THE TEMPERANCE REFORM AND MY CO-WORKERS
As stated in the first chapter of this book, I became a teetotaler when
I was a child, and I also stated that the first public address I ever
delivered was in behalf of temperance. When I made my first visit to
Edinburgh in 1842 I learned that a temperance society of that city was
about to go over to Glasgow to greet the celebrated Father Theobald
Mathew, who was making his first visit to Scotland. I joined my
Edinburgh friends, and on arriving in Glasgow we found a multitude of
over fifty thousand people assembled on the green. In an open barouche,
drawn by four horses, stood a short, stout Irishman, with a handsome,
benevolent countenance, and attired in a long black coat with a silver
medal hanging upon his breast. After the procession, headed by his
carriage, had forced its way through the densely thronged street, it
halted in a small open square. Father Mathew dismounted, and began to
administer the pledge of abstinence to those who were willing to receive
it. They kneeled on the ground in platoons; the pledge was read aloud to
them; Father Mathew laid his hands upon them and pronounced a
benediction. From the necks of many a small medal attached to a cord was
suspended. In this rapid manner the pledge was administered to many
hundreds of persons within an hour, and fresh crowds continually came
forward.
When I was introduced to the good man as an American, he spoke a few
kind words and gave me an "apostolic kiss" upon my cheek. As I was about
to make the first public speech of my life, I suppose that I may regard
that act of the great Irish apostle as a sort of ordination to the
ministry of preaching the Gospel of total abstinence. The administration
of the pledge was followed by a grand meeting of welcome in the city
hall. Father Mathew spoke with modest simplicity and deep emotion,
attributing all his wonderful success to the direct blessings of God
upon his efforts to persuade his fellow-men to throw off the despotism
of the bottle. After delivering my maiden speech I hastened back to
Edinburgh with the deputation from "Auld Reekie," and I never saw Father
Mathew again. He was, unquestionably, the most remarkable temperance
reformer who has yet appeared. While a Catholic priest in Cork, a Quaker
friend, Mr. Martin, who met him in an almshouse, said to him, "Father
Theobald, why not give thyself to the work of saving men from the
drink?" Father Mathew immediately commenced his enterprise. It spread
over Ireland like wildfire. It is computed that no less than five
millions of people took the pledge of total abstinence from intoxicating
poisons by his influence. The revolution wrought in his day, in his own
time and country, was marvellous, and, to this day, his influence is
perpetuated in the vast number of Father Mathew Benevolent Temperance
Societies.
[Illustration: DR CUYLER AT 32 (When Pastor of the Market St Church, New
York)]
Second only to Father Mathew in the number of converts which he has made
to total abstinence was that brilliant and dramatic platform orator,
John B. Gough. When he was a reckless young sot in Worcester,
Massachusetts, he had owed his conversion to a touch on his shoulder by
a shoemaker, named Joel Stratton, who had invited him to a Washingtonian
temperance meeting. Soon after that time he owed his conversion, under
God, to the influence of Miss Mary Whitcomb, the daughter of a Boylston
farmer in the neighborhood. He formed her acquaintance very soon after
he signed the temperance pledge in Worcester, and she consented to
assume the risk of becoming his wife. In the summer of 1856 I visited my
beloved friend Gough at his beautiful Boylston home to aid him in
revival services, which he was conducting in his own church, then
without a pastor. He was Sunday-school superintendent, pastor and leader
of inquiry meetings--all in himself. One evening he took me to the
house of his neighbor, Captain Flagg, and said to me: "Here, in this
house, Mary and I did our brief two or three weeks of courting. We
didn't talk of love, but only religion and about the welfare of my soul.
We prayed together every time we met; and it was such serious business
that I do not think I even kissed her until we were married. She took me
on trust, with three dollars in my pocket, and has been to me the best
wife God ever made." When they went to Boston, Dr. Edward N. Kirk
received Mr. Gough into the Mt. Vernon Street Church, just as many years
afterwards he received Mr. Moody to the same communion table.
