New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1882-01-01
NEW yE1RS CALLS

| Here is story for the New Year worth the
telling: Five or siUycars ago n sturdy, sensible
Young fellow in this city, with quiet steady
habits and small income, married young
woman who had hankeTing for fashionable
| life. Her husband INDUCED her, but kept on
his own regular way 80 far as was possible.
Among the changes which she forced into his
habits. however, was that of taking wine daily.
He did not really like it, nor did She but it was
" the proper thing for persons in their class TO
have wine on the dinner table" which is argu-
ment sufficient for the fimsy kinds of women.
Young B had been warned by his family
musician. who knew his constitution and its
hereditary tendencies, to let liquor alone. But
he could not well offer it to his guests without
drinking himself. Let us cut the story short.
Everybody knows it already. In two years he
was confirmed drunkard, his business and
reputation were gone, his home was broken up,
his wife and child had deserted him. Last
summer he was going every day through the
streets of New-Yori shOeless and in rags, try
inc to borrow dime now and then from the
men he had known in the days Of his prosperity
TO buy a drink. How many dead-beats of this
sort are hanging about Office doors this morn
ing7 "What can be done for him ~ asked one
of his old friends of his physician. "NOthing.
" II is.too late. The disease is now incurable.
"The only fortunate thing that could happen to
him for the sake of ha family or himself would
be to fall off pier into the North River some
day and make an end of it," A hard sentence,
but just.
No doubt most women who read this true
story will feel certain disgust at it as a tire
hoo unbi I il
tiresome because it is true and because
drunken men who have made wreck of home,
fortune and life arc common among us as the
cutters that run along our streets. What com
munity, what family, what single reader of
THE TRIBUNE, does not know them Well
bred, refined people naturally shrink from them
as they would from gutter sights and smells.
They have perfect right to do it, if they have
had nothing to do with making drunkards.
But every wel-brcd woman who offers liquor to
the crowd of men and immature boys who
will enter her drawing-rOOms tomorrow runs
the same risk which the wife OF B. did when
she placed wine in his way, ard takes the same
responsibility. She is as much to blame as the
wife of the taVern-kceper who sells whlskey at
five cents a glass. 1t is not sensational jargon
or temperance fanaticism which bids her con-
slider what she is doing. It is n simple matter
of fact, of whose truth any physician can assure
her, that to some men liquor is an active poison
inducing physical and mental disease as GER
tanly as that in others malaria will produce
fever or peculiar kinds Of food scurvy. She
knows nothing of the hereditary tendencies, the
constitution the temptation Of these men
coming into her house, and she has no right out
of mere subservicncc to fashion to place liquor
before them. If she has a husband or son who
has begun to stumble down this terrible short
road to death she will not be likely to do it, If
she has not, let her think of other wives and
mothers, and for their sake refrain.