I recall a man who was a daily drinker all his life. I don’t think that man was ever drunk in his life. He despised a drinker but he also laughed at total abstinence. I have heard him ridicule it time and time again. He had three boys, carefully reared in most respects but reared to his ideas about drinking, reared to think that moderate drinking was the proper course, reared to despise a drunkard, but also to ridicule total abstinence. Every one of these three boys grew up to be a drunkard.
The rum seller is bound to reap in his own family, if he has one. A friend of mine of very wide experience, I think the widest experience of any friend I ever had, once said to me that he had never known a rum seller, who did not sooner or later feel the curse in his own home. One time I was holding meetings in an American city. Riding through the streets one day a friend pointed out a man. “There,” said he, “is a man who has run a saloon the most persistently of any man in our community. The saloon is prohibited among us, but he has done everything in his power to overthrow or circumvent the law. His own brother committed suicide through the effects of drink, and every member of his family is ruined by drink.”