well do I
know what it is to feel the burning and jagged links of the devil's chain
cutting through my quivering flesh to the shrinking bone--to feel my nerves
tremble with agony, and my brain burn as if bathed in liquids of fire--too
well, I say, do I know what these things are, for I have felt them
intensified again and again, ten thousand times. The infinite God alone
knows the deep abyss of my sorrow, and help, if help be possible, can come
from him alone.

I shall not attempt in these pages any learned disquisition upon the nature
of alcohol--its hideous effects on the system--how it disarranges all the
functions of the body--how it impairs health--blots out memory, dethrones
reason, and destroys the very soul itself--how it gives to the whole body
an unnatural and unhealthy action, crucifying the flesh, blood, bones and
marrow--how it paints hell in the mind and torture on the heart, and
strangles hope with despair.

Nor shall I discuss the terrible and overshadowing evils, financial and
social, inflicted by it on every class of society. Like the trail of the
serpent it is over all. Look where you will, turn where you may, you can
not be blind to its evils. It despoils manhood of all that makes manhood
desirable; it plucks hope from the breast of the weeping wife with a hand
of ice; it robs the orphan of his bread crumb, and says to the gates of
penitentiaries, "Open wide and often to the criminals who became my slaves
before they committed crime." The evils of which I speak are not unknown to
you, but have you considered them as things real? Have you fought them as
present and near dangers? You have heard the wild sounds of drunken revelry
mingling with the night winds; you have heard the shrieks and sobs, and
seen the streaming, sunken eyes of dying women; you have heard the
unprotected and unfriended orphans' cry echoed from a thousand blighted
homes and squalid tenements; you have seen the outcast family of the
inebriate wandering houseless upon the highways, or shivering on the
streets; you have shuddered at the sound of the maniac's scream upon the
burdened air; you have beheld the human form divine despoiled of every
humanizing attribute, transformed from an angel into a devil; you have seen
virtue crushed by vice; the bright eye lose its lustre, the lips their
power of articulation; you have seen what was clean become foul, what was
upright become crooked, what was high become low--man, first in the order