“If that is true God made a mistake, since He made the whole phenomena of animal life to run by water power.  He made it in such abundance it takes oceans to hold it, rivers and rivulets to carry it to man, bird and beast, while in all the wide world He never made a spring of alcohol.  If it’s good for strength, why not give it to the ox, the mule and the horse?” It takes a good deal of faith to trust a sober mule; I’m sure I wouldn’t want to trust a drunken one.  There is not a man in my presence who would buy a moderate drinking horse, and no one would wilfully go through a lot where a drunken dog had right of way.  Yet we license saloons to turn drunken men loose in the street, some of them as vicious as mad dogs.

Good for strength?  When Samson had slain the regiment of Philistines and was exhausted and athirst; when in his extremity he cried to the Lord:  “Thou hast given this great deliverance into the hand of thy servant, and now shall I die from thirst.”  What was done to revive him and renew his strength?  Was strong drink recommended as a stimulant?  The Bible account informs us God “clave an hollow place in the jaw, and water came thereout.”  Don’t you think if alcoholic liquor had been intended as a beverage for mankind, the great Creator would have made a few springs of it somewhere?  Bore into the earth you can strike oil, but you can’t strike whiskey.  You can find sparkling springs of water almost everywhere, but nowhere a beer brewery in nature.  It’s water, blessed water all the time.  On your right it bubbles in the brook; on your left it leaps and laughs in the cascade; above you it rides in rain clouds upon the wings of the wind; beneath you it hangs in diamond dew upon the bending blade; behind you it comes galloping down the gorge “from out the mountain’s broken heart;” before you it goes gliding down the glen, kissing wayside flowers into fragrance and singing, as rippling o’er the rocks it runs:  “Men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.”  Oh, bright beautiful water! may it soon be the beverage of all mankind.

I know some say:  “This is a free country; if a man wants to drink and be a brute, let him do so.”  The trouble about that is, while strong drink will degrade some men to the level of the brute, drunkards are not made of brutes.  Some thirty or more years ago a grandson of one of the greatest statesman this country ever produced, was shot in a saloon while intoxicated.  While that young man was dying, but a few blocks away a grandson of one of the greatest men that ever honored Kentucky in the Senate of the United States, was in jail to be tried for murder committed while drunk; and in the same city at the same hour in the station-house from drink was a great grandson of the author of “Give me liberty or give me death.”  Whom did Daniel Webster leave his seat in the Senate that he might hear his eloquence?  S.S.  Prentice went down under the cloud of drink.  A gifted family gave to a Southern State a gifted son.  His state sent him to the halls of national legislation, but drink wrought his ruin.  Horace Greeley was his friend, and finding him drunk in a Washington hotel said to him:  “Why don’t you give up what you know is bringing shame upon you and sorrow to your family?”