Belmont chronicle. [volume] (St. Clairsville, Ohio) 1855-1973, 1883-12-06

ONE of the inexplicable things of
political temperance, is the impossibility
of engaging the temperance party in
favor of the establishment of public in
stitutions for treatment of inebriates.
Here is great social evil, which per-
vades the families of rich and poor, as
to which the suffering families are
helpless, which society can in a great
degree ameliorate or reform, but in
which it has utterly neglected its duty.
Yet the land rings with the zeal for
temperance reform by the strong arm
of the State. This zeal for finishing the
evil of intemperance by one sweeping
act, and this Indifference to individual
evils, and seeming hostility to the
plain way of reforming them, are in
queer contrast. The look is as if they
thought that any measures to reform
from their brutality, or waste, or idle
ness, were inimical to prohibition. Thus
to this day society has no means of legal
or moral suasion to save the drunkard
from destroying himself and his family.
Yet prohibition itself assumes that the
drinker is helpless and irresponsible.
If irresponsible, society should take
charge of him. If responsible, it should
all ihe more put him under discipline OF
such penal character as to be moral
suasion held over his head. The So
called asylums for inebriates are simply
genteel hotels, where they have rich
friends can go and have good time.
They do nothing to keep drunkard
from devouring the support of his fam
lily, nothing TO cure him of his selfish
solitary vice. nothing to make return
thither penalty to hang over his head
and brace up his feeble nature against
temptation to a relapse. They simply
offer him a good time if he relapses
And they have no authority to keep him
against his will.
This system softly says to the drunk
ard, Go to a tirst-class hotel and heal
yourself, and stay as long as you please.
Yet feeble-ninded people call these
humbugs inehriate asylums, as if they
held and reformed drunkards. Some
times the friends of a respectable
drunkard get him adjudged insane, and
semitic the insane asylum. 1t is illegal,
and only the influential can get it done,
and only when the man is in the drunk
en- delirium or is imbecile. But as soon
as he is cleaned up at the asylum it can
not detain him, and he goes at Lis pleas
ure, and his defiance of it takes away
any idea of terror of return to keen
HIN from yielding to temptation to
drink.
No wOrk-bouse hangs over respectable
men; but the poor man for like offense
is sent to the work-house. In cases of
drunkards abusing their wives and
children, to send them to the work
house is gross outrage, whose penalty
comes almost wholly on the innocent
wife and children.
A man of means, given to this solitary
vice OF spending bis money in his own
selfish induldenee away from bis family,
falls into suttishness, neglects business,
wastes his property, reduces his family
TO want, is a walking disgrace, to them
and yet they are helpless, and society
allows him to travel this downward |
road until he becomes an imbecile and
deadbeat. borrowing and begging to buy
liquor.
Another in the same practice of this |
solitary vice, indulging his own selfish |
appetite with the wages tEat belong to |
the support of his wife and children. |
falls into sOttishness that takes the
Whole OF his earnings, and then makes
him unable to earn anything, and bis
wife is left to support her children and |
support him by washing, or sewing shirts
or clothes at the most grinding wages,
In addition to this he NAV turn to be
brute TO his family. Yet society has
nothing to stay or reform this course.
save to take him up now and then, and
send him to the wOrkhouse, which in
general aggrayates all the suffering of
bis family.
This is the most burning of our social
evils, reaching into every social rank.
Suppose that the State should establish