New Orleans Republican. [volume] (New Orleans, La) 1867-1878, 1874-03-07

| The deluslons of drink are number1ess,
| but there is one OF them which stands in
the way Of reform SO decidedly that it calls
for decided treatment We allude to the
notion that it is a nice thing to drink nice
| liquors or wines at ones house, to offer
them to ones friends, and to make them
minister to good fellowship at every social
| gathering, while it is very different thing
to drink bad liquor in bad places, and in
large quantities. A man full of good wine
feels that he has a right to look with con-
| tempt upon the man who is full of bad
whisky. 1t is not long time since the
election of a professor in British uni
ground that he neither drank wine
nor offered it to his friends: and
| when, by small majority, his election
| was effected, the other professors decided
| not to recognize him socially. There are
| thus two men whom these sticklers for
wine despise-viz: the man who gets drunk
| on bad liquor, and the man who drinks no
liquor at all Indeed, they regard the latter
with hatred or contempt which they do
not feel for the poor drunkard. The alb
sClute luminosity with which many men in
society regard one who is conscientously
opposed to wine drinking, could only spring
from delusion IN regard to the real nature
of their own habits. The sensitiveness of
these people on this subject, however,
shows that they suspect the deluson of
which they are the victims. They claim to
DE on the side of temperance They depre-
cate drunkenness, and really don't see
what is to be done about it. They
wish that men would be more ra-
tional in their enjoyment of the good
things OF the world, ETC.; but their eyes
seem blinded to the fact that they stand in
the way of all reform. The horrible drunk
enness of the larger cities Of Great Britain,
with which no hell that America holds can
compare for a moment, can never be re-
formed until the drinking habits of the
English gentry are reformed. With eleven
twelfths of the British clergy wine drink
ers, and water drinkers tabooed in society,
and social drinking the fashion of all the
high life of the realm, the workman will
stand by his gin, brutality will reign in its I
ewn chosen centres undisturbed, and those
centres will increasingly become what to !
frightful extent they already are-festering |
sores upon the body social, and stenches in |
the nOstris Of the world.
The habits neither of Great Britain nor |
America will be improved until men of in
fiuence in every walk of life are willing to |
dispense with their drinking customs. Hun
drejs of thousands of English speaking
men go to a drunkard's grave every year
There is nothing in sanitary considerations
as they relate to the moderate drinker. and
surely nothing IN The pleasures OF the mod
crate drinker, to mitigate this curse. 1t is
all delusion. The water drinker is the
healthy man, and the happy man. Spirits,
wine, beer, alcoholic beverages of all sorts
are burden and a bane and there is no
place where a good man can stand I'M
Swallowed by fatal delusion, except upon
the safe ground of total abstinence Until
that ground is taken and held, by good men
every where. there can be no temperance re-
form. The wine drinkers of England
and America have the whisky drinkers in
their keeping. What do they propose to do
with them!