certain; and that it went about touching and healing with all the power of an angel, is a matter not of history, but of direct knowledge and immediate recollection.  Nothing, indeed, was ever witnessed in any country similar to it.  Whereever it went, joy, acclamation, ecstasy accompanied it; together with a sense of moral liberty, of perfect freedom from the restraint, as it were, of some familiar devil, that had kept its victims in its damnable bondage.  Those who had sunk exhausted before the terrible Molpch of Intemperance, and given themselves over for lost, could now perceive that there was an ally at hand, that was able to bring them succor, and drag them back from degradation and despair, to peace and independence, from contempt and infamy, to respect and praise.  Nor was this all.  It was not merely into the heart of the sot and drunkard that it carried a refreshing consciousness of joy and deliverance, but into all those hearts which his criminal indulgence had filled with heaviness and sorrow.  It had, to be sure, its dark side to some—­ay, to thousands.  Those who lived by the vices —­the low indulgences and the ruinous excesses—­of their fellow-creatures—­trembled and became aghast at its approach.  The vulgar and dishonest publican, who sold a bona fide poison under a false name; the low tavern-keeper; the proprietor of the dram-shop; of the night-house; and the shebeen—­all were struck with terror and dismay.  Their occupation was doomed to go.  No more in the dishonest avarice of gain where they to coax and jest with the foolish tradesman, until they confirmed him in the depraved habit, and led him on, at his own expense, and their profit, step by step, until the naked and shivering sot, now utterly ruined, was kicked out, like Art Maguire, to make room for those who were to tread in his steps, and share his fate.

No more was the purity and inexperience of youth to be corrupted by evil society, artfully introduced for the sordid purpose of making him spend his money, at the expense of health, honesty, and good name.

No more was the decent wife of the spendthrift tradesman, when forced by stern necessity, and the cries of her children, to seek her husband in the public house, of a Saturday night, anxious as she was to secure what was left unspent of his week’s wages, in order to procure to-morrow’s food—­no more was she to be wheedled into the bar, to get the landlord’s or the landlady’s treat, in order that the outworks of temperance, and the principles of industry, perhaps of virtue, might be gradually broken down, for the selfish and diabolical purpose of enabling her drunken husband to spend a double share of his hardly-earned pittance.