It is true that even then it was known and acknowledged that many were greatly injured by it; but none seemed to think the injury arose from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing.  The victims of it were to be pitied and compassionated, just as are the heirs of consumption and other hereditary diseases.  Their failing was treated as a misfortune, and not as a crime, or even as a disgrace.  If, then, what I have been saying is true, is it wonderful that some should think and act now as all thought and acted twenty years ago? and is it just to assail, condemn, or despise them for doing so?  The universal sense of mankind on any subject is an argument, or at least an influence, not easily overcome.  The success of the argument in favor of the existence of an overruling Providence mainly depends upon that sense; and men ought not in justice to be denounced for yielding to it in any case, or giving it up slowly, especially when they are backed by interest, fixed habits, or burning appetites.

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 some thing so repugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and feelingless, that it, never did nor ever 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 labor 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 to expect a whole community to rise up and labor 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.”