THE FIRST GREAT DUTY OF SOCIETY

is to feed and clothe her individuals.  This burden is just beginning to sit on her shoulders without galling weight.  The next effort is to protect the more industrious against the forays of the wicked and the mistakes of the unwise.  This is the problem with which the past century has had most to deal.  It is an immeasurably greater question than is that of drunkenness, and it is immeasurably far from solution.  For instance, a foolish statesman can to-day plunge fifty millions of people into

WAR

—­a thing represented among words by three letters, but which among events entirely fails to find complete expression, from the lack of any other misfortune worthy of comparison.  An angry statesman, acting like a boy, may stop, not a game of marbles, but ten thousand grain-laden ships.  But, notwithstanding, as an attendant in the betterment of her condition, Society is advancing rightly toward the rum-bottle.  She does not hearken always to the voice of

THE PROFESSIONAL TEMPERANCE “WORKER”

because a betterment in Society is naturally and rightly the result of self-interest.  The man who spends his time altogether in the bettering of others does not establish reforms on the surest basis.  Society usually has to do his work after him, with considerable delay and additional cost.  He is all right in the abstract, but he delays matters.  What I would illustrate is this:  The place for the reformer to deal with drink on a fair battle field is in the city.  The place where the professional reformer finds it profitable to go is in the country, where the youth wear

THE BADGE OF TEMPERANCE

in their cheeks—­not in the button-hole of their coats.  In the country, surrounded by circles of persons as free from stimulants or the need of them as is their snow from the smut of soft-coal, they swear eternal “conversion” to the views of a man—­usually a former victim of intoxication,—­often a subsequent wallower in his same old gutters.  Society sometimes looks upon this Peter the Hermit with little pleasure.  The excitements, the passions and the commotions which he sometimes foments are pitiable from the very fact that

NO RUM CAN BE BLAMED

as having fired the unhappy brains that rush into the vortex of public confusion, like ships into the whirlpool.  All the practical laws would be passed (and at a date earlier than that at which the public finally accept them in reality) without the sacrifices of the man who proudly calls himself a “horrible example” of the power of strong drink.  How does Society do it?  I am sure I do not know.  All I know is this: 

ON THE REAL BATTLE-GROUND,