Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors.

Date:
[1874?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    scriptions of medical men. I have known in my own acquaintance two friends and brother officers of mine, of very high position, whose wives died of drink, through having first been made to take it by medical men when suffering pain, and I am sure there is, if possible, more danger (not perhaps as regards numbers) in the drinking amongst females and their influence on families than there is among men, and for this reason —all of us who know anything about the working of local temperance societies, can count the men drunkards saved by dozens and even hundreds; but ask them where they have seen a woman drunkard saved, and but one or two at the most they can speak of, if so many. (Hear, tiear.) Does that not show that moderate drinking is a greater danger to females than to males ? (Hear, hear.) I will give you one instance ■ of that. A gentleman who took very high classical honours at Oxford, and who became a Fellow, was called to the Bar. He got quickly into practice, and became in a position to marry a lady who was considered a good match for him. His friend, from whom I heard the story, heard nothing of him for several years, but onedayhe received a letter from him asking him to go and see him in a lodging-house in the East of London. He found him there, dying of drink, and on that deathbed, he told him this :—“ I never had the slightest tendency to drink ; I had a horror of it, but after I married that beautiful girl, in whom I thought I had found such a valuable wife, I found she was a secret drunkard, and her drinking drove me to drink. She is dead, and now you see me dying.” I think such an incident as this is enough to show the dreadful danger of moderate drinking to females as well as to men. (“ Hear, hear,” and cheers.) „ DR. PATERSON’S SPEECH. The Rev. H. Sinclair Paterson, M.D. : Having the courage of my convictions, and believing as I do in the endurance of total abstainers, I rise at this late hour to make a speech. (Laughter.) Permit me to say that it has been my belief for a number of years, that there is no absolutely certain method by which we can banish national drunkenness except by the method of national total abstinence, whether voluntary or compulsory. Now the question just rests entirely on that simple fact— the question that we meet to discuss to-night. If we are prepared to allow drunkenness to continue, then we may accept moderate drinking as a right and proper thing, but if we are resolved, if this country is in earnest, it Christian men and philanthropists are decidedly of one mind in this matter, that drunkenness should cease, then we ought to set our- selves with united heart and life against all moderate drinking—(cheers) for there is nothing surer than that drunkenness follows in the wake of moderate drinking. There are some who are able to continue mode- rate drinkers throughout a long life, but there are others, as any physio- logist can tell us, who cannot continue in that particular state. They must either be abstainers or drunkards, and so long as we have this practice of moderate drinking condoned or allowed by the Christian Church, so long must we every year and every generation have a certain number of drunkards. I think I would have met the difficulty which vou. sir. have encountered in a rather different way. I must confess that