Self-Destruction

The Hon. Francis Gillette, in a speech in Hartford, Conn., in 1871, said that there was "in Connecticut, on an average, one liquor shop to every forty voters, and three to every Christian church. Inthis city, as stated in the _Hartford Times_, recently, we have five hundred liquor shops, and one million eight hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars were, last year, paid for intoxicating drinks.A cry, an appeal, came to me from the city, a few days since, after this wise: 'Our young men are going to destruction, and we want your influence, counsel, and prayers, to help save them.'"

InNew London, report says, the young men are falling into drinking habits as never before. So in New Haven, Bridgeport, and the other cities and large places of the state.

"The pulse of a person inhealth beats about seventy strokes a minute, and the ordinary term of life is about seventy years. In these seventy years, the pulse of a temperate person beats two billion five hundred and seventy-fourmillion four hundred and forty thousand times. If no actual disorganization should happen, a drunken person might live until his pulse beat this number of times; but by the constant stimulus of ardentspirits, or by pulse-quickening food, or tobacco, the pulse becomes greatly accelerated, and the two billion five hundred and seventy-four million four hundred and forty thousand pulsations areperformed in little more than half the ordinary term of human life, and life goes out in forty or forty-five years, instead of seventy. This application of numbers is given to show that the acceleration ofthose forces diminishes the term of human life."

"In New York, Mr. Greeley states that 'a much larger proportion of adult males in the state drink now than did in 1840-44.' After speaking of theadverse demonstrations all over the country, he adds, 'I cannot recall a single decisive, cheering success, to offset these many reverses.'

"Massachusetts is moving to build an asylum for her...