TWENTY THOUSAND DRUNKARDS

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1154, 22 September 1882, Page 4

TWENTY THOUSAND DRUNKARDS

The “ .Mall Guz-iie” of Juno :i;‘tb [' n, llie f. 11.-wu , : ■ll.l' following paragraph — has been going the ;-, hn I of the pipers during the last few days : —• lhe latest novelty in conferences is a N-.tional Drunkards' Conference, which has been held at Arnolds, in Indiana. It was attended by about 20,000 drunkards from all parts of the United States. It was not in the nature of things that with so admirable a text we should escape a sermon : and thus a contemporary, in a fit of propriety, wrung its hands, aghast at the hideous vision of the meeting of these t 20,000 drunkards; and found its mind, even at the outset, recoiling in bewilderment from the task of ideally realising the alcoholised spectacle. It was, indeed, easy enough to form a‘feasible conception’ of'such trifling matters as ‘the Tbermopylitan Three Hundred, or of the Illiberal Four Hundred of Carpetweavington-cmu Strikely or Smokely-on-Sewer, of the Six Hundred who rode into the Valley of Death at Balaclava, or of Garibaldis Miglia di Marsala ; the retreat of the len .thousand yet remains in the pages of Xenophon, a concrete picture.’ But the notion of twenty thousand ‘ Bourbon Whisky - ites or Monongahelians almost defies embodiment. However, after lengthy consideration, the conclusion was arrived at* that after all the whole affair was ‘ the last desperate outcome of the American Total Abstinence -m party, who seem to be nt their wits’ end to devise means of grappling with an evil which afflicts not only the surface but rages in ‘ the deeper vitals’ of Anglo-Saxon life on both sides of the Atlantic. In all this there is the same touch of ‘saturnine eccentricity and grim humor’ which our contemporary finds in most, of the manifestations of the American public ; for ‘drundards’ turns ont to be a wicked misprint for ‘ tunkers’ or ‘dunkers’-— an innocent sect of American Baptists, somewhat resembling our peculiar people, who take their name from the German word funker t to a dip : and*henco ‘tunkers,’ or, as sometimes erroneously sprit, ‘ dunkers,’simply moaning dinners,’ or those who baptise bv immerBon.”