In all the world there is not to be found an old man, who has been a total abstainer from intoxicating liquors through all his life, who regrets the rule he adopted and kept. Such a man was never heard to say: “I am sorry I did not learn to love wine, whiskey, ale, beer or brandy when I was young.” This is a very safe rule for young men, that has not a single exception in all the wide world. On the other hand, how many have said: “Drink has been my curse”? Take the pledge, boys, keep it, and you will find it a jewel in nature, a comfort through life, and a consolation in death.
CHAPTER VIII
Be Temperate
One of the great curses, if not the greatest in our land, is intemperance. It is productive of murder, lawlessness and crime; the chief agency in the corruption of the ballot, legislation and administration of the law; the voracious consumer of purity, reputation and health, and the chief architect in establishing mad-houses, orphan asylums, prisons and county farms. It demands and controls annually more than a billion dollars by which bread, meat, clothing, shoes and sugar could be purchased for the poor, and all schools and Christian missions supported. In silver dollars this money could be laid side by side on the equator till it formed a band around the earth, while the liquor it purchased would fill a canal twenty feet wide, twenty feet deep and forty-six miles long. The grain alone used by distilleries in the manufacture of the destructive drink is fifty million bushels, enough to furnish three hundred one-pound loaves of bread to each family in the United States. No wonder that “ninety-nine of every hundred men,” as John B. Gough said, “are ruined morally, intellectually and religiously by the use of drink,” and that fifty of every hundred insane persons, seventy-five of every hundred prisoners, and ninety-six of every hundred tramps are made thus by this evil. Far better that every boy “touch not, taste not.” Longfellow said:
“It will make thy heart sore
To its very core!
Its perfume is the breath
Of the angel of death.
And the light that within it lies
Is the flash of his evil eyes.