TOTAL ABSTINENCE LEAGUE.

Sever 11 was fairly well filled last evening on the occasion of the first public meeting of the Harvard Total Abstinence League to listen to addresses by Rev. E. E. Hale and Ex-Gov. Long. The speakers were introduced by President Cummings who gave a brief statement of the purpose and prospects of the society.

In beginning his remarks, Mr. Hale stated that he was present as a sort of propitiation for his neglect of the total abstinence question while himself in college. He should not discuss the physiological aspect of the question, but would advise the society, if possible, to publish Prof. James' lecture which was the ablest discussion of this phase of the subject he had ever seen.

The question of total abstinence was first brought to his attention when 19 years of age, while tramping through the Maine woods. The lumbermen refused to allow any of their number to take any liquor of any kind with them into the woods. It was a measure of self preservation. In the log drives the most perfect control of every faculty was necessary, and the lumbermen would not permit themselves to be at the mercy of any one man who might wish to indulge himself. He was obliged to sacrifice his own pleasure to the safety of the majority. All employers believe in shutting off their workmen from drinking. They know it is a bad thing for them. The same principle runs through the army and navy; it prevails in all railroads and other great corporations. The students of Harvard expect to be the lenders in such organizations. They will expect those under them to be temperate. Is it fair, is it manly, for them to indulge themselves while depriving others of the privilege? He first became a total abstainer through a poor hard-drinking Irishman whom he tried to reform. He could not play fair with him unless he agreed to shut off drinking himself.

Literary work demands the strictest abstinence, especially in the case of those engaged in journalistic work. Cold water is the only thing for a literary man to use. The most brilliant man he knew during his college course had become a drunkard, and was drowned in New York harbor.

Gov. Long stated that he also spoke as an atonement for the past. Nobody questions the extent of the evils of intemperance fostering nine-tenths of all crime, with its immense cost, equal to the amount of the manufacturing wages of the United States. Harvard men are always full of suggestions on the reform of the conduct of government, but on the question of temperance they are decidedly shrinking, and yet the question of temperance is by far the most important economical question of the day, throwing completely into the shade the reform of the tariff or of the civil service. Intemperance is the greatest evil in existence as regards society and the state. It is the chief obstacle to the extermination of ignorance and pauperism. The question of temperance is no namby-pamby affair, no goody goody subject. It is a great question of political economy, of history, of ethics, of decency, of the purity of politics, of the preservation of the state, and of the preservation of the character of mankind.