584 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



five years past, perished from being poisoned by liquor by alco- 

 hol, an extremely mild toxicant that in some form or other chem- 

 ists tell us exists in almost all our food, solid or liquid ! Did it 

 not, perhaps, occur to the orator, or possibly to another of his au- 

 dience besides the present writer, that in the million of cases as- 

 sured, say in two or three, even in one of them, a latent or contrib- 

 uting cause might possibly have mitigated the responsibility of 

 this murderous alcohol; that one of those million of men may 

 have been, perhaps, indiscreet in something else besides drinking 

 beer, or had somewhere latent in his system some congenital or 

 local contributive cause ; or perhaps had met with some accidental 

 incident to his alleged untimely taking off ? 



But this is a single sample only of the intemperance, not to 

 say the voluptuous dalliance with tropical statistics, of the pro- 

 hibition orator, who asserts that liquor has slain more than 

 wild beasts, than wars, pestilences, famines and even deluges 

 and Johnstown floods (which latter, by the way, were bursts of 

 water and not of alcohol, which therefore has not, even in the 

 mouths of prohibition orators, achieved the record of water, 

 which certainly did wreck Johnstown, and which, according to 

 Holy Writ, in one case did actually destroy the whole world). 

 Indeed, nothing is more common upon their lips than the maxim 

 " Liquor destroys both body and soul." But if the annual 

 deaths actually and beyond question traceable to liquor were 

 arrayed against the annual mortality (which is said to be a con- 

 stant figure indifferently as to wars, famines, tidal waves, and 

 the like cataclysma), it might be disputed as above if liquor 

 always destroys the body, while as to the soul what mortal can 

 depose and say ? The danger of the tropical statement which 

 appears to be inseparable from prohibition politics, however, is a 

 very great one. Falsehood is falsehood and lying is lying, even 

 in the mouths of lecturers and reformers ; and temperance is a 

 cardinal virtue in speech as well as in liquor drinking. Were 

 such opulent misrepresentation and dishonesty confined only to 

 the so-called " temperance " orators or " reformers," it would be 

 bad enough, as teaching looseness and unreliability of statement 

 and an irresponsibility of language, which would be and is dan- 

 gerous to any community at large. But not only the tramp and 

 the circulating itinerant, but eminent men, men of brains and 

 personal worth, whose influence for good in their own neighbor- 

 hood might be very large, are often so warped in their very 

 fiber by this sort of misfortune as to become incapable of see- 

 ing things as they are dealers in untruth, wrapped in untruth 

 as in a garment. I have in mind one eminent gentleman, a 

 man of large affairs and of otherwise unblemished integrity, 

 who has the misfortune of being a prohibitionist leader, and 