Of Mr. Gough's extraordinary platform powers I need not speak while
there are so many now living that sat under the enchantment of his
eloquence. A man who could crowd an opera house in London to listen to
so unpopular a theme as temperance while a score or more of coroneted
carriages were waiting about the door must have been no ordinary master
of oratory. As an actor he might have been a second Garrick; as a
preacher of the Gospel he would have been a second Whitefield. My house
was his home when visiting our city for many years, and he used to tell
me that my letters to him were carried in his breast pocket until they
were worn to fragments. His last speech, delivered in Philadelphia,
displayed much of his early power, and the last sentence, "Young man,
keep a clean record," rung out as he fell stricken with apoplexy, and
the eloquent voice was silent forever. God's messenger met him where
every true warrior may well desire to be met--in the heat of the battle,
and with the harness on.
My acquaintance with Neal Dow began in the early winter of 1852. He had
been chosen Mayor of Portland in the spring of the year, and then he
struck the bold stroke which was "heard round the world" and made him
famous as the father of Prohibition. He had drafted a bill for the
suppression of tippling houses and placed in it a claim of the right of
the civil authorities to search all premises where it was suspected that
intoxicating liquors were kept for sale, and to seize and confiscate
them on the spot. It was this sharp scimitar of search and seizure which
gave the original Maine law its deadly power. He took his bill to the
seat of government and it was promptly passed by the legislature. He
brought it home in triumph, and in less than three months there was not
an open dram shop or distillery in Portland! He invited me to visit him,
and drove me over the city, whose pure air was not polluted with the
faintest smell of alcohol. It seemed like the first whiff of a
temperance millennium. An invitation was extended to him to a
magnificent public meeting in Tripler Hall, New York. At that meeting a
large array of distinguished speakers, including General Houston, of
Texas; the Hon. Horace Mann, of Massachusetts; Henry Ward Beecher, Dr.
Chapin and several other celebrities, appeared. On that evening I
delivered my first public address in New York, and have been told that
it was the occasion of my call to be a pastor in that city two years
afterwards. A gold medal was presented to Neal Dow that evening. He went
home with me to Trenton, and from that time our intimacy was so great
and our correspondence so constant that if I had preserved all his
letters they would make a history of the prohibition movement from 1851
to 1857, the years of its widest successes. With him I addressed the
legislature of New York, who passed a law of prohibition very soon
afterwards. A forceful, magnetic man was General Dow, thoroughly honest
and courageous, with a womanly tenderness in his sympathies. I have been
permitted to know intimately many of the leaders in great moral reforms
on both sides of the ocean; but a braver, sounder heart was not to be
found than that which throbbed in the breast of Neal Dow.
On his ninetieth birthday the hale veteran sent my wife his photograph.
She placed his white locks alongside of the photograph which Gladstone
gave her, and she calls them her duet of grand old men. The closing
years of General Dow's life, like the closing years of Martin Luther,
were clouded with anxiety. He saw the great movement which he had
championed checked by many difficulties and suffering some disastrous
reverses. Some States which had enacted total prohibition forty years
before had repealed the law. In the five States which retained it on
their statute books its salutary enforcement was dependent on the moral
sentiments in the various localities. In his own, beloved Maine, his own
beloved law had been trampled down in some places; in others made the
football of designing politicians. These reverses saddened the old
hero's heart, and he sent to the public meeting in Portland which
celebrated his ninety-third birthday this message: "That the purpose of
my life work will be fully accomplished at some time I do not doubt, and
my hope and expectation is that the obstacles which now obstruct us will
not long block the way." The name of Neal Dow will be always memorable
as one of the truest, bravest and purest philanthropists of the
nineteenth century.
The most important organization for the promotion of temperance in our
country is the National Temperance Society and Publication House, which
was founded in 1865. I prepared its constitution, and the committee
which organized it met in the counting room of that eminent Christian
merchant, the late Hon. William E. Dodge. I once introduced him to the
Earl of Shaftesbury at a Lord Mayor's reception in London in these
words: "My lord, let me introduce you to William E. Dodge, the
Shaftesbury of America." To this day he is remembered as an ideal
Christian merchant and philanthropist. With him conscience ruled
everything, and God ruled conscience. He was one of the founders of a
great railway and cut the first sod for its construction. Long
afterwards the Board of Directors of the road proposed to drive their
trains and traffic through the Lord's day. Mr. Dodge said to his fellow
directors: "Then, gentlemen, put a flag on every locomotive with these
words inscribed on it, 'We break God's law for a dividend.' As for me, I
go out." He did go out, and disposed of his stock. Within a few years
the road went into the hands of a receiver, and the stock sank to thirty
cents on the dollar.
