all will be
futile, for I repeat, that only by asserting power over hearts, souls,
imaginations, can you make any sort of definite resistance to the
awe-striking plague that envenoms the world. With every humility I am
obliged to say that many of the good people who aim at reform do not
know sufficiently well the central facts regarding drink and drinkers.
It is beautiful to watch some placid man who stands up and talks gently
to a gathering of sympathizers. The reposeful face, the reposeful voice,
the refinement, the assured faith of the speaker are comforting; but
when he explains that he has always been an abstainer, I am inclined to
wonder how he can possibly exchange ideas with an alcoholized man. How
_can_ he know where to aim his persuasions with most effect? Can he
really sympathize with the fallen? He has never lived with drunkards or
wastrels; he is apart, like a star, and I half think that he only has a
blurred vision of the things about which he talks so sweetly. He would
be more poignant, and more likely to draw people after him, if he had
living images burned into his consciousness. My own set of pictures all
stand out with ghastly plainness as if they were lit up by streaks of
fire from the Pit. I have come through the Valley of the Shadow into
which I ventured with a light heart, and those who know me might point
and say what was said of a giant: "There is the man who has been in
hell." It was true. Through the dim and sordid inferno, I moved as in a
trance for awhile, and that is what makes me so keen to warn those who
fancy they are safe; that is what makes me so discontented with the
peculiar ethical conceptions of a society which bows down before the
concocter of drink and spurns the lost one whom drink seizes. I have
learned to look with yearning pity and pardon on all who have been
blasted in life by their own weakness, and gripped by the trap into
which so many weakly creatures stumble. Looking at brutal life, catching
the rotting soul in the very fact, have made me feel the most careless
contempt for Statute-mongers, because I know now that you must conquer
the evil of evils by a straight appeal to one individual after another
and not by any screed of throttling jargon. One Father Mathew would be
worth ten Parliaments, even if the Parliaments were all reeling off
curative measures with unexampled velocity. You must not talk to a
county or a province and expect to be heard to any purpose; you must