It was the force of this possibility that he would die a drunkard which worried Barnum most. He returned home from the lecture terribly impressed and went to bed, but not to sleep. He was awfully conscious of having throughout his life pursued a course of wrongdoing, pernicious in its effect not only on himself but also on the community. “I arose from my bed,” he wrote afterwards, “and feeling that as a man I could not persist in a practice which I could not conscientiously and logically defend, I took my champagne bottles, knocked off their heads, and poured their contents upon the ground. I then called upon Mr. Chapin, asked him for the teetotal pledge, and signed it.” After he returned from his wine cellar, having knocked the heads off his champagne bottles, Barnum informed his wife of what he had done. The tears streamed down Charity’s face. Many weary nights of weeping had she spent, she said, in fear for his strength of character and powers of resistance to the temptation constantly offered to the moderate drinker to become an habitual drunkard. Barnum reproached her for not telling him of her fears, but she replied that she also feared her warnings would be received in anger. Barnum’s was a frank admission of the personal lack of self-control which drinking men have often charged against prohibitionists, and he was human enough to confess the personal element in his attempted conversion of mankind. For he did not rest with himself. “I now felt I had a great duty to perform,” he wrote. “I had been groping in darkness, was rescued, and I knew it was my duty to try and save others. The morning I signed the pledge I obtained over twenty signatures in Bridgeport.” He talked temperance wherever he went, and toured New England with a lecture on the subject. Soon what had at first appealed to him as a personal concern became a national issue, a cause, and his most significant admission of this process of thought was his statement: “We had become convinced that it was a matter of life and death; that we must _kill_ Alcohol, or Alcohol would kill _us_; or our friends.”