Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

[212] teetotalers do not recruit these swelling ranks. Will he please account for the million-times-repeated story of the broken-hearted and despairing sot, and of the reformed man, that “moderate drinking lulled them to a false security until the chain was too strong for them to break” ? Will he please explain that confession forced from old Sam Johnson, and repeated hundreds of times since by men of seemingly strong resolve: “I can abstain; I can't be moderate” ?

Do not the Bible, the writers of fiction, the master dramatists of ancient and modern times; the philosopher, the moralist, the man of affairs,--do not all these bear witness how insidiously the habits of sensual indulgence creep on their victim, until he wakes to find himself in chains of iron, his very will destroyed?

When Milton says, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary,” Dr. Crosby, you suppose, interprets it as meaning that boys should frequent gambling-hells and such resorts, in order to prove their strength of resistance. But no; he does not mean any such thing. He only thinks they should face the drink temptation; none other. When you hear that the New York Central Railway prohibits the sale of flash literature in its cars, perhaps you expect to hear Dr. Crosby denounce that corporation as emasculating the virtues of their travellers and making them unmanly. Not at all. He approves it. It is only drink temptations that he considers good training for heroic men.

You might suppose that Dr. Crosby would recommend to colleges to substitute, in their study of the literature of fiction, the works of Eugene Sue, Dumas, and Balzac, in the place of George Eliot, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen, since these last would afford no proof of a lad's ability to withstand the harm of pernicious