in dangerous proportions for a beverage. To say that everything containing alcohol is a poison is, therefore, a false assertion, as false as to say that fruit is poisonous because prussic acid, which is a deadly poison, is found in it. Nature has in her alembic turned a powerful and dangerous element into a beneficial minister to human wants, and all nations have recognized this vital difference between a moderate and an excessive use of stimulants, and have testified to the wisdom of using nature's provision without abusing it.

THE PLEDGE AS A STRAIT-JACKET.

5. A fifth moral error of the total-abstinence system is its dependence upon a contract rather than on a moral sense. Instead of regulating a man from within, it would apply a strait-jacket. Instead of allowing a free play of the man's individuality, and then endeavoring to instruct and educate the man's reason, it would in a moment of the man's emergency tie up his conscience with a pledge, which, when the emergency is past, he will bear irksomely and endeavor to nullify or evade. This is a most pernicious instrument for debauching the conscience. In the first place, it manufactures a new sin, always a dangerous experiment, bringing about a reaction which sweeps the soul into real sin from its experience in committing the constructed sin; and, secondly, it gives a ready excuse to the conscience against any moral argument for temperance by covering it with a suspicion of conventionality. The pledge is always an injury and never a help to a true morality. It is a substitute for principle. It is a sign, not of weakness (for we are all of us weak enough), but of readiness to reform. The true reform would demand a change of the underlying principles of life. That the pledge-taker refuses to make. Instead of that he reforms the surface. Instead of turning the stream into a new channel, he contents himself with throwing up earthen dikes to prevent an overflow. You can get thousands to sign the pledge where you can get one to reform. Of course the pledge is not kept, except in the cases where it was not needed, where the reform took the place of the pledge, where the man would have reformed without any pledge. Surely

such a wholesale defiling of promises is a profane dealing with sacred things, and marks a very corrupt system. Man's moral nature is not to be curbed by pledges. His outward conduct may be restrained by imposed law, but so far forth as that conduct has a moral element in it, no action of the man himself can affect it except a moral reformation. Government, by its threatened punishment, may stop a man's drinking so long as he thinks himself in danger of punishment, but a pledge that has no punishment for its breaking will command no obedience while the moral convictions remain unchanged. It is only an invitation to further sin.

6. The sixth and last moral error of the total-abstinence system to which I shall refer is one which I bring forward not as a philosopher nor a moralist, but as a Christian who believes in the divine authority of the Holy Scriptures. This error I have already adverted to in my prudential argument, and, therefore, need not enlarge upon here. It is impossible to condemn all drinking of wine as either sinful or improper without bringing reproach upon the Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles. There has been an immense amount of wriggling by Christian writers on this subject to get away from this alternative, but there it stands impregnable. Jesus did use wine. I will not waste my time in proving this proposition, and answering those wild bashi-bazouks of controversy who assert, with childlike confidence and simplicity, that the Bible wines were unfermented grape-juice. Their learned ignorance is fairly splendid with boldness. They disarm criticism by their overwhelming dash. Such little questions as why the epithet wine-bibber should have been opprobrious? why deacons should not be given to much wine? why the Corinthian communicants should become drunken? why the apostles at Pentecost should have been accused of winedrinking as the cause of their strange utterances ?—all such trifling questions they utterly disdain to notice in the magnificent sweep of their assertion. It is a small thing, too, with them that the apostles never hint at two kinds of wine, a good, unfermented wine, and a bad, fermented one, when it would have been so easy and natural for our Lord or for Paul to say, "Drink only the unfermented wine." Instead of

that they lead us into great danger by their unguarded remarks about wine, as if there were but one sort; nay, worse than that, Paul even tells the deacons not to drink too much wine. Did Paul mean the fermented wine? Then he allowed the deacons to use it as a beverage. Did he mean unfermented wine? Then why did he limit the amount? This dilemma and all the other arguments from the Scriptures are as mere cobwebs to the lances of these valiant knights, who are too free and fiery to be checked by reason or overcome by syllogism. To a foot-pilgrim like myself, however, these Scriptures are convincing and end the controversy, and, therefore, I have to charge the total-abstinence propaganda with wresting the Scriptures and despising their authority.

THE BIBLICAL ARGUMENT ANALYZED.

