Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1891-03-30
A New Declaration of Indepen-
dence.

| dence.
Extract from an address delivered
at the Independence Day celebration
Woodstock, Connecticut, July 4, 1888.
Not less than eighty thousand vic
tins go annually to the drunkard's
grave from the homes of this land.
Pestilence and war combined do not
in this country, equal its destructive
energy.
The waste of human life wrought
every five years by our two hundred
thousand saloons is equal to the de-
struction of life by both armies, num-
bering millions of armed men, dur
ing the entire War of the Rebellion
In their hands strong drink is a
weapon so fatal that the five hun
dred thousand drunkard- makers are
able to accomplish more in the same
period than four times their number
with shot and shell, fire and sword,
and ali appliances of modern warfare.
| The cruelty Of war is not measured
| by the number of those who fall in
battle, but by the unutterabe woe
and anguish of broken hearts and
desolated homes. Most emphatically
is it true, that the mere destruction
of eighty thousand lives every year
| affords no measure of the relentless
cruelty of the liquor power in its war
against society. To realize this you
| must 90 to the dishonored homes,
question the broken hearts, read the
voicelsss misery in the wan and hag-
gard faces, hear helpless children
cry for food, see them stricken down
by drunken and Infatuated fathers,
and sometimes even by besotted
mothers, witness the utter degrade
ton, ignorance, poverty and misery
which everywhere and always accom-
pany the victims of the saloon.
Alas how true and terrible is
this Indictment of the saloon. Oh,
that from every hilltop and valley,
from every mountain and prairie,
from city and hamlet, from lakes to
gulf and from sea to sea, there might
this day arise the united voice of our
sixty millions of people i'll most SOL
emn Declaration of Independence of
this cruel king whose injuries and
usurpations thIeaten the destruction
of our free government. AS did our
fathers when they resolved to throw
off the absolute tyranny of bad
king, so let us give certain facts to
candid world. This monster, sitting
supreme in the politics of this coun-
trv, has enacted laws authorizing
him to open in all our towns and
cities slaughter houses of men, wo-
men and children, and of all virtue.
He has enacted laws for transform
ing men into beasts.
He is the direct cause of nine
tenths of the woes and SORROWS which
blight and curse our people.
He, hiding his deformity under the
forms Of law enacted by his own vas
sails, over whose heads he cracks the
slave drivers lash in halls of legisla-
ton, maintains at our expense an
army of miscreants who, at the very
door of our homes and in the shad-
ows of our sanctuaries, prosecute the
work of murder and death.
He has despoiled labor, burdened
property with excessive taxation, i'm
poverished whole communities, him
dered education, corrupted morals,
fostered crimes, aided all classes of
vice amp wrong, and plunged his I'M
happy victims into shame and degra-
dalton.
He seizes and debauches innocent
children, tears sons from the arms of
sorrowing mothers, and bears them
away to dishonored graves.
He wrings hot tears from the eyes
Of widows whose husbands he has
sacrificed at the shrine of the drunk
ards Moloch. He sits supreme in
the national congress and makes laws
in the country's capital.
He governs courts of justice, and
makes ministers of the law and legis-
latures his lackeys.
He silences the preacher en- his pull
pit and muzzles the editor at his
desk.
He wastes, directly and indirectly,
in his revels annually more than a
thousand millions of our dollars, and
marshals in his staggering procession
to death and hell half million Of our
people.
He is a cold, heartless, cruel MUIR
| derer and assassin of the deepest dye.
He counts his victims by millions.
His butcheries go on daily and night
ly within sight of the portals of our
homes. We can hear the shrieks of
his victims and the wall of the be-
reaved.
He is the bowling, providing. de-
troying wolf. with scorching, fierce
breath, descending upon every fold,
staying and devouring orr best loved.
Let us rise in our united might as
did our ancestors in Old Windham at
the call of Israel Putnam on Pomfret
Heights in the last century. Let US
hunt this wolf to his den and shoot
him. Clinton B. Fisk.