453. The Crusade of Demons
The Crusade of Demons
Not with the click and clang of glasses and decanters, but with the stroke of the bells of English chapel, Scotch kirk, and American church, all mingling in one chime, would we ring the Old Year out and the New Year in. Putting the palm of my hand against the palm of yours, and clenching the fingers on the back part of the hand, and then jerking my arm backward so as to bring you a little farther over this way, I give you a warm-hearted Christian grip, and wish you a Happy New Year.
I accept with pleasure the invitation of the Scottish Temperance League to write their annual tract, for I am by blood partly a Scotchman, have high cheekbones, and am very stubborn when I think I am right. Now that the steamers are crowded with Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Irishmen coming to America, I must give a word of warning. Stop drinking before you come! Our climate and species of liquors soon swamp or kill your countrymen. Moderate drinkers in Britain soon become immoderate drinkers here. The same amount of rum that in your own country will make you exhilarant, will turn you into a gutter-inspector here. There is something in our climate to rush a man to ruin quicker, if he be on the wrong track. Besides that, I think we put more blue vitriol, potash, turpentine, copperas, and stramonium in our liquors than you do in yours. Oh, you ought to taste our cogniac and Old Otard! Some one declares the fondness of different nationalities for strong drink by saying, when Frenchman meets Frenchman, he takes wine; when German meets German, he takes beer; when Englishman meets Englishman, he takes ale; when Irishman meets Irishman, he takes whisky; but when American meets American, he takes the first thing he can lay his hands on. We have noticed that people of other lands coming here soon get our bad habits, and make quicker plunge than our own natives. Come, by all means! We want to see you’97but leave your ale-pitcher at home.
Your land, like our own, swelters under the curse of strong drink, and it is time that we all take up arms against it. From the way men are everywhere mown down by this evil, it is evident that there must be a banded and organized effort against the world’92s sobriety. I think the original Liquor League was formed in the lower world. One day the bad spirits met together and resolved that our human race was too happy, and a delegation of four internals was sent up to earth on embassy of mischief. One spirit said, ’93I will take charge of the vineyards!’94 Another said, ’93I will look after the grainfields!’94 Another said, ’93I will supervise the dairy!’94 Another said, ’93I will take charge of the music!’94 They landed in the Great Sahara Desert, clutched their skeleton fingers in a handshake of fidelity, kissed each other good-by with lip of blue flame, and separated for their mission.
The first spirit entered the vineyard one bright morning, and sat down on the twisted root of a grapevine in sheer discouragement. He could not at first plan any harm for the vineyard. The clusters were so full and purple and luscious and pure. The air was fairly bewitched with their sweetness; health seemed to breathe from every ripened bunch. But in wrath at so much loveliness, the fiend grasped a cluster in his right hand, and squeezed it with utter hate, and lo! his hand was red with the liquid, and began to smoke. Then the fiend laughed, and said, as he looked at the crimson stream dripping from his hand, ’93That makes me think of the blood of broken hearts. I will strip the vineyard, and squeeze out all the clusters, and let the juices stand till they rot, and will call the process ’91fermentation.’92’93 And a great vat was made, and men seeing it, brought cups and pitchers and dipped them, and went off, drinking as they went, till they dropped in long lines of death; so that when the fiend of the vineyards wanted to go back to his home in the pit he trod on the bodies of the slain all the way, going down over a causeway of the dead.
The fiend of the grain-field waded chin-deep through the barley and the rye. As he came in, he found all the grain talking about bread, and prosperous husbandmen, and thrifty homes. But the fiend thrust his long arms through the barley and rye, and pulled them up and flung them into the water, and kindled fires beneath by a spark from his own heart, and there was a grinding, and a mashing, and a stench. And men dipped their bottles into the fiery juice, and staggered and blasphemed and rioted and fought and murdered till the fiend of the grain-field was so well pleased with their behavior, he changed his residence from the pit to a whisky barrel; and there he sits by the doorway, at the bung-hole, laughing right merrily at the fact that out of so harmless a thing as barley and rye he has made this world a suggestion of Pandemonium.
The fiend of the dairy met the cows as they were coming up full-uddered from the pasture-field. As the maid milked, he said, ’93It will not take me long to spoil that mess. I will add to it some brandy and sugar and nutmeg, and stir them up into a milk-punch, and children will like it, and even temperance men will take it; and if I can do no more, I will make their heads ache, and hand them gradually over to the more vigorous fiends of the Satanic delegation.’94 And then he danced a breakdown on the shelf of the dairy till all the shining row of milk-pans quaked.
The fiend of music entered a grogshop, and found the customers few. So he made circuit of the city, and gathered up all the instruments of sweet sound, and after the night had fallen he marshaled a band, and trombone blew and cymbals clapped and harp thrummed and drum beat and bugle called and crowds thronged in and listened, and, with wine-cup in their right hand, began to whirl in a dance that grew wilder and stronger and rougher, till the room shook and the glasses cracked and the floor broke through and the crowd dropped into hell.
