I have no recollection of a time when I had not an appetite for liquor.  My parents and friends of course knew that if it was taken in excess it would lead to destruction, but in our quiet neighborhood, where little was known of its excesses, no one dreamed of the fearful curse which slumbered in it for me to awake.  Had they had the least dread, fear, or anticipation of it they would have left nothing undone that being done might have saved me.  My appetite for it was born with me, and was as much a part of myself as the air I breathed.  There are three kinds of inheritances, some of money and lands, some of superior or great talents, and others of misfortunes.  For myself this misfortune was my inheritance.  It came not to me directly from my father or mother, but from my mother’s father, and seemed to lie waiting for me for three or four generations, and the mistakes and passion of long dead great grandparents reappeared in me, thus fulfilling, with terrible truth, the words of the divine book.  It has been gathering strength until when it broke forth its force has become wide-sweeping, irresistible and rushing—­a consuming power, devouring and sweeping away whatever dares to arrest its onward progress.  Never, never, in those long gone and innocent years of my childhood did my father or mother dream that I, their much-loved child, would ever become a drunkard.  If there is anything good, manly, noble or true, that is a part of me, I am indebted to them for it.  They loved me, and I worshiped them.  The consciousness that I have caused them to suffer so much has been the keenest sorrow of my life.  My mother (blessed be the name!) is now in heaven.  When she died the light went out from my soul.  A pang more poignant than any known before pierced me through and through.  My father is living still, and I verily believe there is not a son on earth who more truly and devotedly honors and loves his father than I mine.  But I desire to show that I am not wholly responsible for my present unhappy condition.  It is natural for every man to wish to excuse, or at least try to soften the lines of his mistakes with palliating reasons, and this I think right so long as the truth is adhered to, and injustice is not done any one.  I hope no one will think that I have willfully trod the road to ruin, or sunk myself so low when I have desired the opposite with my whole heart.  I was a victim of the fell spirit of alcohol before I realized it.  I was raised in a place where opportunities to drink were numerous, as everybody in those days kept liquor, and to drink was not the dangerous and disgraceful thing it’s now considered to be.  For a radius often miles from our house more people kept whisky in their cupboards or cellars than were without it.  I never heard a temperance lecturer until I was twenty years of age, and but seldom heard of one.  The people were asleep while a great danger was gathering in the land—­a danger which is now known and seen, and which is so vast in its magnitude that the combined strength of all who love peace, order, sobriety and happiness, is scarcely sufficient to meet it in victorious combat.