During the Civil War, General Dix and his military staff gave Mr. Dodge
a complimentary dinner at Fortress Monroe. General Dix rapped on the
table and said to his brother officers: "Gentlemen, you are aware that
our honored guest is a water-drinker. I propose that to-day we join him
in his favorite beverage." Forthwith every wine-glass was turned upside
down as a silent tribute to the Christian conscience of their guest.
When the whole Christian community of America shall imitate the wise
example of that great philanthropist it will exert a tremendous
influence for the banishment of all intoxicants from the public and
private hospitalities of society. Mr. Dodge was elected the first
president of the National Temperance Society, and served it for eighteen
years and bestowed upon it his liberal donations. He closed his useful
and beneficent life in February, 1883, and he was succeeded in the
presidency of the Society by Dr. Mark Hopkins of Williams College, by
the writer of this book, by General O.O. Howard and by Joshua L. Bailey,
who is at present the head of the organization. The society has done a
vast and benevolent work, receiving and expending a million and a half
dollars, publishing many hundreds of valuable volumes, and widely
circulated tracts.
The limits of this chapter will not allow me to pay my tribute to the
venerable Dr. Charles Jewett, Dr. Cheever, Albert Barnes, Dr. Tyng and
the great Christian statesman, Theodore Frelinghuysen, Miss Frances
Willard, Lady Henry Somerset, Joseph Cook and many others who have been
prominent in the promotion of this great Christian reform. It has been
my privilege to labor for it through my whole public life. I have
prepared thirty or forty tracts, written a great number of articles and
delivered hundreds of addresses in behalf of it, and preached many a
discourse from my own pulpit. I have always held that every church is as
much bound to have a temperance wheel in its machinery as to have a
Sabbath school or a missionary organization. It is of vital importance
that the young should be saved, and therefore I have urged temperance
lessons in the Sunday school and the early adoption of a total
abstinence pledge. The temperance reform movement made its greatest
progress when churches and Sunday schools laid hold of it and when the
total abstinence pledge was widely and wisely used. The social drink
customs are coming back again and a fresh education of the American
people as to the deadly drink evil is the necessity of the hour, and
that must be given in the home, in the schools and from the pulpit and
from the public press. I have become convinced from long labor in this
reform that the ordinary license system is only a poultice to the dram
seller's conscience, and for restraining intemperance it is a ghastly
failure. Institutions and patent medicines to cure drinkers have only
had a partial success. The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop
before you begin. Entire legal suppression of the dram shop is
successful where a stiff, righteous, public sentiment thoroughly
enforces it. Otherwise it may become a delusion and a farce.
The best method of prohibition is what is known as "local option,"
where the question is submitted to each community, whether the liquor
traffic shall be legalized or suppressed by public authority. Of late
years friends of our cause have fallen into the sad mistake of directing
their main assaults upon liquor selling instead of keeping up also their
fire upon the _use_ of intoxicants. Legal enactments are right; but to
attempt to dam up a torrent and neglect the fountain-head is surely
insanity. The fountain-head of drunkenness is the _drinking usages_
which create and sustain the saloons, which are often the doorways to
hell. In theory I always have been, and am to-day, a legal
suppressionist; but the most vital remedy of all is to break up the
demand for intoxicants, and to persuade people from wishing to buy and
drink them. That goes to the root of the evil. In endeavoring to remove
the saloon, it is the duty of all philanthropists to do their utmost to
provide safe places of resort--as the Holly-Tree Inns and other
temperance coffee houses--for the working people. And another beneficent
plan is for corporations and employers to make abstinence from drink an
essential to employment. My generous friend, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, when
he recently gave a liberal donation to our National Temperance Society,
said to me: "The best temperance lecture I have delivered was when I
agreed to pay ten per cent premium to all the employees on my Scottish
estates who would practice entire abstinence from intoxicants." The
experience of three-score years has taught me the inestimable value of
total abstinence; the benefit of the righteous law when it is well
enforced, and also that the church of Christ has no more right to ignore
the drink evil than it has to ignore theft, or Sabbath desecration, or
murder. Let me add also my grateful acknowledgment of the very effective
and Heaven-blessed work wrought by that noble organization, the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union. As woman has been the sorest sufferer from
the drink-curse, it is her province and her duty to do her utmost for
its removal.