anger persistent
and mischievous, or remittent and impotent. Fear at every corner of
life, distrust on every side, grief merged into blank despair,
hopelessness into permanent melancholy. Surely no Pandemonium that ever
poet dreamt of could equal that which would exist if all the drunkards
of the world were driven into one mortal sphere.
[Illustration: CRAZED BY DRINK. "God's rational offspring ... become a
brute."]
"As I have moved among those who are physically stricken with alcohol,
and have detected under the various disguises of name the fatal
diseases, the pains and penalties it imposes on the body, the picture
has been sufficiently cruel. But even that picture pales, as I conjure
up, without any stretch of imagination, the devastations which the same
agent inflicts on the mind. Forty per cent., the learned Superintendent
of Colney Hatch, Dr. Sheppard, tells us, of those who were brought into
that asylum in 1876, were so brought because of the direct or indirect
effects of alcohol. If the facts of all the asylums were collected with
equal care, the same tale would, I fear, be told. What need we further
to show the destructive action on the human mind? The Pandemonium of
drunkards; the grand transformation scene of that pantomime of drink
which commences with, moderation! Let it never more be forgotten by
those who love their fellow-men until, through their efforts, it is
closed forever."
We might go on, adding page after page of evidence, showing how alcohol
curses the souls, as well as the bodies, of men; but enough has been
educed to force conviction on the mind of every reader not already
satisfied of its poisonous and destructive quality.
How light are all evils flowing from intemperance compared with those
which it thus inflicts on man's higher nature. "What," says Dr. W.E.
Channing, "is the great essential evil of intemperance? The reply is
given, when I say, that intemperance is the
"VOLUNTARY EXTINCTION OF REASON.
"The great evil is inward or spiritual. The intemperate man divests
himself, for a time, of his rational and moral nature, casts from
himself self-consciousness and self-command, brings on frenzy, and by
repetition of this insanity, prostrates more and more his rational and
moral powers. He sins immediately and directly against the rational
nature, that Divine principle which, distinguishes between truth and
falsehood, between right and wrong action, which, distinguishes man from
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