I know that there is a wing of their army which acknowledges all that I have said of Scripture record, and which holds that times are so changed that the Scripture examples and precepts are now obsolete, that they were made for an Oriental people eighteen centuries ago, and are wholly inapplicable in the great Occident in this nineteenth century. But this wing of the host is a very weak wing, and is often very thoroughly snubbed by the loud leaders, who count their position a giving-up of the contest, as indeed it is. For who will believe that Christ and his apostles, on great moral questions and matters of moral conduct, gave example and precept that would not last? The argument runs this way: Christ and his apostles said that we may drink wine, but that was a local and temporary matter; now, under new circumstances, we must not. Christ and his apostles said that Christians must not be mixed with the ungodly world, but that was local and temporary, when idolatry was rife; now, under new circumstances, Christians and the ungodly world may so intermingle that you can't tell one from the other. The apostle of Christ said that women must keep silence in the churches, but that was local and temporary, when women were not much more than slaves; now, under new circumstances, women may mount platform and pulpit as ex

horters and preachers, for verily, under the Gospel, there is no difference between male and female! I said, who will believe all this? Alas! there are many who do. And I charge them with undermining the authority of the Word of God. If moral questions that are not in the Scripture are to be thus treated, who is to draw the line where you are to stop? Why may not the Christian merchant say of the New Testament command, "Lienot one to another : This is local and temporary, when trade was sluggish and men's minds were dull? Now, under new circumstances, when emulation needs every help and Wall Street sharpens men's wits, you must lie or go under. This departure from the Bible sentiment and example on moral conduct in us who believe in the Bible is a very dangerous thing. Of course, for the Buddhists who have lately become fashionable in our country it is of no consequence. And to them this division of my argument is not addressed.

I have now endeavored, in a very brief way, to point out the reasons why the total-abstinence system as a cure for intemperance will not and ought not to be adopted. Of course I am therefore bound to propose a system that ought to be adopted. I do not dodge the issue. No man is more keenly alive to the frightful ravages of drunkenness than I am, and it is because the prevailing system of a total-abstinence crusade is hindering the cure of the evil by keeping just methods from the field and by disgusting men's minds with the very name of temperance, so cruelly bemired, that I denounce it, and ask good men to rally around a truer and purer standard.

EXCESS AND MODERATION.

The right system must be one that recognizes practically the difference between excess and moderation, and the difference between injurious and harmless drinks, and will thus appeal to the common sense of reasonable and thinking men. It must be a system that deals honestly with history, science, and Scripture, and does not invent theories and then support them by garbled quotations and imaginary facts. It must be a manly system, that has no cant or foolery of

orders and ribbons degrading a matter of high principle to the hocus-pocus of a child's play. Such a system would be found in the exclusion of distilled liquor from common use as a beverage both by public opinion and by law, and the wise regulation in society and in the state of the use of vinous and malt liquors. Society should put away all the drinking usages that lead to excess, such as furnishing many wines at an entertainment, or "treating" others, or putting brandied wines upon the table; and the state should limit the number of licensed sellers to at most the proportion of one to a thousand inhabitants of each town, and these sellers should be under heavy bonds not to sell to minors or drunkards, and not to allow disreputable characters to gather at their places. The law should likewise make the collection of evidence against a licensed seller easy, and the penalty of breaking the law should be imprisonment as well as fine. On a basis like this, that does not sweepingly condemn every drink that has alcohol in it, the great majority of the people could work accordantly, and therefore effectively. The wild radicalism of the teetotalers is just what the rumsellers and their advocates enjoy. They know that this absurd extravagance disintegrates the army of order and renders it powerless; that so long as temperance is made to mean "total abstinence from everything that can intoxicate," the great multitude of order-loving men will shrink from joining any temperance movement, and hence these wholesale destroyers of the race can go on in their nefarious work with impunity. Now, what is needed is the union of all good men who desire to stop the fearful drunkenness of the land with its attendant crimes and misery. That union never can be effected on the principles of the total-abstinence propaganda. But it can be effected on the principles of truth and common sense, and they who prevent this union by their tenacious adherence to a false and fanatical system are responsible before God and man for the spreading curse.

There is no more important question before the American people to-day than this: "How shall we stay this surging tide of intemperance?" and it is to be answered on one side by the practical voice of society, and on the other by the