The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1917-09-10
GREAT MEN WHO.
 DRANK WHISKEY
 ARE ENUMERATED.
Napoleon, Grant, Washington, Jackson, Jefferson All
 Indulged.

- 4t
 Extracts from an article written for 'eThe State" published at Columbia. in prohibition South Carolina, by "Sa- voyard," famous Washington O. C.) political correspondent.
 ''The liquor question is up in Con- gress and thus politics for the mo- ment is laden down with morality. This gives opportunity to William J. Bryan to fire a torpedo after this fashion, which a prohibition Senator from Texas put into The Congression- al Record:i
 Beverages that .ccntain but a smaal percentage of alcohol will un- steady the nerves and impair the pro- ductive value of the drinker, no matter what his occupation may be-
 How about Thomas Jefferson? He drank wine every day. Would Mn Bryan say that the nerves of the au- thor of. the Declaration of Indepen- dence and the father of the Demo- cratic party were unsteady? 2 This world never saw a saner mind than that with which Thomas Jefferson about him. He never said or did a foolish thing. Many regard him as the wisest American. He was en- inently practical, and his brilliant ina gination was held in complete subjection by a judgment almost in. fallible.
 .Jefferson was winebibber-that is, he drank wine every day and he argued with convincing force that the proper way to combat the evil of in- temperance was to encourage the consumption of wine, citing the fact that in rio country where wine was cheap and abundant was there much drunkenness. He also had some re- spect for the rights of his fellow men. He possibly got a hint from Plato, who held that it was not advisable to ,force. the citizen to that which was for his own good. Better to persuade him.
 "On the other hand, George Wash ington was whiskey drinker; so was 1 Andrew Jackson; so was Grover Cleveland; so was Ulysses s. Grant, Used temperately, whiskey is by no
 means an evil. It is the intemperate
 use of it that makes all the mischief 1 The absurd and vicious custom of treating has caused more than half the drunkenness with which our country was cursed throughout the
 Nineteenth Century. Had every state lenacted a law against treating a cen i tury ago and rigidly enforced it to
 date. we would hear little about pro- ! hibition.
 | Napoleon Bonaparte drank wine daily, and had wine distributed to the 7 privates in his armies. He knew as much about nerves as any. man who ever lived, and heap more than Bry-
 an knows. Most of his battles were
 won by the nerve of his soldiers. Take
 the German army of today. It has a strength of nerve that is simply J marvellous, and 99 per cent. of the
 rank and file of the German army ] was raised on beer. and now has it's
 regular allowance of it, when it is possible, at the front.
 [ There is tradition for it, if not his- tory, that Abraham Lincoln, the only
 teetotaler who was ever president of
 the United States, not excepting R. B. 1 Hayes. either, searched the markets : for a brand of whiskey such as Gen.
 eral Grant drank, in order to supply some of his other generals with a case of it.
 The Scotch consume more arcohof
 than any other people in Christen- dom. Yet the nerves of the Scotch are stronger than the nerves of the Spaniards, who consume the least aI-
 coho1 of all the Christian peoples AL
 cohol is absolutely forbidden the
 Turks. How does their civilization i compare with that of the people of l Western Europe, al of whom are winebibbers in more or less degree
 And then for statecraft-compare Thomas Jefferson, the winebibbber with William J. Bryan, the teetotaler! I take that back-there is TO com parison.
 'sThe best place to inculcate tenn perance is in the home, while the ] child is about the mothers knees ], The worst of it is that such fanatics Il as Bryan are seemingly as much op. lI posed to temperance as to debauch kery. Nothing but tota' abstinence