National temperance : a jubilee biography of the National Temperance League instituted 1856 / by William Gourlay ; with an introduction by John Turner Rae.

  • Gourlay, William.
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: National temperance : a jubilee biography of the National Temperance League instituted 1856 / by William Gourlay ; with an introduction by John Turner Rae. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    39/424 (page 33)
    Among those attending the Convention was Elihu Burritt, the learned blacksmith, and he wrote an intro- duction to the printed report of the Convention proceed- ings, from which a few extracts are worth reading. Referring to missions by British and American Christian Churches, he says : “ But, as ‘ when the sons of God came together, Satan came also with them,’ so one sweeping fiery curse had followed in the wake of Christian Missions and Christian commerce. Where the elevating and saving spirit of the Gospel reached thousands of the poor pagans with its life-giving influence, the spirit of intemperance, malignant ghost of the bottomless pit, before unknown to them, slew its tens of thousands, and involved whole nations in a maelstrom of crime and misery. The very ships that bore the missionaries and messengers of salvation to heathen lands had been often freighted with intoxicating liquors, which, like some of the plagues unvialled in the Apocalypse, were let loose to drown in their burning deluge every grain of Christianity before it could germin- ate in the heart of the half-enlightened heathen. No race that ever peopled the earth had done more to propagate the vice and aggravate the ruin of intemper- ance, than the English race. If they had sown the wind, they had reaped the whirlwind in sweeping simooms of vengeance. Among the first articles of export produced by the first ship-load of enslaved Africans in America, was the raw material of rum. It seems an evident dis- pensation of Divine Justice, that the first product of the slave’s labour should conceal a curse that should ‘ bite like a serpent, and sting like an adder ’ those who enslaved him. From that moment rum—the product of slave labour—became the circulating medium of all human flesh markets, the currency which, above all the lucre in Mammon’s purse, would buy of African fathers c