Increase of Intemperance.
Among the evils that are rising and rushing in like a deluge upon us, darkening all the land, and portending earth's fast approaching doom, intemperance, with its streams of liquid death, bears a conspicuous part. Speaking of the order of the Sons of Temperance, T. L. Cuyler, in the N. Y. Independent, says: “In 1850 this order numbered 245,000 members; this year it can count but 55,000! Making all due allowance for the loss by secession of the Southern members, the falling off is painful and portentous. In fact it marks most unerringly the degree of the decline of the temperance cause in the public appreciation and support. With the decline of membership in this famous and useful fraternity, there has been a corresponding decline of other total-abstinent organizations and a discontinuance of their journals. Dr. Marsh's admirable Journal of the American Temperance Union, and a few other similar papers, still hold on their fearless way, though shorn of much of their patronage. Prohibitory laws against the rum-traffic have been expunded from the statute-books of several States; while on some others they remain as effete as the edicts of the Medes and Persians. In Great Britain the temperance cause is better organized and more widely successful than ever before; but in its birthplace, America, it is suffering a wide-spread, shameful, and ruinous neglect. Its great leaders are passing away. The hand that wrote the “Six Sermons against Intemperance” is in the dust, and has left no successor like to it; Frelinghuysen, Gov. Briggs, McLean, Admiral Foote, have gone to their graves; the noble author of the prohibitory law is a captive in the hands of the rebels; and the unrivaled eloquence of Gough is less frequently employed for the temperance reform than in days gone by. Sermons on the perils of the bottle are becoming rarer from the pulpit (with a few faithful exceptions;) and all this time the traffic in the vilest of adulterated liquors, the drinking-usages of society, and loathsome intemperance, are rushing back upon us with appalling volume and violence. This is the actual state of affairs. We have preferred to look at the reality in its terrible face.”