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

Gi-catizcss of the Alcoholioc Plegzle.
to age, the /le of these victims continues to be told, and
is iever completed. Here, in sorrowful truth, is one
broad difference between thle Eastern plague and the
plague of drink. The one breaks forth epidemically and
subsides (in England, there has been no visitation since
the seventeenth century-two centuries ago); whereas
the alcoholic plague never intermits its ravages, and by
the unrelaxing continuity of its infliction occasions an
aggregate mortality far surpassing that which pestilence
has produced. If plague has slain its thousands, intemperance has slain its ten thousands; and if plague can
claim to have hurried its victims more quickly and in
vaster masses to the tomb, intemperance may claim not
only to have wrought a greater slaughter in the long run,
but to have hurried out of life as many of the untainted
as of the self-destroyed. The innocent child has died or
grown up diseased through the sin of the drunken
parent; the wife or husband has been sacrificed to the
drunkenness of the sottish mate; and both on land and
sea, in peace and war, as the days revolve, accidents of
every kind, by which victims' lives are cut short, occur
through the effect of alcohol upon those who have duties
of importance committed to ~them.* To have a perpetual
plague like this within our borders is, therefore, to suffer
a frightful waste of life, compared with which the annual
homicides by murder, manslaughter, and suicide, and even
by a state of war, would be of inferior account. If these
deaths have averaged but 25,o000o a year since the Eastern
plague disappeared two centuries ago, we have a loss of
five million fellow-creatures-a sixth of the population
of the United Kingdom at this time-who might other
* It is probably not true, as roundly asserted at times, that 6o,ooo drunkards die every year in the United Kingdom; but if to those who die prematurely from the effects of alcohol, in large or often-repeated doses, be
added the multitudes who perish as indicated in the text, the host of slain
er,ens 1r, yAd ill probably not fall short of 6o,ooo-,ooo every month.
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