seen it established. I am entirely willing to find it true. And if it is true, I desire that its truth shall be made clear. But I want it established by methods fit to be pursued by free and rational men. I desire that every obstacle may be removed from the path of inquiry, and that the minds of all the people may be disabused of every just ground of prejudice, and be made hospitable and receptive. I know that wilfulness and violence, even under the forms of law, can only arouse contradiction and resentment. I know that, besides these, there will continue to be aroused an honest sense of personal injustice inflicted by the operation of statutes believed to be founded on incorrect notions, arbitrarily insisted upon, and obstinately adhered to. While such relations last, there is no opportunity for men on either side to reach the best conclusions. The mere war of words is of itself always sufficiently disturbing. But, it seems an almost wanton disregard of the laws and the rights of the human mind, to complicate and distract, as the upholders of this law have done, the moral and intellectual issues which the whole subject involves. Grant that you have much reason to believe the proposition of the Prohibitionists true, I submit that no honest man can yet declare that it is proved.

Nay-outside of the lists of controversy-where are the intelligent judges who are prepared to affirm that it enjoys even the preponderance of the proofs?

I honor these scholars, whose testimony has been cited, for their ingenious pursuit of science. I should never fear that such men would draw extreme conclusions, nor insist on their premature adoption by others; for learning is modest.

That alcohol can be easily fatal; that it is hurtful always, unless taken both in moderation, and under circumstances, and in compounds, and in combinations, adapted to the physical condition and the true needs of the individual,-there is no possible dispute. But that all the drinks into which it enters, are to be of course dietetically rejected, is not, thus far, the verdict. Nor does it yet appear that any experiments have settled the boundaries within which diet shall be kept. A physician once starved to death a duck, by feeding it solely on butter. It lived three weeks, and until the butter oozed through its skin and dropped from its feathers. Yet butter is not a poison. We know very well that a man could not maintain

*Boussingault,-Chimie Agricole, p. 166; quoted in Treatise on Physiology, by Prof. John C. Dalton, p. 108.

health, nor even life, long, on water to drink and sugar to eat. Yet neither is a poison. Dr. Stark actually died in the experiment of trying to live on cheese. Yet everybody knows that cheese is a rich and nutritious food. The instances might be indefinitely multiplied of proofs in our common observation, of the inability of single articles of acknowledged wholesome and nutritious solid food to maintain life and health, used singly and without variety. For example, how long would a man live in Havana, on pork only? How long would a healthy Greenlander subsist, amid his snows, on oranges? Or, how long could we, in Boston eveń, live on either? The common experience of men certainly goes for something. Now the common experience of many nations and ages having assigned a place in the foods and medicines, to stimulating drinks of some kinds, into which alcohol enters the experiments of chemists and physiologists are pursued, when made in the interest of truth and pure science, with a view to detecting, identifying and comparing their modes of operation, and correcting the errors of inadvertence in common life. And when the men of science have come to any substantial agreement, which calls on the civil state to interpose and alter the practice of

society, in order to conform it to the decrees of science, we shall learn it from the men of science themselves; we shall not be called on by the unlearned to settle such disputes of the learned by an Act of the Legislature.

Within my own memory Dr. Sylvester Graham taught that no permanent cure for intemperance could be found, except in such changes of personal and social customs as would relieve the human being of all desire for stimulants. He soon applied the idea to medicine, so that the prevention and cure of disease, as well as the remedy for intemperance, were found by him in the resort of all mankind, without regard to age, climate or condition, to the use of water as the only beverage, and the eating of vegetables to the entire exclusion of animal food. And I confess that he seemed to prove it. His theories were ingenious, fortified by elaborate argument. They would have been very good, save that almost all the rest of mankind saw that they were not true. Even some of the very experiments on which he relied, contradict his too rash and dogmatical generalization.

"A little learning is a dangerous thing:

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."

Had Graham convinced many, as for a time he did convince a few, then we might to-day have been arguing as a question of legislative prohibition, the case of Rhine wines and porter in company with that of mutton chops and beef steaks, all being included in the like condemnation.

II.

Leaving here, gentlemen, the argument on the assumption by the Prohibitionists that alcoholic beverages are essentially poisonous, I pass to the argument on their further assumption, that the use and the sale of alcoholic beverages are essentially

immoral.

The evils of this world are too great to render exaggeration any more consistent with wisdom than with truth. What we need is courage, not cowardice, for the controversy against them. This world is a trying one to live in at all. But when its discipline is complete we shall go hence. After all, the moral dangers are within ourselves, not in the objects of nature. And social evils find their causes mainly in the falseness and disorder of the social economy. The savage ignorantly ascribes malign purposes and supernatural powers to things