THE MORALITY OF ALCOHOL DRINKING.

Evening Post, Volume XLVIII, Issue 48, 25 August 1894, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE MORALITY OF ALCOHOL DRINKING.

The habit of alcohol drinking is immoral not only in itself but in ita tendencies. The introduction of diluted spirits of wine into the system impairs digestion, destroys nerve, and vitiate* blood, thus entailing physical incapacity, debility, and ruin, following in the train of which, naturally, come erratic temper, moral cowardice, numberless lies, deceptions, and subterfuges with which to screen or excuse neglect of duty, dereliction of duty, loss of money, of time, and, in short, the multitude of shortcomings by which ono recognises the drunkard's progress on the road to ruin. The physical injury caused by alcohol drinking and the consequent immoral effect on tho individual, are matters of fact, ably and fully attested in Dr. Richardson s wellknown book on the subjeot. Every person impressed with the importance of individual moral responsibility will guard against the indulging in alcohol, either in his own person or in the person of those to whom he is a guide or a law. But the habit is immoral from the outside influences with which it surrounds itself. Thero is no instance of any vice- so universally popular and so altogether degrading as the vice of alcohol drinking. Opium smokers and drinkers are not, in the opinion df men who have studied the quesiton in binds where tho habit is prevalent, predisposed to crime or insanity to anything like the oxtont to which alcohol slaves are subjeot. The inebriate imbibes with his liquor a love of company ; the opium victim Becks solitude -lethargy is the result of one, frenzy of the other. This desire for company which is so strongly allied with the lovo of drink is fatal to moral integrity from the very nature of the company in which the drunkard finds himself. Nothing pure or good can be associated with such habits and surroundings. No man, it is admitted, falls to the lowest level all at once. There is in every one so much of a spiritual nature, whether acknowledged or unrecognised, that only by degrees can the moral tone be obtunded so as to endure and at last enjoy that from which it would have at first unhesitatingly recoiled. The very listening to low talk or ribald song, at first disliked, becomes tolerated and then enjoyed. From listening to actively sharing in the lewdness is only a step, but a step so serious that once taken self-respeot and moral tone are dragged with it, till at last the one-time honourable and respected man " who could toke a glass and leave it alone," isfound associated with needy and debauched turfites, cardsharpers, loafers, and all that class of nondescript social wrecks who are the leading lights of tap-room oxgies, whose conversation and ways set the fashion in the illusionary world of whiskydom.