[From _Speeches and Writings of Hon. Thomas F. Marshall_, edited
by W. L. Barre (Cincinnati, 1858)]
Mr. President, we of the "Total Abstinence and Vigilance Society," in
our meetings at the other end of the city [Washington] are so much in
the habit of "telling experiences," that I myself have somewhat fallen
into it, and am guilty occasionally of the egotism of making some small
confessions (as small as I can possibly make them). Mine, then, sir, was
a different case. I had earned a most unenviable notoriety by excesses
which, though bad enough, did not half reach the reputation they won for
me. I never was an habitual drunkard. I was one of your spreeing gentry.
My sprees, however, began to crowd each other and my best friends feared
that they would soon run together. Perhaps my long intervals of entire
abstinence--perhaps something peculiar in my form, constitution, or
complexion--may have prevented the physical indications, so usual, of
that terrible disease, which, till temperance societies arose, was
deemed incurable and resistless. Perhaps I had nourished the vanity to
believe that nature had endowed me with a versatility which enabled me
to throw down and take up at pleasure any pursuit, and I chose to sport
with the gift. If so, I was brought to the very verge of a fearful
punishment. Physicians tell us that intemperance at last becomes, of
itself, not a habit voluntarily indulged, but a disease which its victim
cannot resist. I had not become fully the subject of that fiendish
thirst, that horrible yearning after the distillation "from the alembick
of hell," which is said to scorch in the throat, and consume the vitals
of the confirmed drunkard, with fires kindled for eternity. I did become
alarmed, and for the first time, no matter from what cause, lest the
demon's fangs were fastening upon me, and I was approaching that line
which separates the man who frolics, and can quit, from the lost
inebriate, whose appetite is disease, and whose will is dead. I joined
the society on my own account, and felt that I must encounter the title
of "reformed drunkard," annoying enough to me, I assure you. I judged,
from the cruel publicity given through the press to my frolics, what I
had to bear and brave. But I did brave it all; and I would have dared
anything to break the chain which I at last discovered was riveting my
soul, to unclasp the folds of that serpent-habit whose full embrace is
death. Letters from people I never had heard of, newspaper paragraphs
from Boston to New Orleans were mailed, and are still mailing to me, by
which I am very distinctly, and in the most friendly and agreeable
manner, apprised that I enjoyed all over the delectable reputation of a
sot, with one foot in the grave, and understanding almost totally
overthrown. I doubt not, sir, that the societies who have invited me to
address them at different places in the Union, will expect to find me
with an unhealed carbuncle on my nose, and my body of the graceful and
manly shape and proportion of a demijohn. I have dared all these
annoyances, all this celebrity. I have not shrunk from being a text for
temperance preachers, and a case for the outpouring of the sympathies of
people who have more philanthropy than politeness, more temperance than
taste. I signed the pledge on my own account, sir, and my heart leaped
to find that I was free. The chain has fallen from my freeborn limbs;
not a link or fragment remains to tell I ever wore the badge of
servitude.