A short time after, on a dying-bed, this four days' liquor-dealer sent for some of these women, telling them their songs and prayers had never ceased to ring in his ears, and urging them to pray again in his behalf; so he passed away.
Thus, through most of the winter of 1874 no alcoholic drinks were publicly sold as a beverage in the county.
During the two intervening years weekly temperance-league meetings have been kept up by the faithful few, while frequent union mass meetings have been held, thus keeping the subject always before the people. Today the disgraceful and humiliating fact exists that there are more places where liquors are sold than before the crusade.
3. Mass Movements and Revolution
a. The French Revolution[310]
The outward life of men in every age is molded upon an inward life consisting of a framework of traditions, sentiments, and moral influences which direct their conduct and maintain certain fundamental notions which they accept without discussion.
Let the resistance of this social framework weaken, and ideas which could have had no force before will germinate and develop. Certain theories whose success was enormous at the time of the Revolution would have encountered an impregnable wall two centuries earlier.
The aim of these considerations is to recall to the reader the fact that the outward events of revolutions are always a consequence of invisible transformations which have slowly gone forward in men's minds. Any profound study of a revolution necessitates a study of the mental soil upon which the ideas that direct its courses have to germinate.
Generally slow in the extreme, the evolution of ideas is often invisible for a whole generation. Its extent can only be grasped by comparing the mental condition of the same social classes at the two extremities of the curve which the mind has followed.
The actual influence of the philosophers in the genesis of the Revolution was not that which was attributed to them. They revealed nothing new, but they developed the critical spirit which no dogma can resist, once the way is prepared for its downfall.