Although the temperance cause has been in progress for near twenty
years, it is apparent to all that it is just now being crowned with a
degree of success hitherto unparalleled.
The list of its friends is daily swelled by the additions of fifties, of
hundreds, and of thousands. The cause itself seems suddenly transformed
from a cold abstract theory to a living, breathing, active, and powerful
chieftain, going forth “conquering and to conquer.” The citadels of his
great adversary are daily being stormed and dismantled; his temple and
his altars, where the rites of his idolatrous worship have long been
performed, and where human sacrifices have long been wont to be made,
are daily desecrated and deserted. The triumph of the conqueror’s fame
is sounding from hill to hill, from sea to sea, and from land to land,
and calling millions to his standard at a blast.
For this new and splendid success we heartily rejoice. That that success
is so much greater now than heretofore is doubtless owing to rational
causes; and if we would have it continue, we shall do well to inquire
what those causes are.
The warfare heretofore waged against the demon intemperance has somehow
or other been erroneous. Either the champions engaged or the tactics
they adopted have not been the most proper. These champions for the most
part have been preachers, lawyers, and hired agents. Between these and
the mass of mankind there is a want of approachability, if the term
be admissible, partially, at least, fatal to their success. They are
supposed to have no sympathy of feeling or interest with those very
persons whom it is their object to convince and persuade.
And again, it is so common and so easy to ascribe motives to men of
these classes other than those they profess to act upon. The preacher,
it is said, advocates temperance because he is a fanatic, and desires a
union of the Church and State; the lawyer from his pride and vanity of
hearing himself speak; and the hired agent for his salary. But when one
who has long been known as a victim of intemperance bursts the fetters
that have bound him, and appears before his neighbors “clothed and in
his right mind,” a redeemed specimen of long-lost humanity, and stands
up, with tears of joy trembling in his eyes, to tell of the miseries
once endured, now to be endured no more forever; of his once naked and
starving children, now clad and fed comfortably; of a wife long weighed
down with woe, weeping, and a broken heart, now restored to health,
happiness, and a renewed affection; and how easily it is all done, once
it is resolved to be done; how simple his language! there is a logic and
an eloquence in it that few with human feelings can resist. They cannot
say that he desires a union of Church and State, for he is not a church
member; they cannot say he is vain of hearing himself speak, for his
whole demeanor shows he would gladly avoid speaking at all; they cannot
say he speaks for pay, for he receives none, and asks for none. Nor can
his sincerity in any way be doubted, or his sympathy for those he would
persuade to imitate his example be denied.
In my judgment, it is to the battles of this new class of champions
that our late success is greatly, perhaps chiefly, owing. But, had the
old-school champions themselves been of the most wise selecting, was
their system of tactics the most judicious? It seems to me it was
not. Too much denunciation against dram-sellers and dram-drinkers
was indulged in. This I think was both impolitic and unjust. It was
impolitic, because it is not much in the nature of man to be driven to
anything; still less to be driven about that which is exclusively his
own business; and least of all where such driving is to be submitted
to at the expense of pecuniary interest or burning appetite. When the
dram-seller and drinker were incessantly told not in accents of entreaty
and persuasion, diffidently addressed by erring man to an erring
brother, but in the thundering tones of anathema and denunciation with
which the lordly judge often groups together all the crimes of the
felon’s life, and thrusts them in his face just ere he passes sentence
of death upon him that they were the authors of all the vice and misery
and crime in the land; that they were the manufacturers and material of
all the thieves and robbers and murderers that infest the earth; that
their houses were the workshops of the devil; and that their persons
should be shunned by all the good and virtuous, as moral pestilences—I
say, when they were told all this, and in this way, it is not wonderful
that they were slow to acknowledge the truth of such denunciations,
and to join the ranks of their denouncers in a hue and cry against
themselves.
To have expected them to do otherwise than they did to have expected
them not to meet denunciation with denunciation, crimination with
crimination, and anathema with anathema—was to expect a reversal of
human nature, which is God’s decree and can never be reversed.
When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind,
unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true
maxim that “a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”
So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him
that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches
his heart, which, say what he will, is the great highroad to his
reason; and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble
in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that
cause really be a just one. On the contrary, assume to dictate to his
judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned
and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues
to his head and his heart; and though your cause be naked truth itself,
transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than
steel can be made, and though you throw it with more than herculean
force and precision, you shall be no more able to pierce him than 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.
