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4–SOCIAL PROGRESS. TEMPERANCE 377
4. SOCIAL PROGRESS. THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT
AND DR. PETER WIESELGREN (18001897). HE
BEGINS AS A SCHOOLBOY. HlS WORK AS A PASTOR.
THE MOVEMENT BECOMES POPULAR. LAW OF
1854. NEW TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT, C. l88o.
MOVEMENT FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN.
FREDERICA BREMER, THE NOVELIST. NEED FOR
WOMEN TO FIND WORK OUTSIDE THE HOME.
With these evangelical movements it is natural to con
nect the movements for social reform, with which many of
them have been in a measure connected. The work of
Lars Levi Laestadius was, as we have seen, largely directed
against drunkenness in the North. But the general tem
perance movement in Sweden had its origin in the person
of Dr. Peter Wieselgren, son of a peasant in Smaland
(1800 1877), a learned man, who was successively a
teacher and librarian at Lund, a pastor in that diocese, and,
lastly, for twenty years Provost of Goteborg Cathedral.
10
But temperance work was the main business of his life.
As a schoolboy at Vexio he was struck by the sight of a
fine-looking young man, sitting crouched up in the window
of his cell in the county gaol, reading the Bible. He found
that this was a man of good character, who, in a drunken
fit, the first he had ever indulged in, had murdered his
much-loved young wife, and so was condemned to death,
and destined to make his children both fatherless and
motherless. The young man was beheaded, after writing
a poem of warning against the use of brandy, which
Wieselgren had printed. Thus his career in life was fixed
by this tragic experience.
The evil against which he had to fight was immense and
of long standing. Brandy had come into use in Sweden
in the Russian wars of Gustavus Vasa, whose soldiers
thought of it as a sort of charm used by their foreign oppo
nents to give them courage. From that time it became the
10
See Cornelius :
Hist., 275, De S.K. inre Misson and Grim-
berg :
I.e., pp. 551-6. There is also a short biography by
Sigfrid Wieselgren, Stkh., 1907.
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