The truth is clear to Rev. Octavius B. Frothingham. He declares that neither crime nor vice can be prevented, remedied, or expelled by force of law. “Nature will have her way, if not by one channel, then by another. She will plunge underground, and come up in unexpected spots. Cunning comes to her assistance. She makes alliance with subterfuge and deceit. She is sly, swift, ubiquitous. Disappearing in New York, she turns up in Philadelphia. Expelled from the cities, she takes refuge in the towns; banished from the towns, she finds coverts in the cities; hiding in the dens and slums, creeping into the lanes, mingling with the crowd of harmless things, sheltering herself behind law. She is a Proteus, able to take on every possible shape of innocence. Refuse her brandy, she will take opium, morphine, ether, tobacco, strong coffee, in quantities equivalent to the stimulant desired. You fancy the community becoming temperate in one respect, and find it becoming intemperate in another. Opium eaters multiply as dram-drinkers decrease. The propensity is alive still, and perhaps provoked to activity by the efforts made to suppress it. The natural appetite being reinforced by anger, spite, the spirit of resistance to persecution, which grows dogged and stubborn, fortifying the sense of injustice by the pride of self-will. “As if impatient at the slowness of the converting process, weary of the task of planting vice out, of choking the weeds of instinct with the flowers of grace, the church undertook, with violent hand, to pull up the weeds by main force. Instead of abolishing the hydra by a beautiful law of evolution, which should create a series of nobler growths; it undertook to cut off the poisonous heads, one by one. It took boys and girls, at the tenderest age, out of the world, confined them in religious houses, refused them the joy of the flesh, and the joy of the eyes, and the pride of life, barred the gates of every terrestrial garden, mortified their desires, kept them occupied with prayers and contemplations, and so tried to starve nature to death.