Rev. E. E. Hale Speaks on Total Abstinence.

A very interested audience listened to a lecture by Dr. Edward Everett Hale on total abstinence in Sever 11 last evening. Dr. Hale said in substance:

I will give you more than your money's worth, for I am going to deliver two addresses instead of one, first speaking on total abstinence as it affects college men, and then on the political reforms necessary in our treatment of the liquor question. We ministers are fanatics on the subject of total abstinence because we see life in many forms, and are forced by our experience into this position. I never took a pledge but once. I had been urging a poor drunken fellow not to drink again for a year, showing him the misery which his habits brought to his wife and children. He answered, "It is all very well for you to talk. Mr. Hale, who can take your glass of wine whenever you like. It is easy for you to tell a poor devil like me that I must not drink a glass of rum when I feel the need of it." I then told him that I would not touch wine again for a year if he would not, and the bargain was struck. The fact is that we find we can't afford to belong to an aristocracy who drink. If we would lessen the misery about us we must set the example. We might have no reason for not taking a glass now and then if there were not examples innumerable to show us the danger of it. The more brilliant the man, the more apt he is to be ruined by the idea that he can take care of himself, that he will mind his own business if others will mind theirs. The whole system of Christian ethics depends on the idea that the body should be kept pure, as God made it. The men who succeed in life are those who live according to this rule. The worst of it is that the affectionate, poetical, generous men of genius are apt to be those who cannot resist temptation.

At this point Dr. Hale changed his position, from one side of the platform to the other, declared that he had become a different man, and was about to lecture on a different subject.

The people of the United States, he said, were in very great danger from the class of professional politicians and saloon keepers, which they had allowed to grow up. Boston has had to be put into the hands of the State police, because no mayor could remain in office there and appoint police unless he was subservient to the liquor dealers. All saloon keepers have to give bonds that they will not break the stringent laws enacted against the liquor traffic. Two years ago more than half of these bonds in Boston were held by sixteen men. The shops direct the politics of those who frequent them, and these sixteen men in turn direct the politics of the shops. They thus control the local politics of Boston, and constitute an oligarchy far more dangerous to this common wealth than any man like Caesar or Napoleon ever will be. The open bar is the chief instrument of this ring in the government of Boston. If a supply of the fatal alcoholic poison must be kept somewhere, as many people assure us, let if be in miserable out-of-the-way houses on the side streets, not in attractive palaces, on the highway. Then I can feel that when I send my boy on an errand he will not be tempted to stop at every corner to see what the brilliant lights and crowds of a saloon mean. On the question of suppressing the open bar all parties should unite.

Dr. Hale closed his lecture by recommending the Total Abstinence League to invite Professor James to deliver a lecture before them on the physiological effects of drinking. He said that such a lecture, if published, would constitute the best tract on temperance written for many years.