The Call of an Epoch (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from The Call of an Epoch This Preface is, of course, a postscript. It is also quite superfluous, since the motif of these and all of my many public speeches is aggressively obvious and monotonously recurrent. It is prefixed here with the same idea - whatever it is - that musical composers have, who finish with a rush at the same chord they began with, but louder. My old friend of other years, Thomas Fitch, a great man, who would have got a high place in our history if he had not known so much, once made a petulant but friendly comment on my mental equipment. He had brought an ominous looking lawsuit against a rich client of mine and appeared at the trial with a wonderful brief. I had none, but beat him promptly and conclusively. As we walked away together from the Court House, he said: "It is of no use to be a good lawyer. I knew all the learning of that case, from Moses to the morning paper, and you didn't know anything except where to kick me." At my first survey of the case against the liquor traffic I saw precisely where to kick it. The Church was the logical plaintiff and it was an ollapodrida of temperamental temperance societies I that made merely a number of slight ripples in the main stream! of liquor power, without checking or disturbing it. Like the old* woman that lived in a shoe, she had so many children she didn't know what to do, while the liquor traffic was a compact, fighting political profiteer, with a single political issue, a perfectly definit program and no party, no pity, no patriotism and no conscience The temperance societies and evangelists were doing a noble work and, in a small way, successfully. But the scale of operation was the same as that of the benevolent Samaritan who, on his way somewhere else, gave first aid to one of many victims of a band of thieves who themselves would not have resented the charity. And while they towed one derelict to the inn of abstinence, the licensed saloon beat up and robbed a dozen more. It was like throwing a scrap of suet to a sparrow while the world was buried in snow. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.