By the Washingtonians this system of consigning the habitual drunkard to hopeless ruin is repudiated.  They adopt a more enlarged philanthropy; they go for present as well as future good.  They labor for all now living, as well as hereafter to live.  They teach hope to all-despair to none.  As applying to their cause, they deny the doctrine of unpardonable sin; as in Christianity it is taught, so in this they teach—­“While—­While the lamp holds out to burn, The vilest sinner may return.”  And, what is a matter of more profound congratulation, they, by experiment upon experiment and example upon example, prove the maxim to be no less true in the one case than in the other.  On every hand we behold those who but yesterday were the chief of sinners, now the chief apostles of the cause.  Drunken devils are cast out by ones, by sevens, by legions; and their unfortunate victims, like the poor possessed who were redeemed from their long and lonely wanderings in the tombs, are publishing to the ends of the earth how great things have been done for them.

To these new champions and this new system of tactics our late success is mainly owing, and to them we must mainly look for the final consummation.  The ball is now rolling gloriously on, and none are so able as they to increase its speed and its bulk, to add to its momentum and its magnitude—­even though unlearned in letters, for this task none are so well educated.  To fit them for this work they have been taught in the true school.  They have been in that gulf from which they would teach others the means of escape.  They have passed that prison wall which others have long declared impassable; and who that has not shall dare to weigh opinions with them as to the mode of passing?

But if it be true, as I have insisted, that those who have suffered by intemperance personally, and have reformed, are the most powerful and efficient instruments to push the reformation to ultimate success, it does not follow that those who have not suffered have no part left them to perform.  Whether or not the world would be vastly benefited by a total and final banishment from it of all intoxicating drinks seems to me not now an open question.  Three fourths of mankind confess the affirmative with their tongues, and, I believe, all the rest acknowledge it in their hearts.

Ought any, then, to refuse their aid in doing what good the good of the whole demands?  Shall he who cannot do much be for that reason excused if he do nothing?  “But,” says one, “what good can I do by signing the pledge?  I never drank, even without signing.”  This question has already been asked and answered more than a million of times.  Let it be answered once more.  For the man suddenly or in any other way to break off from the use of drams, who has indulged in them for a long course of years and until his appetite for them has grown ten or a hundredfold stronger and more craving than any natural appetite can be, requires