with tabular forms, and tell me that each adult in Britain drank so many
pints last year, you might just as well recite a mathematical proof. I
fix on some one human figure that your words may suggest and the image
of the bright lad whom I saw become a dirty, loafing, thievish sot is
more instructive and more woeful than all your columns of numerals.

Before me passes a tremendous procession of the lost: I can stop its
march when I choose and fix on any given individual in the ranks, so
that you can hardly name a single fact concerning drink, which does not
recall to me a fellow-creature who has passed into the place of wrecked
lives and slain souls. The more I think about it the more plainly I see
that, if we are to make any useful fight against drink, we must drop the
preachee-preachee; we must drop loud execrations of the people whose
existence the State fosters; we must get hold of men who _know_ what
drinking means, and let them come heart to heart with the victims who
are blindly tramping on to ruin for want of a guide and friend. My
hideous procession of the damned is always there to importune me; I
gathered the dolorous recruits who form the procession when I was
dwelling in strange, darkened ways, and I know that only the magnetism
of the human soul could ever have saved one of them. If anybody fancies
that Gothenburg systems, or lectures, or little tiresome tracts, or
sloppy yarns about "Joe Tomkins's Temperance Turkey," or effusive
harangues by half-educated buffoons, will ever do any good, he must run
along the ranks of my procession with me, and I reckon he may learn
something. The comic personages who deal with the subject are cruelly
useless; the very notion of making jokes in presence of such a mighty
living Terror seems desolating to the mind; I could not joke over the
pest of drink, for I had as lief dance a hornpipe to the blare of the
last Trumpet.