us—if we believe the Bible—unfit for ever enterin’ the heaven we make such powerful efforts to tell them of.”

“And” says he, “the sufferin’ intemperance has caused cannot possibly be reckoned up by figgers,—the shame, disgrace, and desolation, wretchedness to the guiltless, as well as the guilty. The blackness of despair that is dark enough to veil the very heavens from innocent eyes, and make them doubt the existence of a God—who can permit a nation to make such a traffic respectable and protect it with the shadow of the law.”

Says he, “When you have licenced a man to sell likker, and protected him by the law you have helped to make, he sells a pint of likker to a drunkard; do you know what you and he are sellin’? You know you are sellin’ poverty, and bodily ruin, and wretchedness; this you know. But you may be sellin’ a murder, a coffin and a windin’-sheet; sellin’ broken hearts, and a desolate hearth-stone; sufferin’ to the innocent, that will outlast a life-time; ruin, disgrace, despair, and the everlastin’ doom of a deathless soul. Tell me any one has a right to do this? Men in their greed and self interest may make their wretched laws to sanction this crime, but God’s laws are mightier and will yet prevail.”

Every word Thomas J. said went right to my heart. You see, a heart where a child’s head has laid—asleep or awake—till it has printed itself completely onto it, that heart seems to be a holdin’ it still when the head’s got too large to lay there bodily (as it were.) Their wrong acts pierce it right through, and their noble doin’s cause it to swell up with proud happiness.

Dr. Bombus bein’ dretful excited riz right up, and says he, “How any good man can sanction this infamous traffic, how any minister of the Gospel-—” But here the President made the Dr. set down, for it was Elder Easy’s turn.