his rapacity?  He ever seems to have gone forth like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay, if not the first, the fairest born of every family.  Shall he now be arrested in his desolating career?  In that arrest all can give aid that will; and who shall be excused that can and will not?  Far around as human breath has ever blown he keeps our fathers, our brothers, our sons, and our friends prostrate in the chains of moral death.  To all the living everywhere we cry, “Come sound the moral trump, that these may rise and stand up an exceeding great army.”  “Come from the four winds, O breath! and breathe upon these slain that they may live.”  If the relative grandeur of revolutions shall be estimated by the great amount of human misery they alleviate, and the small amount they inflict, then indeed will this be the grandest the world shall ever have seen.

Of our political revolution of ’76 we are all justly proud.  It has given us a degree of political freedom far exceeding that of any other nation of the earth.  In it the world has found a solution of the long-mooted problem as to the capability of man to govern himself.  In it was the germ which has vegetated, and still is to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind.  But, with all these glorious results, past, present, and to come, it had its evils too.  It breathed forth famine, swam in blood, and rode in fire; and long, long after, the orphan’s cry and the widow’s wail continued to break the sad silence that ensued.  These were the price, the inevitable price, paid for the blessings it bought.

Turn now to the temperance revolution.  In it we shall find a stronger bondage broken, a viler slavery manumitted, a greater tyrant deposed; in it, more of want supplied, more disease healed, more sorrow assuaged.  By it no Orphans starving, no widows weeping.  By it none wounded in feeling, none injured in interest; even the drammaker and dram-seller will have glided into other occupations so gradually as never to have felt the change, and will stand ready to join all others in the universal song of gladness.  And what a noble ally this to the cause of political freedom, with such an aid its march cannot fail to be on and on, till every son of earth shall drink in rich fruition the sorrow-quenching draughts of perfect liberty.  Happy day when-all appetites controlled, all poisons subdued, all matter subjected-mind, all-conquering mind, shall live and move, the monarch of the world.  Glorious consummation!  Hail, fall of fury!  Reign of reason, all hail!

And when the victory shall be complete, when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth, how proud the title of that land which may truly claim to be the birthplace and the cradle of both those revolutions that shall have ended in that victory.  How nobly distinguished that people who shall have planted and nurtured to maturity both the political and moral freedom of their species.