thin a few years
the road went into the hands of a receiver, and the stock sank to thirty
cents on the dollar.

During the Civil War, General Dix and his military staff gave Mr. Dodge
a complimentary dinner at Fortress Monroe. General Dix rapped on the
table and said to his brother officers: "Gentlemen, you are aware that
our honored guest is a water-drinker. I propose that to-day we join him
in his favorite beverage." Forthwith every wine-glass was turned upside
down as a silent tribute to the Christian conscience of their guest.
When the whole Christian community of America shall imitate the wise
example of that great philanthropist it will exert a tremendous
influence for the banishment of all intoxicants from the public and
private hospitalities of society. Mr. Dodge was elected the first
president of the National Temperance Society, and served it for eighteen
years and bestowed upon it his liberal donations. He closed his useful
and beneficent life in February, 1883, and he was succeeded in the
presidency of the Society by Dr. Mark Hopkins of Williams College, by
the writer of this book, by General O.O. Howard and by Joshua L. Bailey,
who is at present the head of the organization. The society has done a
vast and benevolent work, receiving and expending a million and a half
dollars, publishing many hundreds of valuable volumes, and widely
circulated tracts.

The limits of this chapter will not allow me to pay my tribute to the
venerable Dr. Charles Jewett, Dr. Cheever, Albert Barnes, Dr. Tyng and
the great Christian statesman, Theodore Frelinghuysen, Miss Frances
Willard, Lady Henry Somerset, Joseph Cook and many others who have been
prominent in the promotion of this great Christian reform. It has been
my privilege to labor for it through my whole public life. I have
prepared thirty or forty tracts, written a great number of articles and
delivered hundreds of addresses in behalf of it, and preached many a
discourse from my own pulpit. I have always held that every church is as
much bound to have a temperance wheel in its machinery as to have a
Sabbath school or a missionary organization. It is of vital importance
that the young should be saved, and therefore I have urged temperance
lessons in the Sunday school and the early adoption of a total
abstinence pledge. The temperance reform movement made its greatest
progress when churches and Sunday schools laid hold of it and when the
total abstinence pledge was wide