393. Scathing Impeachment of Intemperance
Intemperance cuts down youth in its vigor, manhood in its strength, and age in its weakness. It breaks the father's heart, bereaves the doting mother, extinguishes natural affections, erases conjugal loves, blots out filial attachments, blights parental hope, and brings down mourning age in sorrow to the grave. It produces weakness, not strength; sickness, not health; death, not life. It makes wives widows; children orphans; fathers fiends, and all of them paupers and beggars. It feeds rheumatism, nurses gout, welcomes epidemics, invites cholera, imports pestilence and embraces consumption. It covers the land with idleness, misery and crime. It fills your jails, supplies your almshouses and demands your asylums. It engenders controversies, fosters quarrels, and cherishes riots. It crowds your penitentiaries and furnishes victims to your scaffolds. It is the life blood of the gambler, the element of the burglar, the prop of the highwayman and the support of the midnight incendiary. It countenances the liar, respects the thief, esteems the blasphemer. It violates obligations, reverences fraud, and honors infamy. It defames benevolence, hates love, scorns virtue and slanders innocence. It incites the father to butcher his helpless offspring, helps the husband to massacre his wife, and the child to grind the parricidal ax. It burns up men, consumes women, detests life, curses God, and despises heaven. It suborns witnesses, nurses perjury, defiles the jury box, and stains the judicial ermine. It degrades the citizen, debases the legislator, dishonors statesmen, and disarms the patriot. It brings shame, not honor; terror, not safety; despair, not hope; misery, not happiness; and with the malevolence of a fiend, it calmly surveys its frightful desolation, and unsatisfied with its havoc, it poisons felicity, kills peace, ruins morals, blights confidence, slays reputation, and wipes out national honors, then curses the world and laughs at its ruin.
394. Liberty Defined
The French convention gave the best definition of liberty I have ever read: "The liberty of one citizen ceases only where the liberty of another citizen commences." I know of no better definition. I ask you to-day to make a declaration of individual independence. And if you are independent, be just. Allow everybody else to make his declaration of individual independence. Allow your wife, allow your husband, allow your children to make theirs. It is a grand thing to be the owner of yourself. It is a grand thing to protect the rights of others. It is a sublime thing to be free and just.
395. Free, Honest Thought
I am going to say what little I can to make the American people brave enough and generous enough and kind enough to give everybody else the rights they have themselves. Can there ever be any progress in this world to amount to anything until we have liberty? The thoughts of a man who is not free are not worth much—not much. A man who thinks with the club of a creed above his head—a man who thinks casting his eye askance at the flames of hell, is not apt to have very good thoughts. And for my part, I would not care to have any status or social position even in heaven if I had to admit that I never would have been there only I got scared. When we are frightened we do not think very well. If you want to get at the honest thoughts of a man he must free. If he is not free you will not get his honest thought.