AN APPEAL FOR PROHIBITION.
HERE is a part of a most eloquent appeal for prohibition made by John G. Woolley, at Danville, Va., November 19:— "Two hundred and forty thousand saloons yawn along your way. They are no temptation to you. You despise them, and pass them. But the man behind you, as brave as you are, and 10,000 times more anxious to do right, hates the saloon, but goes in and drinks his mind to a chaos and his heart to a clot, because he has to. You did not have to; is that your own good management? In such a fight as his, what would have become of you? By the mercy of God that has spared you that, I beg of you to lend a hand for the other man. I telegraphed to my home in Boston, after a long absence on the west coast, 'I will arrive at home to-night at 11.' The train was late; long after midnight I came under her window. The light was burning, and I knew that she was waiting for me. I let myself in; there were two flights of stairs, but twenty would have been nothing to me, my heart was hauling away, like a great balloon. She stood in the middle of our room as pale and cold and motionless as a woman of snow, and I knew at a glance that the sweet, brave life was in torture. 'What is it?' I cried, 'what is the matter?' and in my arms she sobbed out the everlasting tragedy of her wedded life: 'Nothing—at any rate, nothing ought to be the matter; I do believe in you; I knew you would come home; but I have listened for you for so many years, that I seem to be just one great ear when you are away beyond your time; I seem to have lost all sense but that of hearing when you are absent, unexplained, and every sound on the street startles me, and every step on the stairs is a threat and a pain, and the stillness chokes me, and the darkness smothers me. And all the old, unhappy home-comings troop through my mind, without omitting one detail, and to-night I heard the children sighing in their sleep, and I thought I should die when I thought of you having to walk in your weariness, and in this midnight, through Kneeland Street alone.' She thinks that I will never fall, and would deny to-day that she knows any fear, but yet, until the undertaker screws her sweet face out of my sight forever, that ghastly, unformed, nameless10thing will walk the chambers of her heart whenever I am unaccounted for. By the mercy of God, that has given to you the unshaken and unshakable confidence of her you love, 'I beseech you,' make a fight for the women who wait to-night until the saloon spews out their husbands and their sons and sends them maudlin, brutish, devilish, vomiting, stinking, to their arms. And you, happy wives, whose hearts have never wavered nor had occasion to waver, and who, when your husbands fail to come on time, can go to bed without a fear and go to sleep with smiles upon your lips, and sleep the long night through too peacefully even to dream, by the mercy of God, that gives you that, I beseech you, band yourselves to help, at least to cheer, the wives who, their whole lives through, must walk the rotten lava-crust of burnt-out confidence—their very love a terror and a pain. I shall never drink again, but one night in a New England train, and very ill, I met a stranger who pitied me and gave me a quick, powerful drug out of a small vial, and my pain was gone in a minute or two, but alcohol was licking up my very blood with tongues of flame. I should have gotten drunk that night if I could. I thought of everything—of my two years of clean life; of the meeting I was going to, vouched for by my friend and brother, D. L. Moody, whose faith in me—withdrawn now, I fear—had gone out into all the world; of the bright little home in New York; of Mary and the boys; I tried to pray, and my lips framed oaths. I reached up for God, and he was gone, and the fiercest fiend of hell had me by the throat and shouted, 'Drink, drink, drink!' I said, 'But Mary—but my boys;' it said, 'To hell with Mary—come on to the saloon!' It was not yet daylight, Sunday morning, when I stood on the platform at Pawtucket, alone. I flew from saloon to saloon; they were shut, so were the drug stores; and all that day, locked in my room at the hotel, I fought my fight and won it in the evening, by the grace of God; and the people never knew that the man who spoke to them that night had been in hell all day. What would you take, in cash, to have that put into your life? By the mercy of God that has spared you that kind of peril and that kind of hate, 'I beseech you,' cast a vote next time in honor of the 'Son of man,' who died for drunkards, and to make the stations on life's highways safe for storm-tossed men to stop at, any day or any night."