Before we tackle this momentous subject to-night, I have got a little
act of justice to preform, which if I shirked out of doin’ of it, would
send my name down to posterity as a coward, a rank traitor, and almost a
impostor. The public mind is outraged at the present time, by officers
in high places provin’ traitors to their trust: traitors to the
confidin’ public that have raised ’em up to their high stations. The
public of Jonesville will find that _I_ am not one of that kind, that
_I_ am not to be trifled with, nor will _I_ be seduced by flattery or
gifts, to permit them that have raised me up to the height I now stand
on, to be trifled with.”
Here he paused a moment, and laid his forefinger on his heart and looked
round on us, as if he was invitin’ us all to take our lanterns and walk
through it, and behold its purity. That gesture took dretful well with
the audience. The President realized it, he see what he had done, and he
kep’ the same position as he proceeded and went on.
“Every one who was present at the last meetin’ of our ‘Creation
Searchin’ Society’ knows there was a disturbance there. They know and I
know that right in the midst of our most searchin’ investigations, some
unprincipled villain in the disguise of humanity outraged us, and
insulted us, and defied us by blimmin’; in other words by yellin’ out
‘Blim! Blim!’ every few minutes. And now I publicly state and proclaim
to that blimmer, that if he blims here to night, I will put the papers
onto him. I will set the law at him. I’ll see what Blackstone and Coke
has to say about blimmin’.”
He hadn’t no more’n got the words out of his mouth, when “Blim!” came
from one side of the house, and “Blim! Blim!” came from the other side.
Nobody couldn’t tell who it was, there was such a crowd. Cornelius
Cork’s face turned as red as a root-a-bagy beet, and he yelled out in
the awfulest tone I had ever heerd him use—and if we had all been polar
bears right from the pole, he couldn’t have took a more deadly aim at us
with that awful forefinger:
“Stop that blimmin’ instantly!”
His tone was so loud and awful, and his gesture so fearfully commandin’
and threatenin’, that the house was still as a mice. You could hear a
clothes-pin drop in any part of it.
Here he set down, and the meetin’ begun. Elder Easy was on the
affirmative, and Thomas J. on the negative, as they call it.
Elder Easy is a first-rate man, and a good provider, but awful
conservative. He believes in doin’ jest as his 4 fathers did every time
round. If anybody should offer to let him look at the other side of the
moon, he would say gently but sweetly: “No, I thank you, my 4 fathers
never see it, and so I would rather be excused from beholdin’ it if you
please.” He is polite as a basket of chips, and well meanin’; I haint a
doubt of it in my own mind. But he and Samantha Allen, late Smith,
differs; that female loves to look on every side of a heavenly idee. I
respect my 4 fathers, I think a sight of the old men. They did a good
work in cuttin’ down stumps and so 4th. I honor ’em; respect their
memory. But cities stand now where they had loggin’ bees. Times change,
and we change with ’em. They had to rastle with stumps and brush-heaps,
it was their duty; they did it, and conquered. And it is for us now, who
dwell on the smooth places they cleared for us, to rastle with principle
and idees. Have loggin’ bees to pile up old rusty brushwood of unjust
laws and customs, and set fire to ’em and burn ’em up root and branch,
and plant in their ashes the seeds of truth and right, that shall yet
wave in a golden harvest, under happier skies than ourn. If we don’t,
shall we be doin’ for posterity what they did for us? For we too are
posterity, though mebby we don’t realize it, as we ort to.
[Illustration: THE AFFIRMATIVE.]
But Elder Easy, although he lives in the present time, is in spirit a 4
father, (though I don’t say it in a runnin’ way at all, for I like ’em,
have swapped hens with him and her, and neighbored with ’em
considerable.) He was on the likker side, not that he wants to get
drunk, or thinks anything particular of likker himself, but he believes
in moderate drinkin’ because his 4 fathers drank moderate. He believes
in licensin’ intemperance because his 4 fathers was licensed. And
Shakespeare Bobbet was on his side, and old Mr. Peedick, and the Editor
of the Auger, (he is a democrat and went for slavery strong, felt like
death when the slaves was set free, and now he wants folks to drink all
they can, goes for intemperance strong. He drinks, so they say, though I
wouldn’t have it go from Josiah or me for the world.) And Solomon Cypher
was on that side. He drinks. And Simon Slimpsey; howsumever, he haint of
much account anyway, he has almost ruined himself with the horrors. He
has ’em every day stiddy, and sometimes two and three times a day. He
told a neighborin’ woman that he hadn’t been out of ’em sense the day he
was married to Betsey, she was so uncommon mean to him. I told her when
she was a tellin’ me about it (she is a real news-bearer, and I didn’t
want to say anything she could carry back) I merely observed in a cool
way: “I have always had my opinion about clingers, and wimmen that
didn’t want no rights, I have kep’ my eye on ’em, I have kep’ my eye on
their husbands, and my mind haint moved a inch concernin’ them from the
place it stood in more formally.” I didn’t say no more, not wantin’ to
run Betsey to her back, and then truly, as a deep thinker observes in
one of his orations, “a dog that will fetch a bone, will carry one.”
