"It has been said that moderate doses of alcohol stimulate work into greater activity, and make life happier and brighter. My experience, since I became a total abstainer, has been the opposite. I have found myself able to work better. I have a greater command over any powers I possess. I can make use of them when I please. When I call upon them, they answer; and I need not wait for them to be in the humour. It is all the difference between a machine well oiled and one which has something, among the wheels which catches and retards the movement at unexpected times. As to the pleasure of life, it has been also increased. I enjoy Nature, books, and men more than I did—and my previous enjoyment of them was not small. Those attacks of depression which come to every man at times who lives too sedentary a life rarely visit me now, and when depression does come from any trouble, I can overcome it far more quickly than before. The fact is, alcohol, even in the small quantities I took it, while it did not seem to injure health, injures the fineness of that physical balance which means a state of health in which all the world is pleasant. That is my experience after four months of water-drinking, and it is all the more striking to me, because for the last four or five years I have been a very moderate drinker. However, the experience of one man is not that of another, and mine only goes for what it is worth to those to whom, as much alcohol as is contained in one glass of sherry, or port, alters away from the standard of health. I have discovered, since abstinence, that that is true of me. And I am sure, from inquiries, I have made, that it is true for a great many other people who do not at all suspect it. Therefore, I appeal to the young and the old, to try abstinence for the very reasons they now use alcohol—in order to increase their power of work and their enjoyment of life. Let the young make the experiment of working on water only. Alcohol slowly corrupts and certainly retards the activity of the brain of the greater number of men. They will be able to do all they have to do more swiftly. And this swiftness will leave them leisure—the blessing we want most in this over-worked world. And the leisure, not being led away by alcohol into idleness, into depression which craves unnatural excitement, into noisy or slothful company, will be more nobly used and with greater joy in the usage. And the older men, who find it so difficult to find leisure, and who when they find it cannot enjoy it because they have a number of slight ailments which do not allow them perfect health, or which keep them in over-excitement or over-depression, let them try—though it will need a struggle—whether the total abandonment of alcohol will not lessen all their ailments, and by restoring a better temper to the body—for the body with alcohol in it is like a house with an irritable man in it—enable them not only to work better, but to enjoy their leisure. It is not too much to say that the work of the world would be one-third better done, and more swiftly done, and the enjoyment of life increased by one-half, if no one took a drop of alcohol."

Speech at Bedford Chapel,
July 20th, 1882.