to prohibit, regulate, or restrict the use of that article, as the case may require. This principle is daily applied in laws which control the manufacture and use of gun-powder, nitroglycerine, dynamite, and other things of great and dangerous potency, the unrestrained use of which, even for useful purposes, has been shown by experience to be destructive to the inalienable rights of others. This results from the common principle of law that every man must so enjoy his own rights as neither to destroy nor impair those of another, and it is the great end for which government is instituted among men to compel him so to do.

"Third. No person has a right to do that to himself which impairs or perverts his own powers: and when he does so by means of that which society can reach and remove by law to such extent as to become a burden or a source of danger to others, either by his example or by his liability to commit acts of crime, or to be essentially incapacitated to discharge his duties to himself, his family, and society, the law, that is, society, should protect both him and itself. A man has no more right to destroy his inalienable rights than those of another, or than another has to deprive him of his own. The laws restraining the spendthrift in the destruction of his inalienable right in property and punishing suicide (as the common law did, by forfeiture of estate, &c.), or attempted self-murder (as the law does now), are familiar examples of the application of this principle.

"These are elementary principles of law and of common sense. They are corner-stones of all just government. To these principles every member of society is held to have given his assent. They are unquestioned, so far as I know, by any one who believes in any law. They are axiomatic and indestructible as the social organization itself.

"Fourth. The use (unless medicinally) of alcoholic liquors to the extent of intoxicating or poisoning-which, as will hereafter be seen, is the same thing as intoxication—is an injury to the individual; it inflicts great evils upon society at large; it is destructive to the general welfare; it is of a nature which may be greatly restricted if not destroyed by the enforcement of appropriate laws; consequently such laws should be enacted and enforced; and this should be done in our country either by the States or by the General Govern

ment, or by both, if such laws can be made more efficient thereby."

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.

I desire at this time less to attempt a summary of fact and argument directly in support of the joint resolution than to offer a few considerations touching the present condition of the great debate upon the liquor traffic which for many years has been so active in all parts of the country; and with the consent of the Senate I will venture a few suggestions which seem likely to compel attention, whether willing or reluctant, from politicians and statesmen and patriots and parties, as well as of this great nation, which embraces them all.

It must be conceded that the use of intoxicating (that is to say of poisonous) liquors as a beverage is the chief source and immediate cause of more hurt to society and to individuals than any other one agency which can be named. The war of the rebellion cost us fewer lives and less treasure year by year during its term of death and devastation than the nation has sacrificed annually to the Moloch of alcohol during the period which has elapsed since its close. Pestilence has not slain sixty thousand victims in any one year since the settlement of this country. If cholera and small-pox combined should sweep away one hundred thousand of our countrymen in a season, the nation would organize as one vast funeral procession and hang the heavens with the emblems of despair. Famine is with us unknown, or at least unnecessary, and whenever it exists is a crime either of the victim or of the community, and not an excusable misfortune in any case whatever; but in other civilized lands starvation, even during the last fifty years, has occasionally taught mankind that the terrible word can not yet be dropped from the human vocabulary as descriptive of an evil liability to which is extant among men.

Yet it may safely be said that since the battle of Waterloo, now the full period of the life of man, there has been no one year in which the combined suffering and pecuniary losses, inflicted upon the Caucasian race by war, pestilence, and famine has equalled the total of destruction chargeable to alcohol in the same lapse of time. Beyond this, the curse of alcohol has not been intermittent and occasional, but perpetual and inexorable, and I think on the whole increasing like

the everlasting and unyielding pressure of gravitation and depravity. I have no heart and no time to repeat the familiar mathematical statements which come to us from municipal authorities, from the leading luminaries of all the professions, and from every source of authentic information, by which we learn that at least three-fourths of the pauperism, insanity, and crime, and of the public and private burdens which these great evils impose upon us directly chargeable to intoxicating drink. Such facts are as familiar as corpses upon a battlefield, and seem to attract no more attention.

