Читать книгу Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious Burglar онлайн

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For days together this miserably-besotted wretch would be in a state of intoxication.

He had several associates who were nearly as bad as himself. The consequences attendant upon the fatal propensity may easily be guessed. His work was neglected. By degrees his apartments were stripped of everything he could turn into money, and his unhappy wife led a life in comparison to which that of a galley slave was an enviable state of existence.

It is not, it cannot be possible for a writer to depict with anything like adequate force all the misery to be witnessed in the home of a drunkard. Mr. J. B. Gough, the temperance orator, has said that there was no power on earth that tended so much to the degradation and ruin of young men, morally, physically, spiritually, religiously, and he might say financially, as drink. “I have held the hands of dying men in mine,” says the orator; “I have laid my hand upon the burning foreheads, and moistened the dry lips of many drunkards, while I have heard such stories as have made my heart ache and my eyes stream with tears. They were wrecks of men of genius—​men of education—​men of power—​men that might have made their mark in the world, going out—​oh, so fearfully—​into the blackness, and darkness and hopelessness, of the awful future.”