On Thomas Jefferson’s side was himself, the Editor of the Gimlet, Lawyer
Nugent, Doctor Bombus, Elder Morton, and Whitfield Minkley—six on each
side. Thomas Jefferson spoke first, and he spoke well, that I know. I
turned right round and give sister Minkley a proud happy look several
times while Thomas J. was a talkin’; she sot right behind me. I felt
well. And I hunched Josiah several times when he said his best things,
and he me, for we both felt noble in mind to hear him go on.
His first speech was what they call an easy, or sunthin’ considerable
like that; Josiah said when we was a goin’ home that they called it an
essence, but I told him I knew better than that. He contended, and I
told him I would leave it to Thomas J. but it slipped my mind.
Howsumever it haint no matter; it is the thing itself that Josiah
Allen’s wife looks at, and not the name of it. The easy—or sunthin’ like
it,—run as follows: I believe my soul I can git the exact words down,
for I listened to it with every ear I had, and upheld by the thoughts of
the future generations, and the cause of Right, I kinder took it out of
his overcoat pocket the next day, and read it over seven times from
beginnin’ to end. I should have read it eight times, if I had had time.
He seemed to be a pryin’ into what the chief glory and pleasure of
gettin’ drunk consisted in; he said the shame, the despair, and the ruin
of intemperance anyone could see. And he pictured out the agony of a
drunkard’s home, till there wasn’t a dry eye in my head, nor Josiah’s
nuther. And he said in windin’ up, (I shan’t put down the hull on’t, for
it would be too long) but the closin’ up of it was:
“I don’t believe there is a sadder sight for men or angels, than to see
a man made in the image of God willfully casting aside his heritage of
noble and true manhood; slipping the handcuffs over his own wrists; and
offering himself a willing captive to the mighty but invisible wine
spirit.
“No slave bound to the chariot wheels of a conqueror is so deplorable a
sight as the captive of wine. His face does not shine like the face of
an angel, as did a captive in the old time—but with so vacant and
foolish an expression, that you can see at once that he is hopelessly
bound, body, mind and soul to his conqueror’s chariot. And a wonderful
conqueror is he, so weak in seeming as to hide beneath the ruby glitter
of a wine cup, and yet so mighty as to fill our prisons with criminals,
our asylums with lunatics—and our graveyards with graves. Mightier than
Time or Death, for outstripping time, he ploughs premature furrows on
the brow of manhood and alienates affection Death has no power over.
“I have often marvelled where the chief glory of dissipation came in.
Its evil effects were always too hideously palpable to be misunderstood;
but in what consists the gloating pleasure for which a man is willing to
break the hearts of those who love him, bring himself to beggary, endow
his children with an undeserved heritage of shame, destroy his
intellect, ruin his body, and imperil his soul, is a mystery.
“I have wondered whether its chief bliss consisted in the taste of the
cup; if so, it must be indeed a delicious enjoyment, transitory as it
is, for which a man would be willing to loose earth and heaven. Or if it
were in that intermediate stage, before the diviner nature is entirely
merged in the animal—the foolish stage, when a man is so affectionately
desirous of doing his full duty by his hearers, that he repeats his
commonest remarks incessantly, with a thick tongue and thicker meaning,
and if sentimentally inclined, smiles, oh how feebly, and sheds such
very foolish tears. In lookin’ upon such a scene, another wonder awakens
in me, whether Satan, who with all his faults is uncommonly intelligent,
is not ashamed of his maudlin friend. Or is the consummation of glory in
the next stage, where with oaths and curses a man dashes his clenched
fists into the faces of his best friends, pursues imaginary serpents and
fiends, thrusts his wife and children out into the cold night of
mid-winter, and bars against them the doors of home. And home! what a
desecration of that word which should be the synonym of rest, peace and
consolation, is a drunkard’s home. Or is the full measure of pleasure
attained when he, the noblest work of God, is stretched out at his full
six feet length of unconsciousness, stupidity and degradation.
