There is no greater enemy to Canada’s material interests abroad this day than the wasteful, ruinous Drink Traffic. But while it overturns the home of plenty, it more cruelly still shatters the goblet of human happiness.
                    The Canadian Temperance Manual and Prohibitionists’ Handbook, 1884

the eye sees the cock, the bottle, the blind pig, the cow, the snuffers, the swan with two necks, the Greenland tiger, and, then, in the corner, the bishop’s finger

the loosened lips ~ where bang up palabras palpatate the beer bombarded babber lips to a bebumped bebop of papaphobic Presbyteers proslytizing the poor pourboire plebs and philobiblic pogey bait pandybatted by bagpipes and baptist preacher pap – speak easy

the tongue sets up still in Whiskey Gap, Alberta and greatly diminishes the industry of his majesty’s subjects

the stomach, drafting the dominion’s constitution at the Quebec Conference in 1864, succumbs to the blasting influence of the sin inspired draught and vomits in a potted plant in Lady Monck’s drawing room

the hands pad their resume with devil’s work – look busy

the fingers reach out to the blanched and branded members of this sad host of hope blighted creatures

the liver (its daughters are nervous and hysterical, its sons are weak, wayward, eccentric and insane), bare chested, syphilitic, and enfeebled by geneva, a naked child tugging at dry dugs, pauses between poses for the woodcut

the blood – addled, banjaxed, coguyed, dagg’d, cock-eyed, fuzl’d, groatable, hammered, inebriated, jagg’d, het the kettle, laugered, moon eyed, nimptopsical, oxycrocium, contending with the Pharaoh, quarrelsome, rudderless with all sails out, tavern tokened, undertaken, Virginia fenced, waterlogged, xed, yanked, and zombied – has, by all degrees, to like, approved, and immoderately drank thereof

the bile, running rum from Saint-Pierre to the American rum line, names its schooner I’m Alone

the heart, as penitence for the body’s excesses, sends a five dollar donation to the Independent Order of Rechibites and Father Kyran Walsh’s Total Abstinence Band, in St. John’s, Newfoundland