An Address of the Representatives of the Religious Society of Friends

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt from An Address of the Representatives of the Religious Society of Friends: For Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, to Their Fellow-Citizens, on the Use of Intoxicating DrinksWe may be allowed, therefore, to call attention to a few statements of a general character, which cannot fail to impress us all with the alarming extent which intemperance has reached, and the deep hold it has gained upon the community.As compared with human slavery in our own country, - by which but one-tenth of its population was thereby brought into bondage, and less than one-half its territory directly affected, - the scourge of intemperance enters almost every town and hamlet in the land, and destroys not only the bodies but the souls of men.In the late war our nation is said to have sacrificed more than a million of lives and three billions of dollars. To support the liquor traffic, it is computed, from authentic sources, that the people of the United States expend annually six hundred millions of dollars, and waste untold wealth besides by the impoverishment of her citizens and the destruction of their health.Noah Davis, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, said, in a public speech lately delivered by him, "That habits of intemperance are the chief cause of crime is the testimony of all judges of large experience. It is established beyond argument, by official statistics, by the experience of courts, and by the observations of enlightened philanthropists, that the prevalence of intemperance in every country is the standard by which its crimes may be measured."The report of the State Board of Charities for Massachusetts for 1869 says, "The proportion of crime traceable to this great vice must be set down, as heretofore, at not less than four-fifths, " and the Inspectors of the State Prison, in 1868, gave the same proportion.Judge Allison, of Philadelphia, said in a speech delivered at a public meeting, in 1872, "Intemperance is upon our right hand and left, on the streets - north, south, east, and west - we see the lures to destruction. There are few people who see the practical evil as we see it in the criminal courts of this city. There we can trace four-fifths of the crimes that are committed, to the influence of rum, there is not one ease in twenty, where a man is tried for his life, in which rum is not the direct or indirect cause of the murder, rum and blood go hand in hand."About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.