Lociology Library

Copyright, 1918

By BYRON A. ROLOSON

Printed by Eastwood-Elwell Printing Co. Denver, Colo.

PREFACE

This volume is intended only for those men and women who derive their conclusions from facts and logic.

"To argue with a man who has renounced his reason, is like giving medicine to the dead."

Liberty, Colorado, May, 1918.

BYRON A. ROLOSON

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

EARLY HISTORY

The use of alcoholic beverages is as ancient as history. Place a quantity of soft, fresh, ripe fruit, such as berries or grapes, in a vessel and its own weight will press out some of the juice. In the presence of air, at the ordinary temperature at which fruit grows, the juice, by a purely natural chemical process, becomes wine, an alcoholic liquor. This simple fact must have been very early discovered by nearly all the races of men, even as early as the discovery of cooking food.

It is recorded that:

Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations and
Noah walked with God. * * *

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them,
Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

* * *

And Noah began to be a husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and was uncovered within his tent. * *

years.

And Noah awoke from his wine,

And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty

And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years and he died.

It can not be successfully denied that hard drinking will eventually bring a man to an untimely death.

Alcoholic liquors were in use among the Chinese in the most distant ages. The ancient Egyptian monuments, constructed many centuries before the Christian era, picture the wine-press and vineyard. Centuries before Moses led the people of Israel out of the land of

Egypt the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates not only flowed with milk and honey, but with wine as well.

Persian history relates a tradition that the King, more than four thousand years ago, attempted to preserve grapes in a large, unsealed vessel. Fermentation set in and the King, believing the juice was poisoned, bottled and labeled it as such. A lady of the court, desiring to commit suicide, drank from it. Pleased with the exhiliration produced, she repeated the experiment until the supply was exhausted. Disclosing the secret to the King, a new supply was made that sufficed for all. Hence wine is called in Persia zahar-i-khosh, a delightful poison. Wine was a common beverage of the ancient Persians.

Brewing alcoholic liquors from grain, while it is a much more complicated and tedious process than fermenting fruit juices, and requires considerable knowledge and skill, has been known from very early times. Rice-brewing was practiced by the people of India and the ancient Chinese before the Christian era. But the discovery of barley-brewing is attributed to the Egyptians. As shown by Egyptian frescoes, brewing was common in Egypt five thousand years ago and it is believed the Egyptians were the earliest brewers.

People in all the countries of southern Europe manufactured and used wine as a beverage and people in all the countries of northern Europe manufactured and used malt liquors as a beverage from the earliest historical times. The early Romans introduced the secret of beer-brewing into Britain, where it replaced the ancient mead (an intoxicant fermented from honey).

The use of intoxicating beverages was common among the people of Mexico and Peru at the time of the earliest Spanish invasions, and nobody knows for how many centuries before.

Unlike the natives of Mexico and South America, as proven by Richard Eddy, D.D., in his Alcohol In History, the North American Indians never made nor used alcoholic liquor of any kind until it was introduced to them by the European discoverers and pioneers.

"It is very certain," says Rev. John Heckewalder, in his History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations, "that the process of distillation and fermentation are entirely unknown to the Indians, and that they have among them no intoxicating liquors but such as they receive from us. The Mexicans have their pulgue and other indigenous beverages of an inebriating nature, but the North American Indians, before their intercourse with us, had absolutely nothing of the kind."