Before me passes a tremendous procession of the lost: I can stop its march when I choose and fix on any given individual in the ranks, so that you can hardly name a single fact concerning drink, which does not recall to me a fellow-creature who has passed into the place of wrecked lives and slain souls. The more I think about it the more plainly I see that, if we are to make any useful fight against drink, we must drop the preachee-preachee; we must drop loud execrations of the people whose existence the State fosters; we must get hold of men who _know_ what drinking means, and let them come heart to heart with the victims who are blindly tramping on to ruin for want of a guide and friend. My hideous procession of the damned is always there to importune me; I gathered the dolorous recruits who form the procession when I was dwelling in strange, darkened ways, and I know that only the magnetism of the human soul could ever have saved one of them. If anybody fancies that Gothenburg systems, or lectures, or little tiresome tracts, or sloppy yarns about "Joe Tomkins's Temperance Turkey," or effusive harangues by half-educated buffoons, will ever do any good, he must run along the ranks of my procession with me, and I reckon he may learn something. The comic personages who deal with the subject are cruelly useless; the very notion of making jokes in presence of such a mighty living Terror seems desolating to the mind; I could not joke over the pest of drink, for I had as lief dance a hornpipe to the blare of the last Trumpet.