The bases of the temperance reform: an exposition and appeal./ With replies to numerous objections. By Rev. Dawson Burns.

32 Thze Drinkiig Sysleml ozir Clii'f Social Evil.
trated by the men who had first stimulated their passions
by draughts of arrack or doses of bhang? Abstemious
persons and communities may, indeed, be guilty of vices
and crimes, but these are committed in spite of the
abstinence; whereas intoxicating drink, besides giving
rise to the peculiar vice of intoxication, aggravates every
form of evil, and leads to crime and violence and recklessness more specifically its own. It would be as rational
to argue that, if we got rid of the indigenous causes of
ague and small-pox, we should be visited by yellow-fever
or the plague, so that the national mortality would still
be kept up to a given point, as to represent that the removal of the drinking system would be followed by an
influx of the same or equal evils from other sources.
Every known fact, in every quarter of the globe, cries
out against this dismal conclusion. \When Ireland had
abandoned whiskey-drinking, did poverty and criminality
retain their former level, fed by other streams? In places
where the sale of strong drink is suppressed, are the vice
and misery due to other causes greater than elsewhere?
It has been the habit of some opponents to charge the
spread of total abstinence with an increase in the consumption of opium, but it has never been shown that any
coincidence, much less a casual connection, has existed
between the two events; while it must be evident that
the persons who abstain from alcoholic liquors from a
conviction of their injurious influence on health and
character will be generally led to abstain, for similar
reasons, from all narcotic agents. The use of Alcohol
may physiologically lead to the use of opium, and any
dietetic use of opium by abstainers must be so rare and
exceptional as to confirm the rule of an ordinary and
natural separation.
4. It may be said " that tAere are benej!s coiferred by the
drizkiizg system of whicAh notice shonid be taken before atny
just decision can be pronounced." To this objection refer