Alcohol at the bar : the highest medical and scientific testimony concerning its use / compiled by G.W. Bacon.
- Date:
- [between 1880 and 1889?]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Alcohol at the bar : the highest medical and scientific testimony concerning its use / compiled by G.W. Bacon. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![STRONG DRINK. From a Poem by J. Room. [Inserted by permission.] Ambition, avarice, lust, and pride Roll on the earth a fearful tide Of grief and shame and misery, Whose cry, 0 God ! goes up to Thee; But, of all ills that curse our race, The deepest fount of our disgrace, Of other -woes the concentration, The essence, cause, and personation, The chain of hardest, strongest link, Is Satan’s masterpiece—Strong Drink ! An engine framed with fiendish skill To work his diabolic will; The craftiest of all inventions, It balketh not the fiend’s intentions. Child never fathered parent more— His features more distinctly bore— Than doth this paragon of evil, The genuine offspring of the devil. Its nature how can I declare, Or with what figure it compare ? So many various names it bears, So many hues and aspects wears, Unlike, yet like, it seems to be Of all bad things the epitome :— A whip that tickles while it scourges; A spur that lacerates while it urges ; An ignis fatuus of the gloom, That lures its victim to his doom ; A meteoric flash and flicker, That leaves the darkness tenfold thicker; A thing inspiring mirth and glad- ness That end in lasting grief and sad- ness ; A flush of hope to lighten care, But hurrying on to blank despair ; Like Satan’s self, ’tis all a cheat, At once deceiver and deceit; A snare, a mockery, and delusion, Wrapping in tangle and confusion; A signpost pointing the wrong way; A knave that flatters to betray ! Throughout the world Strong Drink is known, On hill, in dale, village and town ; Promising peace, it stirs up strife ; And health, it drains the fount of life; Of honest things the counterfeit, Like worthless tares among the wheat; Of God’s good gifts a vile perver- sion ; On Nature’s truth a gross aspersion. Prompter and cause of much ill- doing, Begun in fraud, it ends in ruin. Not pestilence, whose foetid breath Is charged with [poison and with death; Nor famine stalking through the land, With visage gauntand skinny hand; Nor war, whose fierce and fiery tread Spreads desolation dire and dread ; Nor all the three fell fiends combin’d, Bring half such woe to huaaan kind As that one demon, Alcohol! 0 ! why should mortal man extol The flattering fiend? Why cultivate A habit deadlier than fate ? Can none the needful wisdom give, That man may reason, learn, and live ? Dash from his lips the poisonous bowl, And rescue body, mind, and soul ? Pluck from the fire the half-burnt brand, And stay his suicidal hand ?](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28057077_0144.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
