Dodge City times. [volume] (Dodge City, Kan.) 1876-1892, 1888-05-24

liens of Brooklyn. He was capital.
ist a man of excellent business abil-
tiles. trusted and honored by his
friends and the public generally. For
several years he was the president Of
one of the city's banks He trans
ferred his investments to the De Kalb
Avenue Street Railway Company, of
which corporation he became presi-
dent He had 4 charming wife and
pretty children. and home of which
any man might be proud. in De Kalb
avenue. All things were prosperous.
and he was one of the favored ones of
earth apparently.
He was companionable man, with
hosts of friends; but he. like thousands
and tens of thousands of others, dali
lied with rum. The wine-cup sparkled
at his board. He testified his good
fellowship by inviting his friends to
the saloon, or by accepting similar in
vitatiOns. The path of life was strewn
with flowers; in the sun of prosperity
all things were pleasant; his business
prospered. and he was accommodating
still greater wealth. Under the stimu-
lus of rum. he made the mad resolve
to take short cut to becoming a
millionaire. Safe and conservative in
his business methods up to the time he
began to become the slave of rum,
thereafter his business acumen de-
serted him. and he plunged boldly into
the sea of speculation, selecting the
cotton market as his field. The specu-
lator is like the gambler. He must
have cool head Rum worked his
ruin by depriving him of his judgment.
Fhe market went against him. and he
failed.
Rum. hitherto looked upon as his in
spirer, now became his sOlace. 1t had
destroyed his mental energy, and all
those powers which he needed at the
time of adversely. Instead Of seeking
some occupation whereby he could
maintain his wife and children, and
endeavoring to regain the wealth he
had lost, he became sot. Rum had
undermined his moral nature, made
him its slave, and he could not shake
off the chains which bound him. He
removed to an obscure suburb. where,
amid the direst poverty, his heart
broken wife essays to provide enough
to care for her little ones, while her
husband is saloon loafer, arrested ON
the street as vagrant!
1t is all we'll enough for others to
point the finger of scorn at this man,
and show up his shortcomings in the
hour Of his adversely. But the fact
remains that rum was responsible for
it all. He is but one of the thousands
of examples of the fact that when rum
gains dominion over a man, it destroys
every manly quality: It deprives him
of courage, destroys his self-reliance,
drals his brain so that his business sa-
gacity is destroyed, and renders him
weak. vacilating creature, unfit to
cope with the world, doomed to failure
in every undertaking.
So long as rum can be had, so long
will man fall. and the history of this
one man be repeated over and over
again, ten thousand times. The
case of this man is no worse than
that of the humblest working-man who
becomes the slave of rum. 1t is only
because there is SO mighty contrast
between his former and his present
condition that makes it so striking.
The fate that has overtaken him is the
fate of thousands every year, whose
degradation is unnoticcd because the
distance traversed is not so great
Toledo Blade.