A man, who had destroyed three happy homes through his drinking habits, was converted, and set to work to lead his friends to Christ. Some time after his conversion one of his mates, seeing how clean and happy he was looking, asked him jocularly if he had any houses to let. He knew the questioner was a heavy drinker, so he decided to give him a practical lesson. “Here, mate,” he said, “just take a look down my throat, will you?” “There’s nothing there,” said the other, after a careful inspection of his throat. “Well, that’s queer, for I’ve put three good homes and a grocer’s shop down that throat, drowning them in drink.” (Text.)
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See [Drink, Effects of].
WASTE OF LIVES
Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is the waste of labor. If you went down in the morning into your dairy, and found that your youngest child had got down before you, and that he and the cat were at play together, and that he had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up, you would scold the child, and be sorry the cream was wasted. But if, instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with human life in them, and instead of the cat to play with—the devil to play with; and you yourself the player; and instead of leaving that golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the dust yourself, and pour the human life out on the ground for the fiend to lick up—is that not waste?—John Ruskin.
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WASTE, STOPPING
The Agricultural Department has inaugurated a war on rats, not as a preventive of the plague or on account of health, but because of the great loss produced in the country by rats, and especially to farmers and producers. The department claims that a rat eats sixty cents’ worth of grain a year, and that the actual destruction caused by them amounts to over one hundred millions of dollars a year. The extermination of rats will be a great undertaking. Yet it could be accomplished by national effort were it not for the new supplies brought by ships. It is believed that by proper regulations even this supply might be cut off, or the rats killed before spreading. It would cost only a small part of the one hundred millions of dollars to exterminate the rat. The expenditure of ten millions under national authority would be economy.
There are moral wastes comparatively more destructive than the plague of rats, that all men should join in exterminating—the saloon, for example.
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