ent nostrum of pledge-signing, a
lying-made-easy invention, which like calomel, seldom had any permanent
effect on the disease for which it was given, and never failed to
produce another and a worse. Here the cure created an epidemic of
forgery, falsehood and perjury.

Napoleon selected his generals for their large noses. Dr. Washingtonian
chose his leaders for their great vices. The honors bestowed upon his
followers were measured by their crimes, and that man who could boast
the largest accumulation was the hero of the hour. A decent, sober man
was a mean-spirited fellow; while he who had brought the grey hair of
parents in sorrow to the grave, wasted his patrimony and murdered his
wife and children, was "King o' men for a' that." The heroines were
those women who had smilingly endured every wrong, every indignity that
brutality could inflict; had endured them not alone for themselves but
for their children; and she who had caressed the father of her child
while he dashed its brains out, headed the list in saintship; for love
was the kneading trough, and obedience the rolling pin, in and with
which that precious mess called a man was to be made into an angel.

The _Visiter_ held that the law-giver of Mount Sinai knew what was in
man, and had not given any such account of him; that the commands, "Thou
shalt," and "Thou shalt not," were addressed to each individual; that
the disease of opening one's mouth and pouring whisky into it was under
the control of the mouth-opener; that drunkenness was a crime for which
the criminal should be punished by such terms of imprisonment as would
effectually protect society and prevent its confirmation. It told women
that that dough ought to be baked in the furnace of affliction; that
the coil of an anaconda was preferable to the embraces of a drunken man;
that it is a crime for a woman to become the mother of a drunkard's
child; that she who fails to protect her child from the drunken fury of
any man, even to the extent of taking his life on the spot, if possible,
is a coward and a traitor to the highest impulses of humanity.

These sentiments made a stir in temperance ranks, and there was much
defense of the dear fellows. The organization, seemed to be principally
occupied in teaching, that among men, only rumsellers are free moral
agents, and that they and the women are to bear the iniquity of us all.
One Philadelphia woman, engaged in scattering rose-leaf remedies over
the great