Another error, as it seems to me, into which the old reformers fell, was the position that all habitual drunkards were utterly incorrigible, and therefore must be turned adrift and damned without remedy in order that the grace of temperance might abound, to the temperate then, and to all mankind some hundreds of years thereafter.  There is in this something so repugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and feelingless, that it never did, nor never can enlist the enthusiasm of a popular cause.  We could not love the man who taught it—­we could not hear him with patience.  The heart could not throw open its portals to it, the generous man could not adopt it—­it could not mix with his blood.  It looked so fiendishly selfish, so like throwing fathers and brothers overboard to lighten the boat for our security, that the noble-minded shrank from the manifest meanness of the thing.  And besides this, the benefits of a reformation to be effected by such a system were too remote in point of time to warmly engage many in its behalf.  Few can be induced to labour exclusively for posterity; and none will do it enthusiastically.  Posterity has done nothing for us; and theorize on it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are made to think we are at the same time doing something for ourselves.

What an ignorance of human nature does it exhibit, to ask or expect a whole community to rise up and labour for the temporal happiness of others, after themselves shall be consigned to the dust, a majority of which community take no pains whatever to secure their own eternal welfare at no more distant day!  Great distance in either time or space has wonderful power to lull and render quiescent the human mind.  Pleasures to be enjoyed, or pains to be endured, after we shall be dead and gone, are but little regarded even in our own cases, and much less in the cases of others.  Still, in addition to this there is something so ludicrous in promises of good or threats of evil a great way off as to render the whole subject with which they are connected easily turned into ridicule.  “Better lay down that spade you are stealing, Paddy; if you don’t you’ll pay for it at the day of judgment.”  “Be the powers, if ye’ll credit me so long I’ll take another jist.”

From the Circular of the Whig Committee.  An Address to the People of Illinois.  March 4, 1843

...  The system of loans is but temporary in its nature, and must soon explode.  It is a system not only ruinous while it lasts, but one that must soon fail and leave us destitute.

As an individual who undertakes to live by borrowing soon finds his original means devoured by interest, and next, no one left to borrow from, so must it be with a government.