Evolution of Expression, Volume 2—Revised

1. Some men look upon this temperance cause as a whining bigotry, narrow asceticism, or a vulgar sentimentality, fit for little minds, weak women, and weaker men. On the contrary, I regard it as second only to one or two others of the primary reforms of the age, and for this reason: every race has its peculiar temptation; every clime has its specific sin.

2. The tropics and tropical races are tempted to one form of sensuality; the colder and temperate regions, and our Saxon blood, find their peculiar temptation in the stimulus of drink and food. In old times our heaven was a drunken revel. We relieve ourselves from the over-weariness of constant and exhausting toil by intoxication. Science has brought a cheap means of drunkenness within the reach of every individual.

3. National prosperity and free institutions have put into the hands of almost every workman the means of being drunk for a week on the labor of two or three hours. With that blood and that temptation, we have adopted democratic institutions, where the law has no sanctions but the purpose and virtue of the masses. The statute book rests not on bayonets, as in Europe, but on the hearts of the people.

4. A drunken people can never be the basis of a free government. It is the corner-stone neither of virtue, prosperity, nor progress. To us, therefore, the title-deeds of whose estates, and the safety of whose lives depend upon the tranquility of the streets, upon the virtue of the masses, the presence of any vice which brutalizes the average mass of mankind, and tends to make it more readily the tool of intriguing and corrupt leaders, is necessarily a stab at the very life of the nation. Against such a vice is marshalled the Temperance Reformation.

5. That my sketch is no fancy picture every one of you knows. Every one of you can glance back over your own path, and count many and many a one among those who started from the goal at your side, with equal energy and perhaps greater promise, who has found a drunkard's grave long before this. The brightness of the bar, the ornament of the pulpit, the hope and blessing and stay of many a family – you know, every one of you who has reached middle life, how often on your path you set up the warning, "Fallen before the temptations of the street!"

6. Hardly one house in this city, whether it be full and warm with all the luxury of wealth, or whether it find hard, cold maintenance by the most earnest economy; no matter which – hardly a house that does not count among sons or nephews some victim of this vice. The skeleton of this warning sits at every board. The whole world is kindred in this suffering. The country mother launches her boy with trembling upon the temptations of city life; the father trusts his daughter anxiously to the young man she has chosen, knowing what a wreck intoxication may make of the house-tree they set up.

7. Alas! how often are their worst forebodings more than fulfilled! I have known a case – probably many of you recall some almost equal to it – where one worthy woman could count father, brother, husband, and son-in-law all drunkards – no man among her near kindred, except her son, who was not a victim of this vice. Like all other appetites, this finds resolution weak when set against the constant presence of temptation.

    Wendell Phillips.

SHERIDAN'S RIDE

I

Up from the South at break of day,
Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,
The affrighted air with a shudder bore,
Like a herald in haste, to the chieftain's door,
The terrible grumble and rumble and roar,
Telling the battle was on once more,
And Sheridan – twenty miles away!

II

And wilder still those billows of war
Thundered along the horizon's bar;
And louder yet into Winchester rolled
The roar of that red sea uncontrolled,
Making the blood of the listener cold,
As he thought of the stake in that fiery fray,
And Sheridan – twenty miles away!

III

But there is a road from Winchester town,
A good, broad highway leading down;
And there, through the flush of the morning light,
A steed as black as the steeds of night,
Was seen to pass as with eagle flight —
As if he knew the terrible need,
He stretched away with the utmost speed;
Hills rose and fell – but his heart was gay,
With Sheridan fifteen miles away!

IV

Still sprung from those swift hoofs, thundering South,
The dust, like the smoke from the cannon's mouth,
Or the trail of a comet sweeping faster and faster,
Foreboding to traitors the doom of disaster;
The heart of the steed and the heart of the master
Were beating like prisoners assaulting their walls,
Impatient to be where the battlefield calls;
Every nerve of the charger was strained to full play,
With Sheridan only ten miles away!

V

Under his spurning feet the road
Like an arrowy Alpine river flowed,
And the landscape sped away behind
Like an ocean flying before the wind;
And the steed, like a bark fed with furnace ire,
Swept on with his wild eyes full of fire.
But lo! he is nearing his heart's desire —
He is snuffing the smoke of the roaring fray,
With Sheridan only five miles away!

VI

The first that the General saw were the groups
Of stragglers, and then the retreating troops;
What was done – what to do – a glance told him both,
Then striking his spurs with a muttered oath,
He dashed down the line 'mid a storm of huzzahs,
And the wave of retreat checked its course there, because
The sight of the master compelled it to pause.
With foam and with dust the black charger was gray;
By the flash of his eye, and his red nostril's play,
He seemed to the whole great army to say,
"I have brought you Sheridan all the way
From Winchester down to save the day!"

VII

Hurrah, hurrah for Sheridan!
Hurrah, hurrah for horse and man!
And when their statues are placed on high,
Under the dome of the Union sky —
The American soldier's temple of Fame, —
There, with the glorious General's name,
Be it said in letters both bold and bright:
"Here is the steed that saved the day,
By carrying Sheridan into the fight