A MODEL TEMPERANCE ORATION.

Oamaru Mail, Volume IV, Issue 1247, 16 April 1880, Page 3

A MODEL TEMPERANCE ORATION.

To those contemplating a temperance oration a contemporary offers a few denunciations of alcohol from the following outburst of Colonel Ingersoll's indictment of its ill effects before an American jury : " Alcohol cuts down yoath in its vigor, manhood in its strength, and age in its weakness. It breaks the father's heart, bereaves the doting mother, extinguishes natural affection, erases conjugal love, biota oot filial attachment, and blights parental hope, and brings premature age in sorrow to the grave. It produces weakness, not strength; sickness, not health ; death, not life. It makes wives widows, children orphans, fathers Sends, and all paupers. It feeds rheumatism, nurses gout, welcomes epidemics, invites clmlera, imports pestitence, and embraces consumption. It covers the land with misery, idleness, and crime. It engenders controversies, fosters quarrels, and cherishes riots. It crowds your peniten-

tiaries and furnishes victims for the scaffold. It is the blood of the gambler, the element of the burglar, the prop of the highwayman, and the support of the midnight incendiary. It countenances the liar, respects the thief, esteems blasphemy. It viulates obligations, reverences fraud, honors infamy. It defames benevolence, hates love, scorns virtue and innocence. It incites the father to batcher hi 3 helpless oifspring, and the child to grind the paternal axe. It bnrns up men, consumes women, detests life, car3C3 God, and despises heaven. It suborns witnesses, nurses perfidy, denies the jury box, and jtain3 the judicial ermine. It bribes voters, disqualifies votes, corrupts elections, pollutes our institutions, and endangers the government. It degenerates the citizen, debases the legislator, dishonors the statesman, and disarms the patriot. It bring 3 shame, not honor; :terror, not safety; despair, not hope; misery, not happiness; and with the ' mslevolence of a fiend ; calmly surveys its frightful desolation; and, stained with hvoc, it poidous felicity, kills peace, ruins morals, wipes out national honor, then curses the world and laughs at its ruin. It Joes that and more—it murders the soul. It is the sum of all villainies, the father of all crimes, the mother of all abominations, the devil's best friend, and God's wrat enemy."