Some thoughts on moderation / by Axel Gustafson.

  • Gustafson, Axel, 1849-
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some thoughts on moderation / by Axel Gustafson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    no true heart, no clean purpose, no logical brain, shall be left among us. And thinking people have come to recognize that the drink-evil, in spite of all that has thus far been done to check it, is the first, nearest, and biggest of the dangers which England must face and conquer, if she would escape collapse as a nation, and extinction as a God-loving and God¬ serving people. They have already become convinced that, though there are many other vitally important questions calling for reform ; many moral, sanitary, and politi¬ cal problems pressing urgently for solution—such as that of enormous idle wealth on the one hand, and desperate anxious labour, poverty, and struggle, on the other; the problems of the social vice, of the opium trade, the dietary, vaccination, and vivisection controversies; the Irish question, the unemployed, the expensive and disastrous muddle of foreign policies, etc.;—they have become convinced that none of these can be properly understood or coped with except by a sober people, a people with clear brains and active consciences ; and that the drink problem becomes thus not of choice, but of practical imperative necessity, the foremost. And thinking people are beginning to see that something must be wrong somewhere in the ranks of temperance reform itself. We know that alcohol is a poison to body and soul; we know that the liquor-traffic is worse than