of long established customs. These all had, by the change wrought, been saved annually a pretty considerable bill of expense. Thousands of private and of professional gentlemen no longer replenished their sideboards with a variety of expensive liquors as formerly, and thus they were saved heavy bills of expense. The pecuniary benefit to all, except the few who had been engaged in the liquor traffic, was a marked feature of the new and rapidly growing movement. Did there ever exist an enterprise since the world began with stronger claims on its special friends and the Christian public for a liberal pecuniary support? Was it not plain to the most obtuse intellect that the good thus far done, could not have been wrought without funds?

If the support of a few lecturers in the national field, and the scattering among the people of a few thousand of publications, at an expense in the aggregate of a few thousand dollars, awakened so much interest, and produced results so marked and blessed, was there not every possible encouragement to extend the use of the means thus honored of God? It would seem so; and to me one of the most unaccountable facts of modern times is, that while the Christian public have been annually increasing their gifts to save the souls of men in other lands, this eminently Christian enterprise which has been blessed to the salvation of thousands, body, soul and estate, which has plucked thousands from the pretty considerable hell of financial ruin, from the absolute organized hell of the grog shop and the liquor saloon, from the personal hell of delirium tremens, and finally from the ultimate hell announced in God's Word as the future doom of the drunkard, has been suffered to languish, and at many points to die absolutely of pecuniary starvation. I respectfully but earnestly ask the ministers of Christ, why has this outrage been permitted without your earnest and continual protest? I put that question to you, Christian layman; I put it to the variously organized philanthropy of this country; I put it to the thousands in this land who, on reading these words, will feel in their souls, and will acknowledge that they are debtors to this great enterprise, why has it been permitted to die of starvation at a thousand

points where its record has been glorious, while other associations are in receipt annually and quite bountifully of the gifts of the people? When I have pressed this matter on the consciences of educated and Christian men, they have given as a reason why many good men were unwilling to give freely to this enterprise, the fact that they did not approve the manner in which it was prosecuted. The work was not in their opinion conducted with a proper regard to proprieties. Our movements were not marked by that stability and dignity which should characterize a great enterprise. Such discourse is but adding insult to injury. It is as though you should reduce a man to abject poverty by depriving him of his honest dues, and then lecture him on the impropriety of his wearing a seedy coat in respectable company, and tell him of the want of dignity involved in securing a dinner at the hand of charity.

God forgive the Christian public, the wealth and respectability of this country, for first starving and then insulting the advocates of a great enterprise. They have not perhaps seen the matter in that light; but they shall be compelled to hereafter, or deny themselves the luxury of reading what I will write, and put before them in good fair print. - Why, I have myself, while acting as the agent of the most efficient State society that has existed in this country in connection. with the cause, week after week and month after month, labored in the double capacity of a public teacher and a public beggar, speaking to large audiences seven evenings in a week, and during six of the days calling on friends from house to house for funds with which to prosecute the enterprise. It was a weary, unwelcome task to which a public teacher should never be subjected. It violated all the proprieties, and was not a very dignified course to pursue. I felt at every step that it was a bad arrangement.

I knew that I was thus, very materially, curtailing my influence as a public teacher. But what was to be done? Either that or the machinery of the movement must stop. It is the poverty of the enterprise and the subjection of its advocates to necessities so mortifying, to a course so unsuitable, that has driven from the field of public labor nine

tenths of the most successful advocates of the cause we have ever had in this country. Many of them still live, for teetotalers stay long on the earth, but their labor has sought other channels.

One splendid lecturer, whose influence while in the field contributed largely to mould the opinions and to shape the conduct and destinies of men, was compelled to take a step backward, and has become a police judge. He now lives in a house of his own. Another, whose trumpet voice in truthful words has inspired the hearts of tens of thousands with resolutions for a nobler life, whose influence was widely extended and most salutary, has actually descended to the comparatively narrow sphere of an ordinary member of Congress. To these men and their families, such transformations may not be undesirable, but to this blessed cause and to the country they are real calamities. Sargent, Delavan, Dow, Cary, Riley, and a few others to whom God had given wealth derived from other sources, could and have labored long for the cause without being put on half rations, and Gough's popularity and peculiar powers will command. him liberal pay anywhere, let him speak on whatever subject he will; but alas for ordinary men, with however much of knowledge and experience in the work, and with whatever of devotion to the cause their lives have been characterized, if they have to depend for their support on the rewards of their labor in this great enterprise. I, for one, should long ere this have been driven from the field of labor and work I love, had it not been for the benefactions of a few choice, personal friends. I could give the public to-day a list of receipts, in the way of gift, received within the last fifteen years, from less than a dozen personal friends, exceeding in the aggregate my present property real, personal and mixed, and yet few men have labored more constantly for the last twenty-five years in this work of reform, or practised a more rigid economy.

There can never be in this country a general and public advocacy of the great truths which lie at the basis of the temperance reform, by educated and competent men, unless

the wretched policy of which I have complained be entirely abandoned, and this cause be put on a par with other great philanthropic enterprises of the day so far as concerns a reliable financial basis. Without an able public advocacy, through the press and the living teacher, by men especially educated for the work, the cause declines from this hour. Other expedients may give for a time a show of life here and there, but without an able public advocacy of its great and distinctive principles, and the reestablishment of open and general temperance organizations of an educational character, which shall embrace at least the great mass of our really Christian population, and which shall have incorporated into their working plan some reliable and sufficient means of support, the cause must decline from this hour, just as any enterprise must go down inevitably without a financial basis.

CHAPTER III.

Liberality of the Fathers and what came of it.-A Pair of Mistakes.-The First Stage of Reform; its Appropriate Work.-The Era of Gratuitous Labor.-What Could and Should have been done.-Systematic Operations in Massachusetts and their Results.-The Washingtonian Movement; its Results.-A Glance back and over the Field.

In the wonderful success which attended the efforts of our early reformers, from the year 1826 to 1831-and in the very considerable though less marked successes of the more widely extended efforts of a later period, on to the year 1840, there is nothing, when carefully considered, which weakens in any measure the position I have sought to maintain in preceding pages, that the want of an adequate, reliable, financial basis—and consequently of effective labor, is the real cause of the very marked decline of interest in the temperance cause, now manifest throughout the country; while a careful study of the facts, relative to special successes here and there, at different periods in the history of the movement, will greatly strengthen the position I have taken. We have seen, that at the outset, there was manifested at the few points in Massuchusetts where aid was solicited, a commendable degree of liberality toward the infant enterprise. Seven thousand four hundred dollars were promptly furnished by a few friends, in three of the cities and two towns of that state. When we contemplate the glorious results of only so much labor as that fund furnished to the new enterprise, who can fail to regret, that immediate measures were not taken to secure, through the Christian churches of the land, or otherwise, from the benevolent and Christian men of the country, an adequate fund for the prosecution of the work, on a scale commensurate with its importance to all the great interests of human society.

How happened it, that the wise and good of the land, who