TEMPERANCE COLUMN. AETHUE MUESELL ON THE BLUE RIBBON.

Evening Post, Volume XXVIII, Issue 65, 13 September 1884, Page 1 (Supplement)

TEMPERANCE COLUMN. AETHUE MUESELL ON THE BLUE RIBBON.

One cannot but respect and honour deeply the aim and motive of all who enlist in this conscription. My coat wears no bud of Blue, but my voice shall speak none but fair and loving words to those who wear it. If I deem it more in keeping with my manhood to leave my life to speak for itself, and declare its lessons of sobriety in its own way, I don't think my Blue Eibbon friends will refuse me as a comrade, or claim a monopoly of the right to preach the Gospel of Temperance, or lift the warning cry against indulgence or excess. What may seem childish to one mind is manly and heroic in another. The grand thing is for each man to be true to himself, and do nothing that is unreal. I will NEITHER ASSAIL NOR DEFEND the Blue Eibbon movement. But I will defend, with all the might I have, the principle which animates a revolt against that curse of drunkenness by which thousands of homes are wrecked, and millions of hearts are broken. When I pass a prison, and know that its chief architect is drink; when I pass a workhouse, and know that its pauperism is the work of drink ; when I pass an asylum, and know that the yell of its rabid cry is drink ; when I read of murder, and know that the impulse of its cruel blow was drink ; when I see squalid infancy, and reckless prime, and drivelling age, and know that the squalor and havoc are the fruit of drink, I will not be squeamish as to the form which society's protest may assume against the evil, nor wag my tongue against a method just because it is not mine. You say it is childish. Very well, I will not dispute. But is it not childish for a grown-up man to be utterly unable to pass a glaring lamp till he has emptied his pockets of their money, and his brains of their ballast, and robbed his wife and children of the nurture and protection which he swore to God he would give them until death? Is it not childish for a man who has grown daughters and a true-souled wife about him, to prefer the hiccough of a comrade who calls him to the board of green cloth, to barter his wage and Hia yarn's inheritance at pool or billiards, to the smile which hails him to the fireside which his manhood should illuminate, but which his brutality should never curse ? Which is the more childish, to wear a Blue Eibbon or a Eod Nose? Who is the greater baby — the man who wears his sobriety in his buttonhole, or the man who wears his sottishness in the holes which reduce his coat to tatters ? At least it is a worthier thing for a young man to be seen minding his business with a Eibbon in his coat, than lounging at refreshment bars and ogling barmaids while he sucks the handle of a walking stick, and drawls veiled nastiness which he mistakes for wit. Oh, conscripts of the Blue Eibbon ! lam not adorned like you. lam NOT WORTHY OF ADORNMENT. But if you are in earnest in your appeal to men and women to hold the rein on appetite, and give the spur to love ; then, for Christ's sake, let me walk beside you. The publichouse is a home destroyer. I know a score of homes in Birmingham, samples of a thousand more ; and I know a hundred homes in London, Manchester, aud elsewhere, types of tens of thousands more — homes which contain the elements of all that should make home life sweet ; wives, mothers, children, books, love, freedom; and yet where the ashes are dropping from the fire, and the crust is vanishing from the cupboard, because the husband drinks, or plays, or both. The one footstep which brings a curse to the threshold of the temple is the footstep of its high priest. The master of the house is not master of himself. A daughter's smile has not so much attraction as the gin-Bhop lamp. A wife's voice has not the music of the billiard balls, the dice, or the dominoes. And while he, QRINNINO AND GUZZLING over the throe balls upon the billiard board, the victims of his perjured vows of homo are struggling with the needle, or by teaching or in some desperate way, to keep from the three balls which dangle at the pawnshop door. I know homes of ease and affluence, where the one skeleton in the cupboard, behind all the finery, is a husband's self-indul-gence. Oh, how it blights the lives and homes of millions, how it gnaws at the hearts of sensitive and noble womanhood, and brings its poison to the bloom of youth ! How it wakes up indignation and violence in bosoms that are by nature gentle, when a trusting soul wakes slowly from a cruel trance to find herself deceived and duped for life! A thing which the newspapers call a man here in Birmingham was remanded until last Friday for knocking down his wife and killing her. And his excuse, which he snivelled from the dock, was "She hit me first." He was but the ninth part of a man, but ho had fist enough to kill a woman. He had the full ten fingers, and they were fatal to his wife. She struck him first! And why ? Perhaps because she had expected a dole out of his wages to stop the children's hungry cry for