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all will be futile, for I repeat, that only by asserting power over hearts, souls, imaginations, can you make any sort of definite resistance to the awe-striking plague that envenoms the world. With every humility I am obliged to say that many of the good people who aim at reform do not know sufficiently well the central facts regarding drink and drinkers. It is beautiful to watch some placid man who stands up and talks gently to a gathering of sympathizers. The reposeful face, the reposeful voice, the refinement, the assured faith of the speaker are comforting; but when he explains that he has always been an abstainer, I am inclined to wonder how he can possibly exchange ideas with an alcoholized man. How _can_ he know where to aim his persuasions with most effect? Can he really sympathize with the fallen? He has never lived with drunkards or wastrels; he is apart, like a star, and I half think that he only has a blurred vision of the things about which he talks so sweetly. He would be more poignant, and more likely to draw people after him, if he had living images burned into his consciousness. My own set of pictures all stand out with ghastly plainness as if they were lit up by streaks of fire from the Pit. I have come through the Valley of the Shadow into which I ventured with a light heart, and those who know me might point and say what was said of a giant: "There is the man who has been in hell." It was true. Through the dim and sordid inferno, I moved as in a trance for awhile, and that is what makes me so keen to warn those who fancy they are safe; that is what makes me so discontented with the peculiar ethical conceptions of a society which bows down before the concocter of drink and spurns the lost one whom drink seizes. I have learned to look with yearning pity and pardon on all who have been blasted in life by their own weakness, and gripped by the trap into which so many weakly creatures stumble. Looking at brutal life, catching the rotting soul in the very fact, have made me feel the most careless contempt for Statute-mongers, because I know now that you must conquer the evil of evils by a straight appeal to one individual after another and not by any screed of throttling jargon. One Father Mathew would be worth ten Parliaments, even if the Parliaments were all reeling off curative measures with unexampled velocity. You must not talk to a county or a province and expect to be heard to any purpose; you must
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