The teetotalers confess their failure. After forty-five years of zealous and well-meant effort in the "cause," they agree that people are drinking more than ever. Dr. R. T. Trall of New York, the most thoroughgoing teetotaler extant, exclaims: "Where are we to-day? Defeated on all sides. The enemy victorious and rampant everywhere. More intoxicating liquors manufactured and drunk than ever before. Why is this?" Why, indeed! When the teetotalers can answer that question correctly, they will be in a fair way to gain upon the "enemy" that is now so "rampant." They are not the first people who have mistaken a symptom of disease for the disease itself, and striven to cure a cancer by applying salve and plaster and cooling washes to the sore. They are not the first travellers through this Wilderness who have tried to extinguish a smouldering fire, and discovered, at last, that they had been pouring water into the crater of a volcano. Dr. Trall thinks we should all become teetotalers very soon, if only the doctors would stop prescribing wine, beer, and whiskey to their patients. But the doctors will not. They like a glass of wine themselves. Dr. Trall tells us that, during the Medical Convention held at St. Louis a few years ago, the doctors dined together, and upon the table were "forty kinds of alcoholic liquors." The most enormous feed ever accomplished under a roof in America, I suppose, was the great dinner of the doctors, given in New York, fifteen years ago, at the Metropolitan Hall. I had the pleasure on that occasion of seeing half an acre of doctors all eating and drinking at once, and I can testify that very few of them--indeed, none that I could discover--neglected the bottle. It was an occasion which united all the established barbarisms of a public dinner,--absence of ladies, indigestible food in most indigestible quantities, profuse and miscellaneous drinking, clouds of smoke, late sitting, and wild speaking. Why not? Do not these men live and thrive upon such practices? Why should they not set an example of the follies which enrich them? It is only heroes who offend, deny, and rebuke the people upon whose favor their fortune depends; and there are never many heroes in the world at one time. No, no, Dr. Trall! the doctors are good fellows; but their affair is to cure disease, not to preserve health.