Boyville: A History of Fifteen Years' Work Among Newsboys

CHAPTER XXX.

At one of the auxiliary meetings the question was asked a carrier, why the association “kicked against drinking whiskey when my father drinks four times a day.” In a talk at the meeting the vice-president said: “Your father may have been a respected citizen. He was all right when he started out, but today he is a physical wreck, I know him. He drinks too much. He paid no attention to warning. Perhaps he had no one to tell him. He trembles now, and I have seen him fall to the ground, helpless. Some day he will fall and get up no more. Every boy has in his mind a real desire to do good, but if you start in life as a whiskey drinker, if you stand around and see your friends drink without giving them a warning, some day you will regret it, something will come up in your life to remind you of your carelessness, your lost opportunity to help a fellow being, and his ruin means more to you than you think it does.

“There was a man once rowing in a small boat above Niagara Falls, where the water was quiet. He got funny and ventured down stream too far until he got into the current and not having strength enough to pull out of it, he was going faster and every second he saw certain destruction ahead of him. It was too late for him to think and act. The thinking should have been done up the river on peaceful waters. So you boys better do your thinking now if you don’t want to follow that kind of people over the brink. No, boys, don’t drink intoxicating liquors, don’t start it, cut it out, forget it.

“We do not believe that temperance is really promoted by compulsion, but this we do know, that the boy who will let whiskey and all spirits alone is very fortunate, and has a bright, happy future. He is the boy who will succeed; he is the young man that is wanted; he will be the man to be trusted.”