surely they will not refuse submission to the
infinitely lesser condescension, for the temporal, and perhaps
eternal, salvation of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of their
fellow-creatures. Nor is the condescension very great. In my judgment
such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more by the
absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those
who have. Indeed, I believe if we take habitual drunkards as a class,
their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with
those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness
in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice--the demon of
intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius
and of generosity. What one of us but can call to mind some relative,
more promising in youth than all his fellows, who has fallen a sacrifice
to his rapacity? He ever seems to have gone forth like the Egyptian
angel of death, commissioned to slay, if not the first, the fairest born
of every family. Shall he now be arrested in his desolating career? In
that arrest all can give aid that will; and who shall be excused that
can and will not? Far around as human breath has ever blown he keeps our
fathers, our brothers, our sons, and our friends prostrate in the chains
of moral death. To all the living everywhere we cry, "Come sound the
moral trump, that these may rise and stand up an exceeding great army."
"Come from the four winds, O breath! and breathe upon these slain
that they may live." If the relative grandeur of revolutions shall be
estimated by the great amount of human misery they alleviate, and the
small amount they inflict, then indeed will this be the grandest the
world shall ever have seen.

Of our political revolution of '76 we are all justly proud. It has given
us a degree of political freedom far exceeding that of any other nation
of the earth. In it the world has found a solution of the long-mooted
problem as to the capability of man to govern himself. In it was the
germ which has vegetated, and still is to grow and expand into the
universal liberty of mankind. But, with all these glorious results,
past, present, and to come, it had its evils too. It breathed forth
famine, swam in blood, and rode in fire; and long, long after, the
orphan's cry and the widow's wail continued to break the sad silence
that ensued. These were the price, the inevitable price, paid for the
blessings