I hazard nothing in appealing to the consciousness of every one who listens to me to attest that he has seen more of evil flowing from this than from any other cause during his whole lifetime, and I should hardly fail if I asserted that the personal sorrows and afflictions which he has most to bewail among friends, kindred, and the community where he may dwell are traceable to the same omnipresent curse. Those who preach, preach against it, and those who pray, pray against it. The press recounts its daily crimes and deviltries, and those who drink as well as those who abstain vie with each other in stigmatizing rum as the worst thing there is extant. Yet somehow the old king does most wonderfully hold his own. He is a popular curse. He has a round billion of money invested in his business, one-fortieth of the property and labor of the country producing and distributing death and misery to the American people. His market is as sure as that for cotton, corn, or beef. The unnatural appetite which constitutes the demand has become as insatible and almost as universal as the demand for healthy foods. This appetite descends with the blood, and the parent thus becomes bar-tender, even after death, for his child.

Multitudes bewail the evils of intoxication, attend temperance meetings, sing temperance songs, and pay a dollar a year to help along the blessed cause, and then lease their real estate for saloons, protest against the insertion of prohibition planks in political platforms, lest remonstrance against evil shall upset party supremacy, or, it may be, with upright purpose, influenced by profound discouragement and disgust, they break down and destroy an organization which they created and which they might control and save and use as a mighty power for the removal of the evils which they de

plore. So it goes; and the evil expands, until we are told, no doubt truly, that the production which in the year 1862 was said to have been 16,000,000 gallons of distilled liquors and 62,000,000 gallons of beer, perhaps an exceptionally un productive year, was, according to the just-published report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 69,000,000 gallons of distilled spirits, 19,000,000 barrels or 700,000,000 gallons of malt liquors, and over 2,000,000 gallons of wine, all gone into the consumption of this country during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1885. Really we do not seem to be getting ahead very rapidly, according to these figures; but I suspect that the returns of 1862 were imperfect. There is, however, I think, no doubt that the consumption of all kinds of intoxicating liquors has increased quite as rapidly as population in the United States during the last quarter of a century. This is especially true of malt liquors and perhaps of wines. I believe the rum traffic to be the great menacing danger of America and of civilization.

REVIEW OF PROGRESS DURING THE LAST CENTURY.

The thought which I have in mind for discussion upon this occasion is embodied in the question, What had we better do? I do not assume that I can answer this question. I can state what seems to my vision to be the better way-that is all that any man can do—and the Supreme Ruler of events will direct the pathway of action, as He has from the beginning until now.

Sir, we stand upon an elevation to-day at the end of the first century of the temperance reform. It is an hour of retrospect and of forecast. Something is revealed by the lamp of experience for the guidance of our feet in the century to come. What has been done in the last hundred years? By what means has it been accomplished? What remains to do, and by what means and methods shall the remaining work be wrought? In the first place, during the century just closed we have learned that the use of intoxicating liquors as a beverage-simply as a beverage and not as a medicine-is an evil always useless and hurtful. We have learned that alcohol is a poison and not a food; that it is not useful to the human system save under circumstances when a poison may

be useful; never to produce or improve health only as it may remove an obstruction to the natural and proper action of this vital machine so fearfully and wonderfully made. Science has become our ally and fortifies our cause impregnably with her demonstrations. The Byronic phrase, "Rum and true religion," was hardly blasphemous sixty years ago.

A venerable Christian once told me that when he was six years old his sainted mother became converted and joined the church in one of the best towns of my own State. Among his most vivid recollections was the memory of the visit of the distinguished divine who came on two or more occasions to his father's house for the purpose of testing the theological soundness as well as practical piety of his mother during the probationary period which preceded her admission to the church, every such interview in the discharge of his sacred calling being opened by a liberal drink of New England rum, administered by the hands of the candidate for admission. It was not only the way of the world, but it was the way of the church. Drinking which did not result in actual helplessness was hardly considered an offense, while as a social custom its indulgence was as universal as it was delightful, and its dangerous tendency was overlooked most strangely and wickedly by the great majority of the best of men. Now the Christian ministry, Protestant and Catholic, is almost a unit against rum. The medical profession is against rum; the judiciary is against rum; science, religion, the learned professions as a whole, which one hundred years ago were for rum, are now against it. The substantial press of the country is against it; intelligence, conscience, all the great forces and agencies of society are against it.

Whenever and wherever any of them advocate its cause the work is accompanied by a concession of the evil, and the hypocritical or ignorant pretense that it can best be suppressed by some policy which increases the evil. You can not conceive of a political platform which advocates or justifies the liquor traffic because it does any good. All opposition to the evil is deprecated, or its license is sought only upon the ground that stringent and prohibitory measures increase the evil, or that such invasions of personal liberty are dangerous to individuals or to the State. It seems to be forgotten that the very essence of all government is an invasion