Of Mr. Gough’s extraordinary platform powers I need not speak while there are so many now living that sat under the enchantment of his eloquence.  A man who could crowd an opera house in London to listen to so unpopular a theme as temperance while a score or more of coroneted carriages were waiting about the door must have been no ordinary master of oratory.  As an actor he might have been a second Garrick; as a preacher of the Gospel he would have been a second Whitefield.  My house was his home when visiting our city for many years, and he used to tell me that my letters to him were carried in his breast pocket until they were worn to fragments.  His last speech, delivered in Philadelphia, displayed much of his early power, and the last sentence, “Young man, keep a clean record,” rung out as he fell stricken with apoplexy, and the eloquent voice was silent forever.  God’s messenger met him where every true warrior may well desire to be met—­in the heat of the battle, and with the harness on.

My acquaintance with Neal Dow began in the early winter of 1852.  He had been chosen Mayor of Portland in the spring of the year, and then he struck the bold stroke which was “heard round the world” and made him famous as the father of Prohibition.  He had drafted a bill for the suppression of tippling houses and placed in it a claim of the right of the civil authorities to search all premises where it was suspected that intoxicating liquors were kept for sale, and to seize and confiscate them on the spot.  It was this sharp scimitar of search and seizure which gave the original Maine law its deadly power.  He took his bill to the seat of government and it was promptly passed by the legislature.  He brought it home in triumph, and in less than three months there was not an open dram shop or distillery in Portland!  He invited me to visit him, and drove me over the city, whose pure air was not polluted with the faintest smell of alcohol.  It seemed like the first whiff of a temperance millennium.  An invitation was extended to him to a magnificent public meeting in Tripler Hall, New York.  At that meeting a large array of distinguished speakers, including General Houston, of Texas; the Hon. Horace Mann, of Massachusetts; Henry Ward Beecher, Dr. Chapin and several other celebrities, appeared.  On that evening I delivered my first public address in New York, and have been told that it was the occasion of my call to be a pastor in that city two years afterwards.  A gold medal was presented to Neal Dow that evening.  He went home with me to Trenton, and from that time our intimacy was so great and our correspondence so constant that if I had preserved all his letters they would make a history of the prohibition movement from 1851 to 1857, the years of its widest successes.  With him I addressed the legislature of New York, who passed a law of prohibition very soon afterwards.  A forceful, magnetic man was General Dow, thoroughly honest and courageous, with a womanly tenderness in his sympathies.  I have been permitted to know intimately many of the leaders in great moral reforms on both sides of the ocean; but a braver, sounder heart was not to be found than that which throbbed in the breast of Neal Dow.