The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1884-02-04

that it was full time to assert the laws. They
saw around them, not a community like our own,
of fixed habits and character, but one in the
g~ristle, not yet hardened in the bone of man
hood. The people there, children of our older
States, seem to have forgotten the blood
tried principles of their fathers the moment
they lost sight of New England hills. Some
thing was to be done to show them the priceless
value of freedom of the press, to bring back and
set right their wandering and confused ideas.
He and his advisers looked on a community,
struggling like a drunken man, Indifferent to
their rights and confused in their feelings. Deaf
to argument, haply they might be stunned into
sobriety. They saw that of which we cannot
judge-the necessity of resistance. Public opin-
ion, fast fastening on the downward course,
must be arrested. Does not the event show they
judged rightly"
H TEMPERANCE CAUSE.
Energetic as Mr.. Phillips was in the abolition
cause, he found time and strength to strike
heavy blows for temperance. His Grafton on
Metropolitan Police is a powerful argument in
favor of legislative prevention of intemperance.
An extracti is appended:
"Some men look upon this temperance cause
as whining bigotry, narrow asceticism, or a vul-
gar sentimentality, fit for little minds. On the
contrary, regard it only as second to one or two
others of the primary reforms of the age, and
for this reason: Every race has its peculiar tempta-
ton; every cline has its specific sin. The tropics
and tropical races are tempted to one form OF
sensuality; the colder and temperate regions ana
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 our
selves from the -overweariness of constant and
exhaustive toll by intoxication. Science has
brought a cheap means of drunkenness within
the reach of every individual. National prosper
ity 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 sanction 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. A drunken people can never be the ba-
sis of a free government. 1t is the cornerstone
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 brutal
ICES 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. To prevent
the open sale of intoxicating liquor has been the
method selected by the State to help its citizens
to be virtuous: in other words, the State has
enacted what is called the Maine liquor law. You
may drink in your own parlors, you may make
what indulgence you please your daily rule-the
State does not touch you there; there you injure
only yourself and those you directly influence
that the State cannot reach. But when you open
your door and say to your fellow-citizen, Come
and indulge the State has a right to ask, In
what do you invite them to indulgel Is it in
something that helps, or something that harms,
the communityPn