of that great philanthropist it will exert a tremendous influence for the banishment of all intoxicants from the public and private hospitalities of society.  Mr. Dodge was elected the first president of the National Temperance Society, and served it for eighteen years and bestowed upon it his liberal donations.  He closed his useful and beneficent life in February, 1883, and he was succeeded in the presidency of the Society by Dr. Mark Hopkins of Williams College, by the writer of this book, by General O.O.  Howard and by Joshua L. Bailey, who is at present the head of the organization.  The society has done a vast and benevolent work, receiving and expending a million and a half dollars, publishing many hundreds of valuable volumes, and widely circulated tracts.

The limits of this chapter will not allow me to pay my tribute to the venerable Dr. Charles Jewett, Dr. Cheever, Albert Barnes, Dr. Tyng and the great Christian statesman, Theodore Frelinghuysen, Miss Frances Willard, Lady Henry Somerset, Joseph Cook and many others who have been prominent in the promotion of this great Christian reform.  It has been my privilege to labor for it through my whole public life.  I have prepared thirty or forty tracts, written a great number of articles and delivered hundreds of addresses in behalf of it, and preached many a discourse from my own pulpit.  I have always held that every church is as much bound to have a temperance wheel in its machinery as to have a Sabbath school or a missionary organization.  It is of vital importance that the young should be saved, and therefore I have urged temperance lessons in the Sunday school and the early adoption of a total abstinence pledge.  The temperance reform movement made its greatest progress when churches and Sunday schools laid hold of it and when the total abstinence pledge was widely and wisely used.  The social drink customs are coming back again and a fresh education of the American people as to the deadly drink evil is the necessity of the hour, and that must be given in the home, in the schools and from the pulpit and from the public press.  I have become convinced from long labor in this reform that the ordinary license system is only a poultice to the dram seller’s conscience, and for restraining intemperance it is a ghastly failure.  Institutions and patent medicines to cure drinkers have only had a partial success.  The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop before you begin.  Entire legal suppression of the dram shop is successful where a stiff, righteous, public sentiment thoroughly enforces it.  Otherwise it may become a delusion and a farce.