“If there be a lonely woman amid the multitude of lonely and sorrowful
women, more to be pitied than another, I think it is a wife lookin’ upon
the one she has promised to honor, lying upon the bed with his hat and
boots on. Her comforter, who swore at her as long as he could speak at
all. Her protector, utterly unable to brush a fly from his own face. Her
companion, lying in all the stupor of death, with none of its solemn
dignity. As he is entirely unconscious of her acts, I wonder if she
never employs the slowly passing moments in taking down her old idol,
her ideal, from its place in her memory, and comparing it with its
broken and defaced image before her. Of all the poor broken idols,
shattered into fragments for the divine patience of womanhood to gather
together and cement with tears, such a ruin as this seems the most
impossible to mould anew into any form of comliness. And if there is a
commandment seemingly impossible to obey, it is for a woman to love a
man she is in deadly fear of, honor a man she can’t help bein’ ashamed
of, and obey a man who cannot speak his commands intelligibly.”
It was a proud moment for Josiah Allen and me, to hear Thomas J. go on;
and to have the hull house so still, while he was makin’ his eloquent
speech, that you could hear a clothes-pin drop in any part of the room.
And though my companion, perfectly carried away by his glad emotions,
hunched me several time harder than he had any idee of, and almost gored
my ribs with his elbo, I didn’t, as you may say, seem to sense it at
all. And though in hunchin’ and bein’ hunched, I dropped more’n 20
stitches in Josiah’s socks, I didn’t care for that a mite; I had plenty
of time to pick ’em up durin’ the next speech, which was the Editor of
the Auger’es, (he has got over the zebra, so’s to be out.)
I have said, and I say still, that I never see a man that would spread a
idee out thinner than he will,—cover more ground with it. Talk about
Ingy Rubber stretchin’,—why that man will take one small thought and
pull it out and string on enough big words to sink it, seemin’ly.
Howsumever, his talk did jest about as much good on Thomas J’s side, as
on hisen, for he didn’t seem to pay any attention to the subject, but
give his hull mind to stringin’ big words onto his idees, and then
stretchin’ ’em out as fur as human strength can go. That, truly, was his
strong pint. But jest as he bent his knees and begun to set down, he
kinder straightened up again and said the only thing that amounted to a
thing. He said,—“Keepin’ folks from sellin’ likker, is takin’ away their
rights.”
[Illustration: NOT THE RIGHT KIND OF HORNS.]
“Rights!” says Thomas Jefferson, jumpin’ upon his feet the minute he set
down. “Rights! The first right and law of our nature, is
self-preservation, and what safety has any man while the streets are
filled with men turned into crazed brutes by this traffic you are
upholdin’? Every one knows that a drunken man entirely loses for the
time his reasoning faculties, his morality and his conscience, and is
made ripe for any crime. That he is jest as ready to rob and murder
innocent citizens as to smoke his pipe. So if you and I lend our
influence and our votes to make intemperance legal, we make arson,
burglary, rape, robbery, murder, legal. Tell me a man has a right to
thus plant the seeds of crime and murder in a man’s soul, and imperil
the safety of the whole community. Why, the Bible says, that if a man
let loose a wild ox, and it gored men with its horns and killed them,
the men that let it go loose should surely be put to death.”
Here Simon Slimpsey got up, kinder hangin’ on to the bench, and made a
dretful simple sort of a wink with one eye, and says he:
“Them haint the kind o’ horns we are a talkin’ about, we are talkin’
about takin’ a horn of whisky now and then.”
“Yes,” said Thomas J. “there was never a more appropriate name; for if
there ever were horns that gored, and stabbed, and killed, it is these.”
Elder Easy spoke out, and says he,—“The Bible says: ‘take a little wine
for the stomach sake.’”
But Elder Morton jumped up, and says he,—“There was two kinds of likker
in earlier times; one that was unfermented and harmless, and contained
no alcohol or any principle of intoxication, and another that contained
this raging mocker.”
Then old Peedick spoke up. Says he,—“Likker would be all right if it
wasn’t for the adultery in it: poison stuff, wormwood, and etcetery.”
But Dr. Bombus jumped up, and says he,—“Nothing that can be put into it,
can be worse poison than the pure alcohol itself, for that is a rank
poison for which no antidote has ever been found; useful for medical
purposes, like some other poisons: arsenic, opium, laudanum, and so
4th.”
