The Catholic bulletin. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1911-1995, 1917-11-10
DOMAIN OF TEMPERANCE
DRINK AND BE SOBER.

Vance Thompson, who has written
a stirring and impressive indictment
of alcohol under the ironical title,
Drink and Be Sober" says:
Alcohol is a curious thing. 1t is
often as cratic in it's manifestations
as electricity. It's ordinary way of
work is to degenerate it's man, making
for general organic degeneracy, with
progressive waning of the intellectual
faculties. Now and then it has an
other way. Instead of slowly MUIR
dering it's man, it attacks him furious
ly at intervals. Now and then, at an
unforeseen moment, out of the blue
drink storm beats upon him and
sweeps him away from his usual
mornings. =. The best man who
drinks is never sure that crime may
not get him; that when his moral
discrimination is put to sleep by the
drug strange new criminality may
not start up in him. The chance is
one in hundred. If it be only one in
thousand it is bad chance to take,
and it is on the edge of this peril that
one finds the most awful and the most
sad tragedies of life.
One such adventure in life naunts
me. The youth loved most was an
undergraduate at one of the English
universities. Destiny had given him
birth in a famous English family
near the head of it. ~. Once, I
ram hoy uyo bod xuondorad oEold
debating the old Utopian idea, and
winter night shut down on us. We
went into a little wayside inn for din
ner and took what we could get. 1t
was an alehouse and there was no
wine to be had. And I remember his
gentleman dine without a half pint
of claret?"
Now, in the horoscope of this grave
and gentle lad was the maddest night
ever written by the stars. 1 did not
witness it. | was not even in Eng
Land, but what happened know, and
| know the end He had been study
| ing hard and late and in the after
noon he rode out for an. hour or So
| those were the days when youth took
it's pleasure on horse-and he came
back and dressed to dine in town
| with some friends. There you have
him at a trifle before o'clock. He
had never been drunk in his life; he
was the half pint of claret sort of a
man; the man who vets his pipe
L wi Cr1o turn Of xxy11i cIx nd
soda; clean-mannered man who
would as soon think of drinking to
excess as of rolling in the kennel like
a dog.
| Where he went that evening l do
not know The bolt from the blue
struck him. At 10 o'clock he was a
drink-mad maniac, securing the
streets of the town with an American
revolver-Heaven knows where he got
Iit;-have forgotten-in his hand, and
five minutes later he shot and killed
a constable who expostulated with
him in kindly way. They hanged
that boy. In spite Of the mighty
weight of his family name, in spite
of his dazed defense, in spite of the
evident madness of that drink storm,
they hanged him on a gallows. 81
don't remember anything about it,"
was all he could say. How could he?
Science would have made it clear to-
day that he was in an alcoholic trance.
When he went out to kill, the real
man in him-the man I knew and
loved, the dreamer of Utopia-was
| deaf and blind do not care to write
| any more about this boys life and
death, only this: No man who plays
with the lawless force of alcohol
knows when or where the bolt from
the blue will strike. No man knows.
For inexorably as a triangle is i'm
bedded in circle there is hidden in
alcohol the swift potentiality of crime.
The Tablet