s made upon his mind which
changed the current of his life. Studying the globe, he was impressed
with the need that one nation has of other nations, and one zone of
another zone; the tropics producing what assuages life in the northern
latitudes and northern lands furnishing the means of mitigating tropical
discomforts. He felt that the earth was made for friendliness and
cooeperation, not for fierce competition and bloody wars.

Under the influence of these feelings, his lecture became an eloquent
plea for peace, and to this object his after life was chiefly devoted.
The dispute with England upon the Oregon boundary induced him to go to
England with the design of travelling on foot from village to village,
preaching peace, and exposing the horrors and folly of war. His
addresses attracting attention, he was invited to speak to larger bodies,
and, in short, he spent twenty years of his life as a lecturer upon
peace, organizing Peace Congresses, advocating low uniform rates of ocean
postage, and spreading abroad among the people of Europe the feeling
which issued, at length, in the arbitration of the dispute between the
United States and Great Britain, an event which posterity will, perhaps,
consider the most important of this century. He heard Victor Hugo say at
the Paris Congress of 1850:

"A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in public museums, just
as an instrument of torture is now, and people will be amazed that such a
thing could ever have been. . . ."

Elihu Burritt spent the last years of his life upon a little farm which
he had contrived to buy in his native town. He was never married, but
lived with his sister and her daughters. He was not so very much richer
in worldly goods than when he started out for Boston, with his property
wrapped in a small handkerchief. He died in March, 1879, aged sixty-nine
years.

JOHN B. GOUGH

(1817-1886)

THE CONQUEST OF A BAD HABIT

Happily few human beings sink to the depths in which John B. Gough
found himself at the age of twenty-five years. By sheer force of will
he raised himself from the slough in which he wallowed, till he
attained a position honored among men, and performed a service of
exceptional usefulness to society.

His story, as told in his own vivid words, is one of the most absorbing
in the annals of self-help. His example must have helped thousands
among the myriads whom he thrilled by the dramatic recital of his
experience