Sword and shield. (Clinton, Miss.) 1885-1888, 1886-07-10
Popular Education Versus the Rum
PO1Cer.

Seventeen states and one territor.
have now enacted laws which provide TO
the study of the nature and effects 0
alcoholic drinks in the public schools
and Congress has lately passed similal
law, applicable to the district ofColum
bia, and the military and naval academic
of West Point and Annapolis respect
lively, and to the Indian and coloreC
schools established by the authority o
the national government in the ter
ritories. That the similar provision
will be engrafted upon the statutes O
all the other states is but matter o.
time. The net result of this instruction
as to the real properties and physicaI
effects of alcohol will be, that the next
generation Of men and women will be
able to look at the rum question: through
the clear eyes of science, and the strength
of the movement for the suppression ol
the rum traffic will be enormously in
creased.
That all temperate men are not Pro
hibitionistS in sentiment, and are not
actively engaged in the battle against
the rum Power, is due simply to ig-
norance. The amount of error as to the
real nature of rum-which term has
come to be used in general sense, to
embrace all malt, vinous or spirituous
liquors, and all of which contain
alcohol-is astonishing to one who
understands the cause. Doctors, follow
ing the erroneous beliefs of the past, pre-
scribe rum in their daily practice; peo-
pie who do not dream of the dangers
they incur nor the risk they run, use it
in their families, as a sort of fgeneral cure
all. On all sides you will hear the view
expressed that it is not the use, but the
abuse of rum, which is harmful. And
the result is, that the rum power finds
one of its strongest bulwarks in the ig-
norance and difference of the great mass
of the people.
Rum in any form has for its basis alco-
hol And what is alcohol? DIR. Willard
Parker, of New York, answers;
Alcohol is poison. IL is SO regarded
by the best writer's and teachers on tox-
Zoology. Like arsenic, corrosive sub
Innate, and prussic acid, when in
troduced into the system it is capable
of destroying life without acting mechan-
ically and it induces a general disease
as well marked as fever, smallpox or
lead poison.
Prof. Youmans, an eminent chemist of
the same city, says:
1t is evident that, so far from being
the conservator of health, alcohol is an
active and powerful cause of disease.
interfering with the respiration, the cir
culatiOn, and the nutrition.
Dr. Richardson, one of the greatest of
English Physicians of the present day,
after making long series of researches
to determine the nature of alcohol, de-
clares:
| find it to be an agent that gives no
strength that reduces the tone of the
blood vessels and heart, that reduces the
nervous power, that builds up no tissues,
and can be OF no use to me or any other
animal as substance for food. On that
side of the quarter my mind is made up.
that this agent, in the most moderate
quantity, is perfectly useless for any of
the conditions of life to which men are
subjected, except under the most ex-
ceptional conditions, which none but
close observers can declare.
Practically, the decision of science
is that every man who drinks rum in
evitably poisons himself. The process
may be slow, but it is absolutely sure.
He who drinks may not intend suicide,
but all the same he evidently kills him
self, directly or indirectly; for where
rum is not the direct cause of death, it
has opened the door to the fatal disease,
and has shortened the full term of years
which nature had intended the victim
to live.
In all visitations of epidemics it is
found that runs votaries form the great
er portion of the victims of the disease.
In New York, for instance, in the
cholera epidemic of 1892, out of 1,615
cases treated in hospitals, 1,O23- nearly
two thirds-were decidedly Incorporate
persons. In 1853 the yellow fever des-
olated New Orleans, and physician of
that city wrote to medical journal that
about 5000 of the patrons of drinking
saloons died before the disease touched
single sober man. Last summer,
during one of the extremely hot spells,
a New York paper stated that the num-
Der Of fatal cases Of sunstroke was 145,
Of which at least two-thirds were
habitual drinkers. And the researches
of Mr. Nelson, an eminent English life
insurance actuary, who was investigating
the effect of rum on the duration oflife,
resulted in the startling conclusion that
among beer drinkers, 1857 per cent,