beautiful and fragrant flowers, and inspiring landscapes. Who can estimate the value of such a change?

ASYLUMS FOR IDIOTS AND INEBRIATES.

Another class of human beings calling for pity are idiots; of whom there were in our States and Territories, in 1860, 18,865, or one in every 1,666 of our population.

The idea of doing any thing for the benefit of these mindless ones is wholly modern and Christian; and now we see, through the exhaustless skill and patience of humane scientific men and kind women, these unfortunates also slowly returning to consciousness and perception, and gradually rising to the exercise of reason, and even usefulness.

Inebriates, the most criminal and yet pitiable of all demented people, are also at length finding an asylum from the reach of their relentless murderers, the dealers in intoxicating liquors; and hope dawns upon minds and families over which has heretofore brooded only the darkest, deepest despair. At Binghamton, N.Y., and San Francisco, Cal., are the two parent homes for the inebriate, for the Atlantic and Pacific slopes; to be followed, let us trust, by others, until this also shall take its place among the great Christian movements of this noble country.

CHAPTER IX.

DEVELOPMENT OF NATURAL DEPRAVITY.

Let us consider, that, for the sins of a people, God may suffer the best government to be corrupted or entirely dissolved; and that nothing but a general reformation can give good ground to hope that the public happiness will be restored by the recovery of the strength and perfection of the State; and that Divine Providence will interpose to fill every department with wise and good men."-PRESIDENT LANGDON.

IF, in any land beneath the sun, human nature might be expected to exhibit natural freedom from sin, and from infancy grow up to angelic manhood, it surely ought to be here. It would be difficult to mention one condition of natural perfection outside of the moral character of man, as man, which God has omitted in the preparation of this country. We have found, moreover, an evident purpose to bring extraordinary moral power to bear upon the judgments, feelings, and purposes of the race in this Republic, with the view of accomplishing the most for human nature that can be done by means divine and human. But what are the facts? Evidently, there is no paradise here. We have utterly failed to demonstrate the natural purity of souls. We can boast of no national perfection growing up under the natural laws of development. Indeed, we have not even a state or country or city or neighborhood where depravity does not show itself, rising up so directly out of the natural moral condition as to suggest strongly that it must be hereditary. Every family finds rebellion against the right in its nursery, and even in the cradle. The neglect of even the sterner forms of discipline will soon reveal its absolute necessity; and all assumptions of the righteous tendency

of childhood are painfully corrected by the production, as well as the influence, of pernicious example. Penal laws must go into every statute-book. The police, the seats of justice, the penitentiaries, the houses of correction, must be everywhere. The States of this Union are no exception to the moral delinquencies of peoples and governments; and historical fidelity requires the chapter I am about to write.

INTEMPERANCE.

Love of strong drink is at least as natural to Americans as to any people; and it is cultivated to a depth and extent of vice which can gather no comfort from comparison with other countries.

Official reports for 1860 show that we were then employing 1,138 establishments in the manufacture of spirituous liquors, producing 80,453,089 gallons of whiskey, high wines, and alcohol, 3,397 gallons of brandy, gin, &c., and 4,152,480 gallons of New-England rum; being a total of 88,002,988 gallons of strong liquors to circulate chiefly among our own people, and be used as a beverage just so far as a vicious appetite and depraved public sentiment, urged on by a vile class interest, can secure this result.

To this must be added 970 establishments for the manufacture of beer, yielding 3,239,545 barrels annually, to stupefy and poison our citizens. The estimated value of these pernicious liquors was $42,255,311; and, making all proper allowance for those portions used for mechanical and medicinal purposes, we have here one intimation as to the cost of this ruinous indulgence. It is, however, only an intimation; for these liquors, before they get to the people, are multiplied by incredible dilutions. Their cost is increased by enormous profits; and the whole price which supports manufacturers, jobbers, and retail dealers and their families, many of them in splendid attire, furniture, and equi- comes from consumers, who are thus wickedly im

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poverished; and multitudes of helpless women and children are reduced to the extreme of wretchedness, and perhaps of crime. To this expense must be added, for these poor people to pay, the cost of clerk-hire and agencies, bar-keepers and rents, until the frightful aggregate rises above the reach of accurate estimate. Then taxes on the grand list must be added to the burdens of the people to support the poor-houses, penitentiaries, and hospitals required to sustain this accursed traffic. But the deep depravity, the wreck of virtue, and the untold horrors, which must be traced directly to this crime, can by no means be estimated in this world and it is the disgrace of our country, that, in so many of our States, the guilty traffic is sustained by law.

With less than half our present population, it was estimated that we sent into the realms of the dead thirty thousand drunkards a year, and that "one-fourth of the families of the United States were sufferers" from this vicious habit.

Some of our great men, like Dr. Benjamin Rush, sought to rouse the people to their danger. The strong ground of the Methodist-Episcopal Church, in her discipline and administration against the use of intoxicating drinks, saved multitudes from ruin, and helped mightily to create the public sentiment out of which temperance societies arose, a movement which began in Moreau, Saratoga County, N.Y., in 1808, at the suggestion of Dr. B. J. Clark, and which has swept over a large part of the civilized world. If we must confess that the vice of dram-drinking did, at the close of the last century and the beginning of the present, go far toward fixing upon us the disgrace of being a nation of drunkards, it may be accepted as some relief that this great reform arose under the guidance of American philanthropists. Their heroic struggles, under the old pledge, to abstain from the use of spirituous liquors; and the pledge of total abstinence from all that can intoxicate, dating from August, 1836; the organization of the Washingtonians in 1840, with all their successes and failures, - indicate the depth of their con

victions that a destructive vice was preying upon the public morals and health. Sons of Temperance, Rechabites, Cadets of Temperance, Good Templars, Dashaways, and other beneficial societies, sought in other ways to exterminate the evil.

The boldest measure of a virtuous and Christian people to protect themselves from this public wrong dates from Maine in 1851. Her legislature came forward with a law that prohibited, under severe penalties, the sale of this pernicious beverage; and prohibitory laws were adopted by several States. Around this question of the right and efficiency of absolute prohibition the battle has raged for many years, saving vast multitudes, and even whole towns, for the time being, from the dreadful scourge, and rousing all the energy of wicked men in defence of their traffic, with the fell purpose of saving their unrighteous and enormous profits from the interdict of law. In the mean time, the constitutional right of the suffering people to protect themselves by law from this baleful scourge has been established by the written opinions of the ablest jurists of our land, and, finally, by appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States.

With the record of the American Temperance Union and its subordinate and cognate organizations on the pages of history; with such names on the roll of philanthropy as Dr. Beecher, Marsh, Neal Dow, and Gough; and with the grand reforms actually accomplished in America, in England, and on the Continent,-we have some relief from the odium which otherwise adheres to our national honor. But the battle is by no means ended. The churches, the schools, the lovers of the race in our midst, and the virtuous press, are rousing to the conflict with a new vigor; while all the vices of the land are combined in the resistance. This war will now rise to grander proportions than ever before; and CHRISTIAN REGENERATION, TOTAL ABSTINENCE, AND ABSOLUTE PROHIBITION,

will be the rallying-cry of the good and the brave on the side of the right. The struggle will be long and varied in results; but it can never end until our country is saved.