1. INSTRUCTION.—In the struggle against the powers of darkness light often proves a more effective weapon than might or right. Even the limited light of human reason might help us to avoid mistakes that have undoubtedly retarded the triumph of our cause. We must enlighten, as well as admonish our children, if we would save them from the snares of the tempter; among the victims of intemperance, even among those who can speak from experience and can not deny that their poison has proved the curse of their lives, only a small portion is at all able to comprehend the necessary connection of cause and result. They ascribe their ruin to the spite of fortune, to the machinations of an uncharitable world, to abnormally untoward circumstances, rather than to the normal effects of the insidious poison. Intoxication they admit to be an evil, but defend the moderate use of a liquor as infallibly injurious in the smallest as in the largest dose; they underrate the progressive tendency of their vice and overrate their power of resistance; they cling to the tradition that alcohol, discreetly enjoyed, may prove a blessing instead of a curse. We must banish that fatal delusion. We must reveal the true significance of the poison habit before we can hope to suppress it as a life blighting vice. Our text-books should be found in every college and every village school from Florida to Oregon. Every normal school should graduate teachers of temperance. The law of the State of New York providing for the introduction of primers on the effects of alcoholic beverages was attacked by one of our leading scientific periodicals, with more learning than insight, on the ground that the physiological action of alcohol is as yet obscure even to our ablest pathologists, and therefore not a fit subject for a common school text-book. The same objection might be urged against every other branch of physiology and the natural history of the organic creation. “Every vital process is a miracle,” says Lorenz Oken,[3] “that is, in all essential respects an unexplained phenomenon.” A last question will always remain unanswered wherever the marvelous process of life is concerned, but our ignorance, as well as our knowledge, of that phenomenon has its limits, and in regard to the effects of alcoholic beverages it is precisely the most knowable and most fully demonstrated part of the truth which it behooves every child to know, but of which at present nine tenths of the adults, even in the most civilized countries, remain as ignorant as the natives of Kamtschatka who worship a divinity in the form of a poisonous toadstool. A boy may be brought to comprehend the folly of gambling even before he has mastered the abstruse methods of combination and permutation employed in the calculus of probable loss and gain. We need not study Bentham[4] to demonstrate that honesty is an essential basis of commerce and social intercourse. By the standard of usefulness, too,