that twenty-seven of them had also a fondness for alcoholic stimulants.  A large proportion of the Franklin Home inmates attribute their habit of drinking to the effects of company; many commenced in the army, and many were induced to drink at first by invitation.  If smoking was a solitary habit, it would be less likely to lead to drinking; but the same companionship, and habits of treating prevail, as in the saloon, and the step from the estaminet to the bar-room under invitation, is an easy one, where the diseased thirst, so often induced by tobacco, favors the movement to treat.

We have no prejudice against tobacco, other than what would naturally arise in the mind from a careful examination of the effects of the poison in hundreds of cases.  We have seen large, hale-looking men forced in time to abandon, although very reluctantly, the use of tobacco in every form; and the most bitter enemy we have ever met to the vile weed as he termed it, was a physician, who had been forced to give up chewing on account of the state of his heart, after years of indulgence.  We have seen many such instances, and, in one case, the abandonment of the habit entirely cured a dyspepsia of twenty-eight years’ standing.

CHAPTER XI.

THE WOMAN’S CRUSADE.

For every one saved through the agency of inebriate asylums and reformatory homes, hundreds are lost and hundreds added yearly to the great army of drunkards.  Good and useful as such institutions are, they do not meet the desperate exigencies of the case.  Something of wider reach and quicker application is demanded.  What shall it be?  In prohibition many look for the means by which the curse of drunkenness is to be abated.  But, while we wait for a public sentiment strong enough to determine legislation, sixty thousand unhappy beings are yearly consigned to drunkards’ graves.

What have temperance men accomplished in the fifty years during which they have so earnestly opposed the drinking usages of society and the traffic in alcoholic drinks?  And what have they done for the prevention and cure of drunkenness?  In limiting the use of intoxicants, in restricting the liquor traffic and in giving a right direction to public sentiment, they have done a great and good work; but their efforts to reclaim the fallen drunkard have met with sad discouragements.  In the work of prevention, much has been accomplished; in the work of cure, alas! how little.  The appetite once formed, and the unhappy victim finds himself under the control of a power from which he can rarely get free.  Pledges, new associations, better and more favorable surroundings, all are tried, and many are saved; but the number of the saved are few in comparison with those who, after a season of sobriety, fall back into their old ways.

In all these many years of untiring efforts to lift up and save the fallen, what sad disappointments have met our earnest and devoted temperance workers.  From how many fields, which seemed full of a rich promise, have they gathered only a meagre harvest.  But still they have worked on, gaining strength from defeat and disappointment; for they knew that the cause in which they were engaged was the cause of God and humanity, and that in the end it must prevail.