But old Peedick kep’ a mutterin’,—“I know there’s adultery in it;” and
kep’ a goin’ on till Cornelius Cork, the President, sot him down, and
choked him off.
Solomon Cypher spoke up, and says he:
“No! licence bills don’t do no good; there is more likker drunk when
there haint no licence, than when there is. If you hinder one man from
sellin’ it, another will.”
I declare, that excited me so, that entirely unbeknown to myself, I
spoke right out loud to Josiah:
“Good land! of all the poor excuses I ever heerd, that is the poorest.
If I don’t kill my grandmother, somebody else will; or she’ll die
herself, of old age, or sunthin’; good land!”
The sound of my voice kinder brought my mind back, and Josiah hunched me
hard, and I went to knittin’ dretful fast. Whitfield looked round to me
and kinder smiled, and says he, right out in meetin’:
“That’s so, Mother Allen!”
I declare for’t, I didn’t know whether I was seamin’ two and one, or
towin’ off, or in the narrowins. I was agitated.
But Whitfield went right on, for it was his turn. His speech was about
licencing wrong: admitting a thing was wrong, evil in itself and evil in
its effects, and then allowin’ folks to carry on the iniquity, if they’d
pay enough for it. It was about givin’ folks the privilege of bein’
mean, for money; about a nation sellin’ the right to do wrong, and so
4th.
Whitfield done well; I know it, and Tirzah Ann knows it. Jest as quick
as he sot down, Solomon Cypher got up and says he—with an air as if the
argument he was about to bring forred, would bring down the
school-house, convince everybody, and set the question to rest forever:
“The way I look at it, is this:” said he, (smitin’ his breast as hard as
I ever see a breast smote,) “if there haint no licence, if a man treats
me, and I want to treat him back again, where—” (and again he smote his
breast almost fearfully,) “_where_ will I git my likker to do it with.”
“That’s so;” said Simon Slimpsey, “there he has got you; you can’t git
round that.”
Then Thomas J. spoke and brought up facts and figgers that nobody
couldn’t git over, or crawl round; proved it right out, that
intemperance caused more deaths than war, pestilence, and famine; that
more than half the crimes committed in the United States could be traced
back to drink; and eighty out of every hundred was helped on by it. And
then he went on to tell how they transmitted the curse to their
childern, and how, through its effects, infant babes was born drunkards,
idiots, and criminals, entirely unbeknown to them; that the influence of
our free schools is destroyed by the influence of the other free schools
the nation allows for the childern of the people—the dram shops, and
other legalized places of ruin—that while the cries of the starving and
naked were filling our ears from all sides, seven hundred millions of
dollars were annually spent for intoxicatin’ drink. Instead of spendin’
these millions for food and clothin’ for the perishin’, we spent them
for ignorance, beastliness, taxation, crime, despair, madness and death.
Says he:
“The cost of likker-drinkin’, from 1861 to 1870, was six thousand
millions of dollars. Add to that, the labor in raisin’ the grain to make
it; all the labor of distillin’ it; all the loss of labor the drinkin’
of it entailed; the sickness, deaths and crimes that resulted from its
use; the ships that went down in mid-ocean, through the drunkenness of
their crews—engulfin’ thousands of lives; the ghastly railroad accidents
that fill our newspapers with long death-lists; the suicides and
thousands of fatal accidents, all over the land, caused by it; the
robberies and murders, and the cost of tryin’ the criminals, buildin’
the prisons, penitentiaries and jails, and supportin’ them therein; the
alms-houses for the paupers made by it; the asylums for the insane, and
the hirin’ of officers and attendants to take care of them. Imagine the
sum-total if you can, and add to it, the six thousand millions of
dollars,—and all spent for that which is not only useless, but ruinous.
And honest, sober citizens consent to have their property taxed to
support this system.
“What if this enormous amount of money was spent by our government, for
the compulsory education of the childern of the poor; takin’ them from
their wretched haunts and dens—schools of infamy, where they are bein’
educated in criminality—and teachin’ them to be honest and
self-supportin’. What a marvelous decrease of crime there would be; what
a marvelous increase of the national wealth and respectability.”
