But,
notwithstanding every drawback, his action was most important, and
deserves grateful memory. We may see in it the inception of that
great movement whose indirect influence in reforming social habits
and restraining excess had at least equalled its direct power for
good on its pledged adherents. Though it is still unhappily true that
drunkenness slays its tens of thousands among us, and largely helps
to people our workhouses, our madhouses, and our gaols, yet the fiend
walks not now, as it used to do, in unfettered freedom. It is no
longer a fashionable vice, excused and half approved as the natural
expression of joviality and good-fellowship; peers and commoners of
every degree no longer join daily in the "heavy-headed revel" whose
deep-dyed stain seems to have soaked through every page of our
last-century annals. And it would appear as though the vice were not
only held from increasing, but were actually on the decrease. The
statistics of the last decade show that the consumption of alcohol is
diminishing, and that of true food-stuffs proportionally rising.
[Illustration: Father Mathew]
There were other enterprises now set on foot, by no means directly
philanthropic in their aim, which contemplated utility more than
virtue or justice--enterprises whose vast effects are yet
unexhausted, and which have so modified the conditions of human
existence as to make the new reign virtually a new epoch.
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