On this point the Washingtonians greatly excel the temperance advocates
of former times. Those whom they desire to convince and persuade are
their old friends and companions. They know they are not demons, nor
even the worst of men; they know that generally they are kind, generous,
and charitable even beyond the example of their more staid and sober
neighbors. They are practical philanthropists; and they glow with
a generous and brotherly zeal that mere theorizers are incapable of
feeling. Benevolence and charity possess their hearts entirely; and out
of the abundance of their hearts their tongues give utterance; “love
through all their actions runs, and all their words are mild.” In this
spirit they speak and act, and in the same they are heard and regarded.
And when such is the temper of the advocate, and such of the audience,
no good cause can be unsuccessful. But I have said that denunciations
against dramsellers and dram-drinkers are unjust, as well as impolitic.
Let us see. I have not inquired at what period of time the use of
intoxicating liquors commenced; nor is it important to know. It is
sufficient that, to all of us who now inhabit the world, the practice of
drinking them is just as old as the world itself that is, we have seen
the one just as long as we have seen the other. When all such of us as
have now reached the years of maturity first opened our eyes upon
the stage of existence, we found intoxicating liquor recognized by
everybody, used by everybody, repudiated by nobody. It commonly entered
into the first draught of the infant and the last draught of the dying
man. From the sideboard of the parson down to the ragged pocket of the
houseless loafer, it was constantly found. Physicians proscribed it in
this, that, and the other disease; government provided it for soldiers
and sailors; and to have a rolling or raising, a husking or “hoedown,”
anywhere about without it was positively insufferable. So, too, it was
everywhere a respectable article of manufacture and merchandise. The
making of it was regarded as an honorable livelihood, and he who could
make most was the most enterprising and respectable. Large and small
manufactories of it were everywhere erected, in which all the earthly
goods of their owners were invested. Wagons drew it from town to town;
boats bore it from clime to clime, and the winds wafted it from nation
to nation; and merchants bought and sold it, by wholesale and retail,
with precisely the same feelings on the part of the seller, buyer, and
bystander as are felt at the selling and buying of ploughs, beef, bacon,
or any other of the real necessaries of life. Universal public opinion
not only tolerated but recognized and adopted its use.
It is true that even then it was known and acknowledged that many were
greatly injured by it; but none seemed to think the injury arose from
the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing. The
victims of it were to be pitied and compassionated, just as are the
heirs of consumption and other hereditary diseases. Their failing was
treated as a misfortune, and not as a crime, or even as a disgrace. If,
then, what I have been saying is true, is it wonderful that some should
think and act now as all thought and acted twenty years ago? and is it
just to assail, condemn, or despise them for doing so? The universal
sense of mankind on any subject is an argument, or at least an
influence, not easily overcome. The success of the argument in favor
of the existence of an overruling Providence mainly depends upon that
sense; and men ought not in justice to be denounced for yielding to it
in any case, or giving it up slowly, especially when they are backed by
interest, fixed habits, or burning appetites.
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 some
thing so repugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and
feelingless, that it, never did nor ever 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 labor 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 to expect
a whole community to rise up and labor 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.”
By the Washingtonians this system of consigning the habitual drunkard
to hopeless ruin is repudiated. They adopt a more enlarged philanthropy;
they go for present as well as future good. They labor for all now
living, as well as hereafter to live. They teach hope to all-despair to
none. As applying to their cause, they deny the doctrine of
unpardonable sin; as in Christianity it is taught, so in this they
teach—“While—While the lamp holds out to burn, The vilest sinner may
return.” And, what is a matter of more profound congratulation, they, by
experiment upon experiment and example upon example, prove the maxim
to be no less true in the one case than in the other. On every hand we
behold those who but yesterday were the chief of sinners, now the chief
apostles of the cause. Drunken devils are cast out by ones, by sevens,
by legions; and their unfortunate victims, like the poor possessed who
were redeemed from their long and lonely wanderings in the tombs, are
publishing to the ends of the earth how great things have been done for
them.
To these new champions and this new system of tactics our late
success is mainly owing, and to them we must mainly look for the final
consummation. The ball is now rolling gloriously on, and none are so
able as they to increase its speed and its bulk, to add to its momentum
and its magnitude—even though unlearned in letters, for this task none
are so well educated. To fit them for this work they have been taught in
the true school. They have been in that gulf from which they would teach
others the means of escape. They have passed that prison wall which
others have long declared impassable; and who that has not shall dare to
weigh opinions with them as to the mode of passing?