He said he had been lookin’ upon the subject in a financial point of
view, for its moral effects could not be reduced to statistics. Says he:
“Now, with our boasted civilization, we support four drinkin’ saloons to
one church. Which exerts the widest influence? In one of the finest
cities of New England, there are to-day, ten drinkin’ saloons to one
church, and a buildin’ owned by the Governor of the state has two
drinkin’ saloons in it, the rumsellers hiring directly of him. The
Indians, Buddhists, and Brahmins, the savage and heathen races, whom we
look down upon with our wise and lofty pity, are our superiors in this
matter, for they know nothin’ of drunkenness still we teach them. How
will it be looked upon by the Righteous Judge above, that with all our
efforts to evangelize the heathen; our money offerin’s of millions of
dollars; our life offerin’s of teachers and missionaries; our loud
talkin’, and our long prayers; after all the efforts of the Christian
world, the facts face us: that for one heathen who is converted to
Christ by the preachin’ of the tongue of our civilized race, one
thousand sober heathen are made drunkards by the louder preachin’ of our
example; are made by us—if we believe the Bible—unfit for ever enterin’
the heaven we make such powerful efforts to tell them of.”
“And” says he, “the sufferin’ intemperance has caused cannot possibly be
reckoned up by figgers,—the shame, disgrace, and desolation,
wretchedness to the guiltless, as well as the guilty. The blackness of
despair that is dark enough to veil the very heavens from innocent eyes,
and make them doubt the existence of a God—who can permit a nation to
make such a traffic respectable and protect it with the shadow of the
law.”
Says he, “When you have licenced a man to sell likker, and protected him
by the law you have helped to make, he sells a pint of likker to a
drunkard; do you know what you and he are sellin’? You know you are
sellin’ poverty, and bodily ruin, and wretchedness; this you know. But
you may be sellin’ a murder, a coffin and a windin’-sheet; sellin’
broken hearts, and a desolate hearth-stone; sufferin’ to the innocent,
that will outlast a life-time; ruin, disgrace, despair, and the
everlastin’ doom of a deathless soul. Tell me any one has a right to do
this? Men in their greed and self interest may make their wretched laws
to sanction this crime, but God’s laws are mightier and will yet
prevail.”
Every word Thomas J. said went right to my heart. You see, a heart where
a child’s head has laid—asleep or awake—till it has printed itself
completely onto it, that heart seems to be a holdin’ it still when the
head’s got too large to lay there bodily (as it were.) Their wrong acts
pierce it right through, and their noble doin’s cause it to swell up
with proud happiness.
Dr. Bombus bein’ dretful excited riz right up, and says he, “How any
good man can sanction this infamous traffic, how any minister of the
Gospel-—” But here the President made the Dr. set down, for it was Elder
Easy’s turn.
And the Elder got up. I see he was kinder touched up by what the Dr. had
said, and he made a long speech about what he thought it was a
minister’s place to do. He thought it wasn’t their place to meddle in
political matters. I kinder got it into my head from what he said,
though he didn’t say it right out, that he thought there was bad men
enough to make our laws without good men meddlin’ with ’em. And in
windin’ up he said he thought ministers took too active a part in the
Temperance move; he heerd of ministers preachin’ sermons about it on
Sunday, and though he had no doubt they meant well, still, he must say
he thought there was other subjects that was better fitted for good men
to hold forth and improve upon. He thought the cross of Christ, warnin’
sinners to keep out of a future hell, was better subjects for ’em, and
then he said the Bible was full of beautiful themes for Sunday
discourses, such as the possibility of recognizin’ our friends in a
future world, and so 4th.
Thomas J. got up and answered him.
Says he, “The subject of recognizin’ our friends in a future world is a
beautiful one, and worthy of much thought. But I think it is commendable
to try to keep our friends in a condition to recognize us in this world,
try to keep a man while he is alive, so he will know his own wife and
children, and not turn them out into the storm of a winter midnight, and
murder them in his mad frenzy.”
Jest at this minute—when Thomas J. was goin’ on his noblest—some
unprincipled creeter and no nothing,—whoever it was—yelled out “Blim!”
again, and Cornelius Cork, the President, bein’ on a keen watch for
iniquities, jumped out of his seat as if he had been shot out of it with
a shot-gun. And he lifted up his head nobly and walked down the aisle of
the school-house, in jest that proud triumphant way that Napoleon walked
along on top of the Alp, and with that same victorious mean of a
conqueror onto him, with his forefinger pinted out firmly and calmly,
and almost nobly, he exclaimed in loud, glad tones, and the majesticest
I ever heerd in my life:
[Illustration: THE BLIMMER CAUGHT.]
“I’ve catched him at it! I’ve catched the blimmer! I heerd him blim! I
seen him! I seen him when he was a blimmin’! Ike Gansey, I fine you ten
cents and cost for _blimmin_.”