people anywhere, on the ground that liberty is denied to be good or right, in itself. The universal pretext of every despotism is, that liberty is dangerous to society,—that is, that the people are unfit to enjoy it.

Do you tell me that these arguments have a tendency indirectly to encourage and defend useless and harmful drinking, and that silence would have been better-for the sake of a great and holy cause?

I answer: that He who governs the universe and created the nature of man, who made freedom a necessity of his development, and the capacity to choose between good and evil the crowning dignity of his reason, knew better than to trust it to the expedients of political society. The great and holy cause of emancipation from vice and moral bondage, is moral, and not political.

It used to be thought right to burn a man's body for the salvation of his soul. It used to be thought that to suppress heresy and false teachers deceiving the people, was mercy to the heretic and the false teacher themselves, while it protected the people against perversion and spiritual ruin. The motive was not bad, but the philosophy was fatal. The better the motive, the sincerer the men, the more

disastrous was the policy. So now, if dishonest and despotic men alone, from love of power and not of human welfare, should appeal to this machinery, to work, against men's wills, their moral renovation, the plan would lose more than half its danger. But the bad precedents good men establish to-day, in the weakness of their faith in better means, bad men use to-morrow for bad purposes and with worse motives. Meanwhile, aiming at compulsory conformity to your creed of artificial virtue, the dissentients, even if submissive, regarding themselves merely as the victims of a dominant asceticism, are made deaf to moral teachings, impatient of the preacher, haters of his doctrine, and defiant at heart.

Gentlemen, I maintain the positions I have assumed, and enforce them by arguments, because I believe those positions to be true, and the arguments sound. I believe it is safe, expedient and wise to stand by the truth. If the Catholic priest, uttering the united voice of all the bishops and minor clergy of the principal ecclesiastical body in Christendom, [see testimony of Rev. James A. Healey,] claims no power to declare that to be a sin, which Almighty God has not made to be a sin, neither can Protestant minister nor pop

ular convention. But, I cannot stand in the attitude of defence. If the doctrine is true; if the teachings of science are so; if the argument is sound, then I charge back upon all those who, in the spirit of jesuitical philosophy would sacrifice the truth, science and argument, to a supposed moral expediency, that they-in the service of morality-are unsettling its foundations in the confidence of men.

Do you suppose that the adherents, of the Roman Catholic Church, or the many thousands of other persuasions, whose opinions have been declared by the reverend and learned men, belonging to Protestant denominations, who have denied before this Committee the moral validity of the theory of prohibition, will accept the dogmas of a Protestant Pope, although indorsed by a selfcreated convention, or enacted by a secular government? Do you suppose that the people of every class and persuasion,-taught by professors and practitioners of medical science of every school to take wines and beer as tonics, and restoratives, and as part of their diet, in illness, in age, or on occasions of physical depression-will, in their hearts, believe your declaration that they are essentially and characteristically poisonous? Do

you think that the children at our firesides will believe that the apostle, (in the unworthy phrase of modern discussion,) was a "rummy" and a perverter, when, instead of commanding total abstinence, he enjoined freedom from excess of wine? Do you imagine they will forget, that he who made the best wine which the guests enjoyed at the marriage feast in Galilee, (because He came "eating and drinking" while John the Baptist was a Nazarite and drank no wine,) was aspersed by the Jewish Pharisees as a "wine bibber and a friend of publicans and sinners"?

The people and the children are not blind to the inconsistencies and sophistries of those who claim to lead them. They can distinguish the truths of the Gospel, and the practical dictates of Reason, from the controversial theories of "contentious conscientiousness."

I have a few words to say on the statistics. Many gentlemen called by the remonstrants, gave opinions based on the presumed existence of facts which, if not known to exist, can afford no ground of opinion. If known, they could have been proved, by reference to the ordinary means of statistical information. For the purpose of aiding the Committee to arrive at the truth, we brought the

evidence of such gentlemen to the test of crossexamination; in every instance showing that their opinions, whenever they seemed at first to have been deductions from such facts, were in reality, at best, only the guesses of honest, but pre-occupied judgments. Now there was one gentleman whose fame in statistics, in philanthropy and in medicine, had led to his employment by the national government to prepare the volume of "Mortality" in the series of volumes containing the results of the census of 1860-I mean Dr. Edward Jarvis. An ardent opponent of all "ardent spirits," he would have been for the remonstrants the safest possible witness, had the truth been trustworthy. He was the best witness for them to have called, had they only desired the best evidence. Besides, I had alluded to his work, in my cross-examinations. And on the last day of their testimony, one of the most intelligent and fair-minded of their witnesses, when pressed in cross-examination by the facts shown in the statistics of Dr. Jarvis's volume, repeatedly called in question the reliability of the census reports. The Doctor, (who knew better than anybody else,) was in the presence of the Committee during the larger part of the sitting. He had also been in the hall, with the witnesses,