The Monitor. [volume] (Woodstown, N.J.) 1884-1892, 1884-04-18
DESTRUCTIVE POWER OF STRONG
DRINK IN TRANSMITTED SUI
FERING, DISEASE, AND DEATH.

FERING, DISEASE, AND DEATH.
The evils of drink are not limited to the
drinker. Its baneful effects go down to pos
terity blighting his children and his children's
children with an innumerable train of evils
which we have no power to express. Here
more directly and Immediately both in a
physical and mental sense is fulfilled those
words of holy writ, twisting the iniquities
of the fathers upon the children, unto the
third and fourth generations" What an
awful truth that innocent children should
be brought into the world, burdened besides
natural depravity (Which though unavoidable
is bad enough) with tendencies that are in
evitably ruinous, rum-infected rum blotched,
and m-controlled from their very birth
with tendencies which from their very nature
must prove the horrible precursors of fear
full harvest of suffering, woe, and death.
Plato, Plutarch and Aristotle all taught that
drunken parents brought forth children like
themselves, and that the injurious effects of
intemperance were equally seen in both par
ent and child
Says a celebrated superintendent of one of
England's largest lunatic asylums: mo vice
is more hereditary than intemperance" It
reveals itself in one form by transmitted
taste for strong drink. DR.. Turner says that
tout of !, 400 cases of delirium tremens in
the New York state inebriate asylum (the
largest in the world), $50 had an inebriate
parent or grand-parent or both" S. 0.
Fowler (who has given forty years of study
to this subject) gives case where tipping
politician from total abstaining family made
the greater part of his descendants drunkards
to the fifth generation. Again, it descends
more frequently in the form of some foul
disease of which strong drink is the direct
parent. The children of drinking parents, SO
frl1 hi nj <,I xynr
plants, consumption, and all manner of ner-
vous disorders.
DIR. Brown of the Crichton lunatic asylum
says ''Drunkards children are nervous
weak, hayward and eccentric, and become
insane under the pressure of excitement from
unforeseen emergency or the ordinary calls of
duty they inherit a faulty, de-
fective or vicious organization, which de-
velops itself in the most varied forms of dis
ease or character" DIR. Magnus Huss testifies
that, g In consequence of all this insanity,
suicide and crime are frightfully on the in
crease" Here, then, we have the fearful
cause of insanity and idiocy. DIR. Howe, of
the Massachusetts, state asylum, ascertained
the antecedents of 800 of the idiots under his
charge and 145 of them were habitual drunk
ards DR.. Lodge, among one hundred,
traced the disease of fifty to the same cause.
A moulder, constantly tipsy, had three idiotic
children then he reformed and had three of
sound mind. In another case, all the chill
dren of one mana confirmed drunkard-
were idiotic In another instance, both par
ents being drunkards, the child was shriyeled,
wasted, blasted.
But why further open this fostering, rotting
mass of human corruption? this dripping,
soul-revolting, stenchful, charnel-house of
suffering, degradation putridity and woe?
a. c,o1r i,,h no1
and soul at the horrible, revolving spectacle.
o, God, how poor humanity is cursed,
withered, scalded, crazed, damned, by blind
ing, poisoning, maddening, infuriating rum
And yet men go on drinking rinking-as
if they would quench the very fires of hell
within them! Go on, infamed by very ichor
of perdition, mingling in promiscuous iniqui-
ties as if they would blast to utter annihila-
ton the race of man, which God has COM
manded them in purity and virtue to multi
ply and replenish." And need we add
drunkenness shortens life? "The wicked
shall not live out half their days" This is
heavens .edct and is being verified every
hour of human life. God struck Eelshazzar
with the very golden vessels of wine, in
the midst of his drunken stupor and lewd-
ness and lust) with death, and we say the
handwriting of blood is on the very walls of
the house. aye, emblazoned on the sacred
page, against every such violator of Gods
holy law The Quakers live the longest,
because the purest, and how can it be other
wise than that those who violate every law of
their physical, social, mental, and moral be-
ing-as the drunkard unquestionably does
should not suffer the sure and swift penalty
of their doings? Take the accidents of the
world and how many grow out of drunken
ness An engineer is drunk and the train is
a wreck, and a score or more of souls are
hurled into eternity! An engineer is drunk
and the steamboat crashes upon rock Or
blows up, and the sea is covered with shrek
ing, drowning, sinking humanity man is
drunk, and his child is dashed in his wild
madness against the steps and its brains
spatter the pavement! A man is drunk, and
his poor wife's head is cleaved with the axe,
or her face stamped beyond recognition by
his rough, iron-fenced heelsl A man is
drunk and in his frenzy shoots or stabs to
death a fellow man and the gallows bangles
with its guilty victim
The writer of this article only few years
back stood under the gallows at Bloomsbury,
PENNSYLVANIA, and saw Patrick Hester Pat
rick Tully and Peter McHugh, simultaneously
drop from the falling platform into eternity.
All were drunk when the deed was COM
mitted. Tully said upon the scaffold: If l
had minded my mother and never tasted
liquor I'd never been here" We will not go
on with this revolving subject. Let us now
sum up in brief these five articles on the
Destructive power of drink" Rum de-