sometimes the most inanimate and senseless.

He

sees them in some near relation, real or fancied, to woes already endured or evils apprehended. He seeks to conciliate them by worship. And that we justly call superstition. But civilized man is not wholly unlike him. Sometimes, perceiving that in human society, in affairs, even in the uses of natural things, and in the operation of the passions native to the very constitution of the race, there are manifold abuses, he flees, disheartened and disgusted, from human society, abjures affairs, despises nature and all her loveliness, and contradicts and quarrels with all the intimations of nature within himself.

It is only in the strife and actual controversy of life-natural, human and free-that robust virtue can be attained, or positive good accomplished. It is only in similar freedom alike from bondage and pupilage, alike from the prohibitions of artificial legislation on the one hand, and superstitious fears on the other, that nations or peoples can become thrifty, happy and great. Will you venture to adhere to the effete blunders of antiquated despotisms, in the hope of serving, by legal force, the moral welfare of your posterity? Will you insist on the dogma that, even if certain gifts of nature or science are not poisons, they are nevertheless so

dangerously seductive that no virtue can be trusted to resist them? But when society shall have intrusted the keeping of its virtue to the criminal laws, who will guaranty your success in the experiment, tried by so many nations and ages, resulting always in failure and defeat? Do you exclaim, that the permitted sale of these beverages, followed as it must be by some use, must be followed, in turn, by some drunkenness; and that drunkenness is not only the parent cause of nearly all our social woes, but that it is impossible to maintain against its ravages a successful moral war? To both these propositions, moral philosophy, human experience, and history, all command a respectful dissent.

Reason, experience and history all unite to prove that, while drunkenness lies in near relations with poverty and other miseries, and is very often their proximate cause, it is not true that it is the parent, or essential cause, without which they would not have been. And to the teachings of reason, experience and history, are added the promises of Gospel Grace, enabling me in all boldness, to confront the fears of those who would rest the hopes of humanity on the commandments of men.

The evils of society, in our own country and in the northern nations, have always tended to appear on the surface in the form of this sensual indulgence. And yet, the essential evil has always been less deeply seated, while at the same time, the hope of social regeneration is brighter, within them, than among some other peoples, in whom the instinctive love of liberty is weaker, and among whom such indulgence is comparatively unknown. Writing in 1799, Croker says in his "Travels in Spain":

"The habitual temperance of these people is really astonishing; I never saw a Spaniard drink a second glass of wine. With the lower order of people, a piece of bread with an apple, an onion, or a pomegranate, is their usual repast."

And many writers and travellers at different periods concur in describing them as temperate, frugal, and even abstemious as a rule, testifying that

drunkenness is a vice almost unknown in Spain among people of a respectable class, and even very uncommon among the lower orders."

An English clergyman, eight years ago, in 1859, describing a tour through Spain, remarks, that when they were approaching the plains of Castile:

"It had now become quite evident, from the number of beggars, male and female, adult and juvenile, with their tattered brown clothing and mahogany complexion, that we were at length in veritable Spain."

Again he says:†

*

"In all our wanderings through town and country, along the highways and by-ways of the land, from Bayonne to Gibraltar, we never saw more than four men who were in the least intoxicated. If they would only leave off those two national sins, bad language and misuse of the knife, they would be some of the finest peasantry in the world."

Our own distinguished fellow-citizen, William Cullen Bryant, in a series of letters written in 1857, says:

"The only narcotic in which the Spaniards indulge to any extent is tobacco, in favor of which I have nothing to say; yet it should be remembered in extenuation, that they are tempted to this habit by the want of something else to do; that they husband their cigarritos by smoking with great deliberation, making a little tobacco go a great way, and that they dilute its narcotic fumes with those of the paper in which it is folded. With regard to the use of wine, I can confirm all that has been said of Spanish sobriety and moderation."

But Spain, though once prosperous and rich, became in spite of the temperance and abstinence † pp. 320, 321.

*Roberts's Autumn Tour in Spain," p. 61.

of her people, miserably and frightfully poor. Her manufactures, once the means of employment of hundreds of thousands of workmen, passed into decay and neglect. Her agriculture at the beginning of the present century failed to supply wheat enough for the consumption of her people. And notwithstanding many institutions of hospitality and charity, maintained by the ecclesiastical orders, and by contributions from the public funds, the poor are so numerous, that beggary in some of the provinces is considered no disgrace, and even students have been known to occupy their vacations in excursions to raise by begging, the means required for their personal support, labor being regarded by them as more disreputable than asking alms. Supremely ignorant, notwithstanding the acknowledged gravity, sobriety, sincerity and generosity of the Spanish character, the people are miserably poor in the midst of fertility of almost tropical exuberance. And their country,-possessing within herself nearly every mineral and vegetable production needful or convenient to mankind, holding numerous ports, and a geographical position commanding greater commercial advantages than any other country in Europe, but without the idea of liberty,-sleeps, a torpid mass, a giant