He replied:  “Mr. Greeley, ask me to take my knife and sever my arm from my shoulder and I can do it, but ask me to give up an appetite that has come down upon me for generations, I can’t do it.”  He threw his cane upon the floor to emphasize his utterance.  A few days later in the old Saint Charles Hotel, he pierced his brain with a bullet and was sent home to his family in his coffin.

Bring me the men who are drunkards in this city, strip them of their appetite for strong drink, and they are husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, and as a rule, generous in disposition.

Thank God, while drunkenness will drag down the gifted and noble, temperance will build up the humblest and lowest.  Bring me the poorest boy in this audience, let him pledge me he will never take a drink of intoxicating liquor as a beverage, let him keep that pledge, be industrious and honest; my word for it, in twenty years from now he will walk the streets of the city in which he dwells, honored, respected, loved, and the world can’t keep him down.  I rejoice we live in a land where I can encourage a boy, a land where rank belongs to the boy who earns it, whether he hails from the mansion of a millionaire or the “old log cabin in the lane;” a land where a boy can go from a rail cut, a tan yard, or a toe-path, to the presidency of the United States; a land where I can look the humblest boy in the face and say: 

“Never ye mind the crowd, my boy, or think that life won’t tell; The work is the work for aye that, to him that doeth it well.  Fancy the world a hill, my boy; look where the millions stop; You’ll find the crowd at the base, my boy; there’s always room at the top.”

Have you a trade?  Go learn one.  Do you know how to do things?  Go try; you may make mistakes, but do the best you can like the boy who joined the church.  At his uncle’s table soon after he was asked to say grace.  He didn’t know what kind of a blessing to ask, but he did know he was very hungry, so bowing his head he said:  “Lord, have mercy on these victuals.”  I have faith in the boy who will try to do a thing.  I believe in a boy like that one in a mission Sabbath school in New York, who though he had but little knowledge of the Bible, had a way of reasoning about Bible lessons.  The teacher of his class said to him:  “James, who was the strongest man of whom we have any account?”

He quickly replied:  “Jonah.”

“How do you make that out?” said the teacher.

Promptly the answer came:  “The whale couldn’t hold him after he got him down.”