I shall not attempt in these pages any learned disquisition upon the nature of alcohol—­its hideous effects on the system—­how it disarranges all the functions of the body—­how it impairs health—­blots out memory, dethrones reason, and destroys the very soul itself—­how it gives to the whole body an unnatural and unhealthy action, crucifying the flesh, blood, bones and marrow—­how it paints hell in the mind and torture on the heart, and strangles hope with despair.

Nor shall I discuss the terrible and overshadowing evils, financial and social, inflicted by it on every class of society.  Like the trail of the serpent it is over all.  Look where you will, turn where you may, you can not be blind to its evils.  It despoils manhood of all that makes manhood desirable; it plucks hope from the breast of the weeping wife with a hand of ice; it robs the orphan of his bread crumb, and says to the gates of penitentiaries, “Open wide and often to the criminals who became my slaves before they committed crime.”  The evils of which I speak are not unknown to you, but have you considered them as things real?  Have you fought them as present and near dangers?  You have heard the wild sounds of drunken revelry mingling with the night winds; you have heard the shrieks and sobs, and seen the streaming, sunken eyes of dying women; you have heard the unprotected and unfriended orphans’ cry echoed from a thousand blighted homes and squalid tenements; you have seen the outcast family of the inebriate wandering houseless upon the highways, or shivering on the streets; you have shuddered at the sound of the maniac’s scream upon the burdened air; you have beheld the human form divine despoiled of every humanizing attribute, transformed from an angel into a devil; you have seen virtue crushed by vice; the bright eye lose its lustre, the lips their power of articulation; you have seen what was clean become foul, what was upright become crooked, what was high become low—­man, first in the order of created things, sunken to a level with brute beasts; and after all these you have or may have said to yourself, “All this is the work of the terrible demon, alcohol.”

I shall not attempt to paint any of the countless scenes of degradation, and horror, and misery, which this demon has caused to be enacted.  I shall leave without comment the endless train of crimes and vices, the beggary and devastation following the course of this foul Titan devil of ruin and damnation.  I shall only endeavor to give a plain, truthful history of one who has felt every pang, every sorrow, every agony, every shame, every remorse, that the demon of drunkenness can inflict.  I have nothing to thank this demon for, beyond a few fleeting—­oh, how fleeting—­hours of false delight.  He has wrought only woe and loss to me.  Even now, as I sit here in the stillness of desperation, afraid of I know not what, trembling with a strange dread of some impending doom, gazing in fright backward along