The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1896-09-03
is 1T NECESSARY
The Full Import of the Statement That
the Liquor Trafpe Is Unavoidable.

The Full Import of the Statement That
the Liquor Trafre Is Unavoidable.
We have frequently heard it stated
by men who on other subjects deserve
to be called intelligent and sober, that
we might as well attempt to arrest the
planets in their orbits as to arrest the
progress of intemperance. Do these
men really believe what they say-be-
lieve that the power which drives the
1runkard to his glass, the vender to
his barrel and the maker to his distll-
'ery, is as irresistible as the power
which keeps the luminaries of heaven
in their spheres? If they believe this,
they may congratulate themselves, if
they dare, on having made an attain
nent which the devil himself may well
my. For he, with all his art and
Knowledge and wickedness, has never
been able to view virtue and vice, holi-
ness and sin, sobriety and intoxication,
rs alike in accordance with the design,
the order, the appreciation of God.
Yes, we are free to affirm that men
who believe that the causes and effects
of intemperance are necessary and un"
avoidable; that there must be dis
tilleries and breweries of liquid poison;
perennial fountains, sending out far
and wide the stream of death; that in
every village there must be reservoirs
ever open, yet ever full; into which
these streams discharge part of their
hellish contents; that in every neigh
I,a IN
those of the tabled salamander, which
are proof against combustion, which
can be cooled only by fire, and which
should be regarded as channels melted
into hardness and worn smooth by
gaseous flame; and that in many a
dwelling there must be hearts to bleed
over broken vows and blighted hopes,
parents fastened sorrowing to the
grave by abandoned and drunken SONS,
q wife fading away in her bloom and
dropping dead to the ground by the
cold neglect, the wounding insults or
the killing blows of him she once re-
ioiced to call her husband; children
freezing and starving because he to
whom they owe their being has deter
miped as far as in his power lies to
connect with it nothing put shame and
misery and sin; men, we say, who can
believe these evils are necessary and
unavoidable have gone beyond the arch
Of sophists himself in the acuteness of
their logic, in the breadth of their
views, and in their faith, or rather in
their exemption from faith in the Su-
preme Creator. The grand deceiver can
not in his own conscience ascribe his
plans of wickedness and his modes of
warfare against all that is holy and
happy throughout the universe to the
uncomfortable laws and regulations of
his Maker.
No doubt it is one of his temptations
to those who are willing to be his serv-
ants that moral evils are according to
the irresistible orders of heaven. and
therefore to participate in them is to
contract no guilt, to violate no obligar
ton, TO do no wrong. No doubt it Is
one of his temptations, and the sue
cess of it may have often filled pande'
monium with a universal hiss of up
plause; that it is necessary to make
TO sell and to drink alcoholic liquors;
that they are the gift of benevolent
Providence, and that they are to be re
ceved with thankfulness, and Jha'
there can be nothing wrong unless il
the abuse of the blessing. Verify, -ncf
persons have been given over to believe
"a lie.-National Temperance Advocate
In Paris one rarely sees drunken
woman, in london often.