Assuredly you might, at least you would, have a very promising chance of effecting considerable _good_, and you might have commenced your address with your own remark of the superfluity of any light of information afforded to an habitual dram-drinker respecting the unutterable evil and misery of his thraldom. As wisely give a physiological lecture to convince a man of the pain of burns, while he is lying with his head on the bars of the fire-grate, instead of snatching him off. But in stating this, you might most effectingly and preventively for others describe the misery of that condition in which the impulse waxes as the motive wanes. (Mem. There is a striking passage in my "Friend" on this subject,[218] and a no less striking one in a schoolboy theme of mine[219] now in Gillman's possession, and in my own hand, written when I was fourteen, with the simile of the treacherous current of the Maelstrom.) But this might give occasion for the suggestion of one new charitable institution, under authority of a legislative act, namely, a _Maison de Santé_ (what do the French call it?) for lunacy and idiocy of the _will_, in which, with the full consent of, or at the direct instance of the patient himself, and with the concurrence of his friends, such a person under the certificate of a physician might be placed under medical and moral coercion. I am convinced that London would furnish a hundred volunteers in as many days from the gin-shops, who would swallow their glass of poison in order to get courage to present themselves to the hospital in question. And a similar institution might exist for a higher class of will-maniacs or impotents. Had such a house of health been in existence, I know who would have entered himself as a patient some five and twenty years ago.
Second class. To the persons still capable of self-cure; and lastly, to the young who have only begun, and not yet begun--[add to this] the urgency of connecting the Temperance Society with the Christian churches of all denominations,--the _classes_ known to each other, and deriving strength from _religion_. This is a beautiful part, or might have been made so, of the Wesleyan Church.
These are but raw hints, but unless the mercy of God should remove me from my sufferings earlier than I dare hope or pray for, we will talk the subject over again; as well as the reason _why_ spirits in any form as such are so much more dangerous, morally and in relation to the forming a habit, than beer or wine. Item: if a government were truly fraternal, a healthsome and sound beer would be made universal; aye, and for the lower half of the middle classes wine might be imported, good and generous, from sixpence to eightpence per quart.