The next extract is from the Manchester (N.H.) Press: 

“Smyth’s Hall was completely filled, seats and standing room, at two o’clock Sunday afternoon, with an audience which came to hear Luther Benson.  The officers of the Reform Club, clergymen and reformed drunkards occupied seats upon the platform.  Mr. Benson is a native of Indiana, and says he has been a drunkard from six years of age.  He was within three months of graduation from college when he was expelled for drunkenness.  Then he studied for a lawyer, and was admitted to practice, being drunk while studying, and drunk while engaged in a case.  At length he reduced himself to poverty, pawning all he had for drink.  At length he started to reform, and though he had once fallen, he was determined to persevere.  Since his reformation two years ago he had been giving temperance lectures.  He is a young man, a powerful, swinging sort of speaker, with a good command of language, original, with peculiar intonation, pronunciation and idioms, sometimes rough, but eminently popular with his audiences.  He spoke for an hour and a half steadily, wiping the perspiration from his face at intervals, taking up the greater part of his address with his personal experience.  He said he had had delirium tremens several times, once for fifteen days, and gave an exceedingly minute and graphic description of his torments.  A number of men signed the pledge at the close of the meeting, Among them was one man, who sat in front of the audience and kept drinking from a bottle he had, evidently in a spirit of bravado, but at the conclusion of the address he signed the pledge, crying like a child.”

From the Saltsburg Press, of Pennsylvania, I copy the following: 

“On Monday evening, 29th inst., the people of our staid and quiet little town had their dormant spirits stirred to their inmost depths, by an eloquent and thrilling lecture delivered in the Presbyterian church by Luther Benson, Esq., a native of Indianapolis, Indiana, who chose for his topic “Total Abstinence.”  He opened his lecture by delineating in the most touching and beautiful language the almost heavenly happiness resulting in a total abstinence from all intoxicating beverages, and by his well-aimed contrasts demonstrated that, in the use of those beverages, even in a temperate degree, there was but one result—­drunkenness and eternal death.  He was no advocate of temperance; that is, the temperate use of anything hurtful.  Did not believe that anything vicious could be tampered with, without harm coming from it.  He argued to a final and satisfactory conclusion, that in the use of alcoholic beverages there could be no such thing as temperance; that the man who took a drink now and then would make it convenient to take more drinks now than he would then, and in the end would as surely fill a drunkard’s grave as the man who persistently abused the beverage in its use.  His description of the two paths through life was