They had done their work so well, these fiends of vineyard and grain-field and dairy and concert-saloon, that, on getting back, high carnival was held, Satan from his throne announcing the fact that there was no danger of the earth’92s redemption so long as the vineyards and orchards and grainfields and music paid such large tax to the diabolic. Then all the satyrs and spirits and demons cried ’93Hear! hear!’94 and, lifting their chalices of fire, drank ’93Long life to rumsellers! Prosperity to the gallows! Success to the License Law!’94
In view of the devastations of strong drink, my first word is to toilers of brain or hand or foot! God intended us all to be busy. The sun and the moon in six thousand years have rested only part of a day. and then it took a miracle to stop them. Nothing that God ever made, animate or inanimate, human or angelic, can afford to quit work. But the outlay of human energy often leads to inebriation. Men have so much to do that they think they must have artificial stimulus. Vast multitudes of professional men have found their nervous system exhausted, and their brain lethargic, and have resorted to this dangerous help. Now what a man cannot do without perpetual stimulant I do not believe he ought to do. You are responsible for no more strength than that which you have in your arm, and for no more speed than you have in your foot, and for no more vivacity than you have in your brain. God asks no more, and the world has a right to expect no more. Notwithstanding this, some of the most brilliant men in the law and medicine, yea, even in the ministry, have fallen overboard. It will be a glorious day for Britain and the United States when all their professional men and artisans shall throw the bottle out of the back window. It may require a struggle; but what great and grand and glorious thing was ever done without a struggle? Let not the descendants of men who fell at Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge talk complainingly about sacrifices!
My next word is to parents! If I can persuade you that your present course of taking intoxicating liquor in the slightest, yea, in the ten-thousandth part of a risk, imperils your boys, you will knock out the end of your ale-keg, and pull out the cork of your wine-bottle, to let the beverage, which hitherto has made your lips smack, go into the ditch. You say you have never been harmed by it. Granted. But remember what I tell you this first day of January, 1875. That if you proceed with your present idea about intoxicating liquors, the probability is your son John or George or Peter or Henry or James or Frederick will break your heart with his dissipations. Do not let them be familiar with the odors of the wine-closet. Do not let them take the sugar from the bottom of the glass. Abstain not only for yourself, but for your children. O father! if in the last hour of your life you can take the hand of your son and say, ’93Farewell! I thank God that I can trust my name and my property and the defense of your mother in your keeping. I thank God that he ever gave me such a boy as you are!’94 in that hour you will be more than compensated for any self-sacrifice of appetite that you have made for his welfare. But suppose you should, on the other hand, come to stand at the death-couch of a dissipated son, and he should say, ’93I am lost! Father, you are to blame. You drank, and I thought you could do no wrong. But the habit which I learned in our sitting-room on winter nights at the entertainment of friends has been my destruction!’94 Ah! in such an hour a pile of beer-barrels high as heaven and deep as hell could not barricade your soul against remorse and chagrin unutterable.
My next word is to the fashionable and elegant: Beastly drunkenness is no temptation. But when intoxication fills its cut-glass or golden chalice under blazing chandelier and before flashing mirror, graceful gentleman bowing to gay lady as they click the rim, then the thing is bewitching. Though the heavens fall, we must be in the fashion. The wedding-hour, when two immortals join their fate in holy alliance, and when, of all other occasions, hearts should be purest, yea, the wedding-hour has often been the starting-place of a dissipation which ended not until he who took the vows had fallen under the all-consuming influence of strong drink and she who, among the throng of congratulating hearts, in clear sweet voice, promised, ’93I will!’94 had wandered out in the cold winter night, and from the abutment of a bridge looked down into the glassy water, and then, in hope of relief from earthly agonies, took a wild leap into the wave.
My last word is to temperance men of Britain! To arms! I sound the tocsin of a war compared with which Sedan and Waterloo and Gettysburg were child’92s play. While we do not underrate the foe, let us not limit the power of the God in whose cause we have been enlisted. The flag we bear is not stained with tears or blood. No skeletons will be found in the track of the host who march out for the defense of the right; but in the wake of this army of philanthropists will smile the harvests of reformed inebriates, and be heard the shout of children at the return of their fathers from the captivity of the wine-cup. ’93The mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.’94
On the first day of January, some years ago, our Abraham Lincoln made Proclamation of Emancipation for all bondmen of my own country. Would God that on the first day of January, 1875, there might go forth in England, Scotland, and Ireland a proclamation of emancipation for all the slaves of strong drink! That would make the happiest of all happy New Years. God save the Queen! and give long life and peace to all her subjects!
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage