n to
penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man,
and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his
own best interests....

Another error, as it seems to me, into which the old reformers fell, was
the position that all habitual drunkards were utterly incorrigible, and
therefore must be turned adrift and damned without remedy in order that
the grace of temperance might abound, to the temperate then, and to all
mankind some hundreds of years thereafter. There is in this something so
repugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and feelingless,
that it never did, nor never can enlist the enthusiasm of a popular
cause. We could not love the man who taught it--we could not hear him
with patience. The heart could not throw open its portals to it, the
generous man could not adopt it--it could not mix with his blood. It
looked so fiendishly selfish, so like throwing fathers and brothers
overboard to lighten the boat for our security, that the noble-minded
shrank from the manifest meanness of the thing. And besides this, the
benefits of a reformation to be effected by such a system were too
remote in point of time to warmly engage many in its behalf. Few can be
induced to labour exclusively for posterity; and none will do it
enthusiastically. Posterity has done nothing for us; and theorize on it
as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are
made to think we are at the same time doing something for ourselves.

What an ignorance of human nature does it exhibit, to ask or expect a
whole community to rise up and labour for the temporal happiness of
others, after themselves shall be consigned to the dust, a majority of
which community take no pains whatever to secure their own eternal
welfare at no more distant day! Great distance in either time or space
has wonderful power to lull and render quiescent the human mind.
Pleasures to be enjoyed, or pains to be endured, after we shall be dead
and gone, are but little regarded even in our own cases, and much less
in the cases of others. Still, in addition to this there is something so
ludicrous in promises of good or threats of evil a great way off as to
render the whole subject with which they are connected easily turned
into ridicule. "Better lay down that spade you are stealing, Paddy; if
you don't you'll pay for it at the day of judgment." "Be the powers, if
ye'll credit me so long I'll take another jist."