After performances of “The Drunkard” it was announced from the stage that all those who wished to sign the teetotal pledge could do so at the box office. Barnum wrote that “almost every hour during the day and evening women could be seen bringing their husbands to the Museum to sign the pledge.” No bar was allowed on the Museum premises, and when Barnum discovered that men were in the habit of going out for a drink between the acts of “The Drunkard” he refused to give return checks. “The Loan of a Lover” was the attraction in the Lecture Room during the afternoon, while “The Drunkard” was performed at night. Horace Greeley’s _Tribune_ was delighted with the success of Barnum’s “Drunkard.” Horace Greeley probably wrote the editorial himself which said: “When Barnum presents his reformatory piece of ‘The Drunkard’ night after night to two or three thousand persons at a time; when we hear his stage manager, as in his speech Monday evening, speak of his ‘present proud position’ as Director of Amusements, tending, not to debase, but to elevate the moral tone of the community; when we see three Theaters in this vicinity, and Theaters in other places, dropping their customary performances, and hastily getting up this same drama of ‘The Drunkard’ and boasting of its wholesome effects, we may think what we please of the inconsistency of these copyists, and admire, if we choose, the course of the original, but we _must_ feel gratified at the evidences which all present of the emancipation of the public mind from the shackles of prejudice and its restoration to a sound and promising condition of moral healthfulness on the subject of Temperance.” And the _Tribune_ continued: “When the Theater,--which for years has attracted by its artful disguise of vice the youthful mind, has excited by its _double entendres_ and indelicate allusions, the youthful mind, then tempted by its showy bar-rooms to a grosser abandonment, and completed by its third tier its course of iniquitous fascinations,--when the Theater really commences to hold the mirror up to nature, and paint the blackness of that very vice a taste for which it has ever done so much to cultivate, we may hope for reform indeed.” It is doubtful whether there is reason in such acclaim of the substitution of slush for smut. It is still a question, awaiting scientific research, whether in both the long and the short run, tawdry, false, and stultifying intellectual sentiments passed out over the stage are more harmful to the formation of the mind of the race than obscenities which assuredly seem to wear off sooner.