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Strong drink cuts down youth in its vigour, manhood in its strength, and age in its weakness. It breaks the father's heart, bereaves the doting mother, extinguishes natural affection, erases conjugal love, blots out filial attachment, blights parental hope, and brings down mourning age in sorrow to the grave. It produces weakness instead of strength; sickness instead of health; death instead of life. It makes wives widows, children orphans, fathers fiends, and all of them paupers and beggars. It feeds rheumatism, nurses gout, welcomes epidemics, invites cholera, imports pestilence, and embraces consumption. It covers the land with idleness, poverty, disease, and crime. It fills your jails, supplies almshouses, and demands asylums. It engenders controversies, fosters quarrels, and cherishes riots. It crowds your penitentiaries and furnishes victims for the death chamber. It is the life blood of the gambler, the aliment of the burglar, the prop of the highwayman, and the support of the midnight arsonist. It countenances the liar, respects the thief, and esteems the blasphemer. It violates obligation, reverences fraud, and honors infamy. It defames benevolence, hates love, scorns virtue, and slanders innocence. It incites the father to butcher his helpless offspring, helps the husband to massacre his wife, and aids the child to grind the patricidal axe. It burns up man and consumes woman, detests life, curses God and despises heaven. It suborns witnesses, nurses perjury, defiles the jury box, and stains the judicial ermine. It bribes votes, disqualifies voters, corrupts elections, pollutes our institutions, and endangers our government. It degrades the citizen, debases the Legislature, dishonors the statesman, and disarms the patriot. It brings shame instead of honor, terror instead of safety, despair instead of hope, misery instead of happiness and, with the malevolence of a fiend it calmly surveys its frightful desolation. Unsatiated with the havoc is wreaks, it then poisons felicity, kills peace, ruins morals, blights confidence, slays reputation, wipes out national honor, and then curses the world and laughs at its ruin. It does all that and more. It murders the soul. It is the sum of all villainies, the father of all sorts of crimes, the mother of all sorts of abominations, one of the devil's best friends and one of God's worst enemies. |