But if it be true, as I have insisted, that those who have suffered by
intemperance personally, and have reformed, are the most powerful and
efficient instruments to push the reformation to ultimate success, it
does not follow that those who have not suffered have no part left them
to perform. Whether or not the world would be vastly benefited by a
total and final banishment from it of all intoxicating drinks seems
to me not now an open question. Three fourths of mankind confess the
affirmative with their tongues, and, I believe, all the rest acknowledge
it in their hearts.
Ought any, then, to refuse their aid in doing what good the good of the
whole demands? Shall he who cannot do much be for that reason excused
if he do nothing? “But,” says one, “what good can I do by signing the
pledge? I never drank, even without signing.” This question has already
been asked and answered more than a million of times. Let it be answered
once more. For the man suddenly or in any other way to break off from
the use of drams, who has indulged in them for a long course of years
and until his appetite for them has grown ten or a hundredfold stronger
and more craving than any natural appetite can be, requires a most
powerful moral effort. In such an undertaking he needs every moral
support and influence that can possibly be brought to his aid and thrown
around him. And not only so, but every moral prop should be taken from
whatever argument might rise in his mind to lure him to his backsliding.
When he casts his eyes around him, he should be able to see all that he
respects, all that he admires, all that he loves, kindly and anxiously
pointing him onward, and none beckoning him back to his former miserable
“wallowing in the mire.”
But it is said by some that men will think and act for themselves; that
none will disuse spirits or anything else because his neighbors do; and
that moral influence is not that powerful engine contended for. Let us
examine this. Let me ask the man who could maintain this position most
stiffly, what compensation he will accept to go to church some Sunday
and sit during the sermon with his wife’s bonnet upon his head? Not a
trifle, I’ll venture. And why not? There would be nothing irreligious
in it, nothing immoral, nothing uncomfortable—then why not? Is it not
because there would be something egregiously unfashionable in it? Then
it is the influence of fashion; and what is the influence of fashion
but the influence that other people’s actions have on our actions—the
strong inclination each of us feels to do as we see all our neighbors
do? Nor is the influence of fashion confined to any particular thing or
class of things; it is just as strong on one subject as another. Let us
make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the temperance cause
as for husbands to wear their wives’ bonnets to church, and instances
will be just as rare in the one case as the other.
“But,” say some, “we are no drunkards, and we shall not acknowledge
ourselves such by joining a reformed drunkard’s society, whatever our
influence might be.” Surely no Christian will adhere to this objection.
If they believe as they profess, that Omnipotence condescended to take
on himself the form of sinful man, and as such to die an ignominious
death for their sakes, 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 it bought.
Turn now to the temperance revolution. In it we shall find a stronger
bondage broken, a viler slavery manumitted, a greater tyrant deposed; in
it, more of want supplied, more disease healed, more sorrow assuaged.
By it no Orphans starving, no widows weeping. By it none wounded in
feeling, none injured in interest; even the drammaker and dram-seller
will have glided into other occupations so gradually as never to
have felt the change, and will stand ready to join all others in the
universal song of gladness. And what a noble ally this to the cause of
political freedom, with such an aid its march cannot fail to be on
and on, till every son of earth shall drink in rich fruition the
sorrow-quenching draughts of perfect liberty. Happy day when-all
appetites controlled, all poisons subdued, all matter subjected-mind,
all-conquering mind, shall live and move, the monarch of the world.
Glorious consummation! Hail, fall of fury! Reign of reason, all hail!
And when the victory shall be complete, when there shall be neither
a slave nor a drunkard on the earth, how proud the title of that land
which may truly claim to be the birthplace and the cradle of both
those revolutions that shall have ended in that victory. How nobly
distinguished that people who shall have planted and nurtured to
maturity both the political and moral freedom of their species.
This is the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the birthday of
Washington; we are met to celebrate this day. Washington is the
mightiest name of earth long since mightiest in the cause of civil
liberty, still mightiest in moral reformation. On that name no eulogy
is expected. It cannot be. To add brightness to the sun or glory to the
name of Washington is alike impossible. Let none attempt it. In solemn
awe pronounce the name, and in its naked deathless splendor leave it
shining on.