ng;
The minstrel harpeth merrily,
The sailor plows the foaming sea,
The huntsman kills the good red deer,
And the soldier wars without a fear;
_Nevertheless, whate'er befall_,
_The farmer he must feed them all_.

[Illustration]

TEMPERANCE

O thou invisible spirit of wine; if thou hast no name to be known
by, let us call thee--devil.--Shakspeare.

Society has much to attend to. The whole wonderful
mechanism by which those citizens who now do measurably right, can have
blessings far beyond the totals of luxuries enjoyed by Kings a few
centuries ago--this whole mechanism, I think, has been perfected by one
law, the self-interest of the class wielding the force necessary to
compel the change desired. To-day, among the evils which we suffer,--not
as results of the new civilization, but as vestiges of the old
barbarism,--is the abuse of stimulants. The effects of this abuse are,
perhaps, next to atrocious crime, the most discouraging which menace the
march of progress, and

EVEN THE ANNALS OF ATROCIOUS CRIME

so closely link the curse of strong drink with deeds of violence as to
totally extinguish the mark of difference in the minds of many good men.
Society as to-day organized, commits the keeping of a woman to the hands
of a man, who in turn, is legally free to condemn her to the horrors of
companionship with a man (that man being himself) bereft periodically or
continuously of his moral motives of conduct. He is entitled by law to
return to his wretched home with murder in his heart, and to vent upon a
woman from whom he fears no defense, the anger which

IT WOULD BE UNSAFE TO MANIFEST

toward the person who may have originally inspired the passion. The
point at which this cruelty becomes practically illegal is that limit
which the wife puts to her own endurance, which in turn, is generally
gauged not by her own powers, but by the personal safety of her
children. So long as her own life seems to be alone in jeopardy, she
waits to be killed--as in the notable case at Minneapolis, Minn.,--and
Society permits itself to be called in simply to attend the funeral of
the murdered woman, who, however, is often buried as a victim of some
hypothetical disease, invented to take the blame off the prevailing
order of things. Now while this is

ENTIRELY HORRIBLE IN THE ABSTRACT,

the abstract is notoriously a false way of getting the general drift of
things