Chance, the noted English engineer, built a thousand sea-lights, shore-lights and harbor-lights. When in old age he lay dying, a wild storm on the sea seemed to revive him by its association with his life-work. He said to the watchers: "Lift me up and let me see once more the ocean in a storm."
As he looked out, the red lightning ripped open the black wardrobe of the firmament, and he saw the salted sea driven by the fury of the hurricane into great billows of foam. Sinking back upon his pillows his last words were: "Thank God, I have been a lighthouse builder, and though the light of my life is fast fading, the beams of my lighthouse are brightening the darkness of many a sailor's night."
When my life-work closes, and my platform experiences are ended, I would ask no better name than that of an humble lighthouse builder, who here and there from the shore-points of life's ocean, has sent out a friendly beam, to brighten the darkness of some brother's night.
VII
THE DEFEAT OF THE NATION'S DRAGON.
Joseph Cook said in one of his Boston lectures: "Whenever the temperance cause has attempted to fly with one wing, whether moral suasion or legal suasion, its course has been a spiral one. It will never accomplish its mission in this world, until it strikes the air with equal vans, each wing keeping time with the other, both together winnowing the earth of the tempter and the tempted."
I congratulate the friends of temperance upon the progress both wings have made since the beginning of their flight.
The first temperance pledge we have any record of ran thus: "I solemnly promise upon my word of honor I will abstain from everything that will intoxicate, except at public dinners, on public holidays and other important occasions." The first prohibitory law was a local law in a village on Long Island and ran thus: "Any man engaged in the sale of intoxicating liquors, who sells more than one quart of rum, whiskey or brandy to four boys at one time shall be fined one dollar and two pence."