perance society was
able at the end of five years to bear this testimony in the presence of
those who were in a position to recognize any misstatement or
exaggeration:

"The wonderful change which the past five years have witnessed
in the manners and habits of this people in regard to the use
of ardent spirits--the new phenomenon of an intelligent people
rising up, as it were, with one consent, without law, without
any attempt at legislation, to put down by the mere force of
public opinion, expressing itself in voluntary associations, a
great social evil which no despot on earth could have put down
among his subjects by any system of efforts--has excited
admiration and roused to imitation not only in our sister
country of Great Britain, but in the heart of continental
Europe."[287:1]

It is worthy of remark, for any possible instruction there may be in it,
that the first, greatest, and most permanent of the victories of the
temperance reformation, the breaking down of almost universal social
drinking usages, was accomplished while yet the work was a distinctively
religious one, "without law or attempt at legislation," and while the
efforts at suppression were directed at the use of ardent spirits. The
attempt to combine the friends of temperance on a basis of "teetotal"
abstinence, putting fermented as well as distilled liquors under the
ban, dates from as late as 1836.

But it soon appeared that the immense gain of banishing ardent spirits
from the family table and sideboard, the social entertainment, the
haying field, and the factory had not been attained without some
corresponding loss. Close upon the heels of the reform in the domestic
and social habits of the people there was spawned a monstrous brood of
obscure tippling-shops--a nuisance, at least in New England, till then
unknown. From the beginning wise and effective license laws had
interdicted all dram-shops; even the taverner might sell spirits only to
his transient guests, not to the people of the town. With the
suppression of social drinking there was effected, in spite of salutary
law to the contrary, a woeful change. The American "saloon" was, in an
important sense, the offspring of the American temperance reformation.
The fact justified the reformer in turning his attention to the law.
From that time onward the history of the temperance reformation has
included the history of multitudinous experi