When you see a poor drunkard reeling about the streets, when you recognise the crimes and misery produced by intemperance, you do not say that drunkenness is necessary to men, and that it is our duty to provide clean and attractive gin-shops and any amount of unadulterated alcohol to meet the craving appetites of old and young. On the contrary, you form a mighty crusade against intemperance. And how do you go to work? You recognise the absolute necessity which exists in human nature for amusement, social stimulus, refreshment, change, and cheerful hilarity; and so you provide bright entertainments, bands of hope and excursions for the young, attractive coffee palaces and clubs for the adults. In your entertainments you substitute wholesome drinks for ‘fire-water’; you repress the sale of alcohol by legislative enactments, you arrest drunken men and women, and you establish inebriate asylums for their voluntary cure. You recognise that drunkenness is a monstrous perversion of legitimate human necessities, and you set to work to reform public opinion and social customs. Whilst on the one hand you legislate, on the other hand you educate. You perceive that the distinctive feature of humanity is its power of intellectually guiding life, and you train boys and girls in the exercise of this specially human faculty, moral self-control. Now, my friends, lust, unchecked, untransfigured by affection, is like fiery alcoholic poison to the human constitution. It constantly grows by indulgence; the more it is yielded to, the fiercer it becomes; an instinct which at first was governable, and susceptible of elevation and enlightened direction and control, becomes through constant indulgence a vicious domination, ungovernable and unrestrainable. When unsubdued it injures the health, produces disease, and grows into an irresistible tyrannical possession, which converts human beings into selfish, cruel, and inhuman devils. This is what the great universal force of sexual passion becomes when we resolutely ignore it in childhood and youth, refuse to guide it, but subject it to accumulated vicious influences in manhood; and when even our churches and religious organizations are afraid or ashamed to deal with this most powerful force of our God-created human nature, we suffer lust to grow into a rampant evil, a real drunkenness, and then we have the audacity to say in this nineteenth century, ‘This is the nature of men; they have not the human power of intelligent self-control; women must recognise this fact, and unbridled lust must be accepted and provided for.’