If he is a physician, health
and life are no longer entrusted to his care; if a lawyer, no man
will give an important case into his hands. A ship-owner will not
trust him with his vessel, though a more skilled navigator cannot be
found; and he may be the best engineer in the land, yet will no
railroad or steamship company trust him with life and property. So
everywhere the drunkard is ignored. Society will not trust him, and
he is limited in his power to do harm.
"Not so with your moderate drinkers. They fill our highest places
and we commit to their care our best and dearest interests. We put
the drunkard aside because we know he cannot be trusted, and give to
moderate drinkers, a sad percentage of whom are on the way to
drunkenness, our unwavering confidence. They sail our ships, they
drive our engines, they make and execute our laws, they take our
lives in their hands as doctors and surgeons; we trust them to
defend or maintain our legal rights, we confide to them our
interests in hundreds of different ways that we would never dream of
confiding to men who were regarded as intemperate. Is it not fair to
conclude, knowing as we do how a glass of wine too much will confuse
the brain and obscure the judgment, that society in trusting its
great army of moderate drinkers is suffering loss far beyond
anything we imagine? A doctor loses his patient, a lawyer his case,
an engineer wrecks his ship or train, an agent hurts his principal
by a loose or bad bargain, and all because the head had lost for a
brief space its normal clearness.
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