Danger! Or,
Wounded in the House of a Friend!
By Timothy Shay Arthur, 1875

This is a fiction work.

PREFACE

All efforts at eradicating evil must, to be successful, begin as near the beginning as possible. It is easier to destroy a weed when but an inch above the ground, than after it has attained a profuse growth and set its hundred rootlets in the soil. Better if the evil seed were not sown at all; better if the ground received only good seed into its fertile bosom. How much richer and sweeter would be the harvest!

Bars and drinking-saloons are, in reality, not so much the causes, as the effects of intemperance. The chief causes lie back of these, and are to be found in our homes. Bars and drinking-saloons minister to, stimulate and increase the appetite already formed, and give accelerated speed to those whose feet have begun to move along the road to ruin.

In “Three Years in a Man-trap” I have uncovered the terrible evils of the liquor traffic; in this book, I go deeper, and unveil the more hidden sources of that widespread ruin which is cursing our land. From the public licensed saloon, where liquor is sold to men — not to boys, except in violation of law — I turn to the private home saloon, where it is given away in unstinted measure to guests of both sexes and of all ages, and seek to show in a series of swiftly-moving panoramic scenes, the dreadful consequences that flow therefrom.

This book is meant by the author to be a startling cry of “DANGER!” Different from “THE MAN-TRAP,” as dealing with another aspect of the temperance question, its pictures are wholly unlike those presented in that book, but none the less vivid or intense. It is given as an argument against what is called the temperate use of liquor, and as an exhibition of the fearful disasters that flow from our social drinking customs. In making this argument and exhibition, the author has given his best effort to the work.