hol meets a bright young man and cultivates his
acquaintance.]

[Illustration: Alcohol introduces the youth to his old-time friend,
Gambling.]

[Illustration: The mutual friends relieve the youth of his cash.]

[Illustration: Alcohol and his victim have a jolly time.]

[Illustration: The young man comes to grief, but Alcohol sticks by him.]

[Illustration: They suggest an easy method for replenishing his
exchequer.]

[Illustration: The mutual friends determine to follow him to the inmost
cell of the prison.]

[Illustration: Alcohol and Gambling incite their victim to murder.]

[Illustration: They mock him when upon the scaffold.]

[Illustration: Alcohol and Gambling bury their victim in an untimely
and dishonored grave.]

[Illustration: They report their success to Satan and receive his
congratulations.]

CHAPTER VII.

MEANS OF CURE.

Is this disease, or vice, or sin, or crime of intemperance--call it by
what name you will--increasing or diminishing? Has any impression been
made upon it during the half-century in which there have been such
earnest and untiring efforts to limit its encroachments on the health,
prosperity, happiness and life of the people? What are the agencies of
repression at work; how effective are they, and what is each doing?

These are questions full of momentous interest. Diseases of the body, if
not cured, work a steady impairment of health, and bring pains and
physical disabilities. If their assaults be upon nervous centres, or
vital organs, the danger of paralysis or death becomes imminent. Now, as
to this disease of intemperance, which is a social and moral as well as
a physical disease, it is not to be concealed that it has invaded the
common body of the people to an alarming degree, until, using the words
of Holy Writ, "the whole head is sick and the whole heart faint." Nay,
until, using a still stronger form of Scriptural illustration, "From the
sole of the foot even unto the head, there is no soundness in it; but
wounds and bruises and putrifying sores."

In this view, the inquiry as to increase or diminution, assumes the
gravest importance. If, under all the agencies of cure and reform which
have been in active operation during the past fifty years, no impression
has been made upon this great evil which is so cursing the people, then
is the case indeed desperate, if not hopeless. But if it appears that,
under these varied agencies, there has been an arrest of the