1841 the number of pledge-takers had reached a total of 4,647,000, and by the end of that year the number must have been at least 5,000,000 in a total population of 8,175,124.

During August, 1842, Father Mathew visited. Glasgow, where 40,000 took the pledge. A tour of England, made this year by the "Apostle of Temperance," as Father Mathew was now universally called, resulted in 197,940 pledges, 60,940 of them from London. It was asserted that Father Mathew was making enormous profits from the sale of medals furnished to pledgetakers-each signer being charged 8d. for his medal, if able to pay, or receiving one gratuitously, if unable. But this insinuation was found to be groundless, for the priest had impoverished himself for his work's sake.

Father Mathew's reception in the United States, which he visited in 1849, reaching New York on June 30, was attended by official honors rarely accorded to a foreigner. In New York he was welcomed by the City Council in a body, and addresses were presented to him by the President of the Board of Aldermen and by William E. Dodge for the American Temperance Union. In Boston an address of welcome was made in the name of the City Council, and Governor Briggs attended a reception given in his honor. The Philadelphia City Council received him in Independence Hall. At Washington President Taylor extended a banquet to him at the White House, Dec. 20, and the Senate voted, by 33 to 18, to admit him to the bar of

the Senate Chamber-a mark of distinction that had been conferred on only one other foreigner, Gen. Lafayette. On this occasion Henry Clay pronounced a eulogy, in which he said:

"I think it ought to be received as a just homage to a distinguished foreigner, for his humanity, his benevolence, his philanthropy and his virtue, and as properly due to one who has devoted himself to the good of his whole species. It is but a merited tribute of respect to a man. who has achieved a great social revolution-a revolution in which no blood has been shed, a revolution which has involved no desolation, which has caused no bitter tears of widows and orphans to flow; a revolution which has been achieved without violence, and a greater one, perhaps, than has ever been accomplished by any benefactor of mankind."

In 1851 Father Mathew returned to Ireland. completely exhausted, after a tour of the principal cities of the South and of the Misssissippi Valley made in spite of sickness and intense suffering. It is estimated that he administered the pledge to about 600,000 in this country.

JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOUGH.

John Bartholomew Gough was born in Sandgate in Kent, Eng., Aug. 22, 1817; died in Frankford, Pa., Feb. 18, 1886. His family was supported by the earnings of his mother as village school-teacher, and a pension of £20 per annum

received by his father for services in the Peninsular War. He was kept at school until his twelfth year, when he emigrated to America with a neighbor's family. After working two years with these people on a farm near Utica, N. Y., he went to New York City and obtained employment in the book-binding department of the Methodist Book Concern, where he learned his trade. In 1833 he had saved sufficient money to send for his mother and sister-his father having died, but in July, 1834, a little less than a year after her arrival in America, his mother died also.

He now fell in with evil associates, and entered on a career of dissipation which his marriage in 1839 and the setting up of a small bookbindery on his own account did not check. At the age of 24 he was a hopeless sot. He went to Bristol, R. I., Providence, Boston, Newburyport and Worcester, eking out a scant subsistence by doing small jobs at his trade or by comic. acting and singing in low theatres and resorts. "I was now," he writes, "the slave of a habit which had become completely my master, and which fastened its remorseless fangs in my very vitals. . . . I drank during the whole day.

So entirely did I give myself up to the bottle that those of my companions who fancied they still possessed some claims to respectability gradually withdrew from my company. At my house, too, I used to keep a bottle of gin, which was in constant requisition. . . . A burning sense of shame would flush my fevered brow at

the conviction that I was scorned by the respectable portion of the community. But these feelings passed away like the morning cloud or the early dew, and I pursued my old course." At Newburyport he was induced to attend a temperance meeting addressed by Mr. J. J. Johnson, a reformed drunkard. "My conscience told me that the truth was spoken by the lecturer. As I left the chapel a young man offered me the pledge to sign. I actually turned to sign it, but at that critical moment the appetite for strong drink, as if determined to have the mastery over me, came in all its force; and remembering too, just then, that I had a pint of brandy at home, I deferred signing."

In Worcester his wife and child died from the consequences of want and exposure, but even then he did not reform his habits. "Soon it was whispered from one to another until the whole town became aware of it," he confesses, "that my wife and child were lying dead, and that I was drunk!... There in the room where all who had loved me were lying in the unconscious slumber of death, was I gazing, with a maudlin melancholy imprinted on my features, on the dead forms of those who were flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. During the miserable hours of darkness I would steal from my lonely bed to the place where my dead wife and child lay, and in agony of soul pass my shaking hand over their cold faces, and then return to my bed, after a draught of rum, which I had obtained

and hidden under the pillow of my wretched couch."

Not long after this, in October, 1842, when he "had no hope of ever becoming a respectable man again—not the slightest"-"believing that every chance of restoration to decent society and of reformation was gone forever," and when he often contemplated suicide and even "stood by the rails, with a bottle of laudanum clattering against" his lips, he was persuaded by Joel Stratton, a Quaker, to go to a temperance gathering and sign the pledge. Encouraged by Mr. Stratton and others he kept his pledge for several months in spite of the most terrible cravings for liquor. “Knowing that I had voluntarily renounced drink, I endeavored to support my sufferings and resist the incessant craving of my remorseless appetite as well as I could; but the struggle to overcome it was insupportably painful. When I got up in the morning, my brain seemed as though it would burst with the intensity of its agony, my throat appeared as if it were on fire, and in my stomach I experienced a dreadful burning sensation, as if the fires of the pit had been kindled there. . . . I craved, literally gasped, for my accustomed stimulus, and felt that I should die if I did not have it. Still, during all this frightful time, I experienced a feeling somewhat akin to satisfaction at the position I had taken. I had made at least one step towards reformation. I began to think that it was barely possible that I might see better days." After a few months of suc