drinkers from the public view they dread. Is not this skulking evidence of weakening?

Sixty years ago the legislature passed a few formal laws perfunctorily, and dismissed the whole subject. But ten years ago Liquor gathered at the state-house all the experts of social science, the lights of the medical profession, all the famous science from Harvard College, and retained an ex-governor, at vast expense, to marshal this host, in order to resist Dr. Miner and a few Bible-twisters, whom Liquor seemed somehow to dread, although they had disgusted and repelled all the sensible men in the State.

Of course this was before Dr. Crosby had communicated to the liquor dealers the comforting fact that the Temperance movement was a failure, and that they ought to be delighted with it and with Dr. Miner and his Bible-twisters, and that they were delighted with it, whether they themselves knew it or not!

And far above all, set on a hill, a great State, Maine, challenges the world to show her equal in an intelligent, law-abiding, economical, and self-restraining population; while smaller examples cluster round her, here and across the Atlantic; and the haughty Episcopal Church, hardest and last to be roused to any reform, has put on record in its Convocations the most convincing and the most instructive array of facts and evidence on total abstinence that any ecclesiastical body ever contributed to social science. It is the ocean-wave kissing the Alps. You would weary if I continued the summary.

Even if the statistics showed that the amount of liquor consumed increased as fast as our population and wealth do, which they do not show, but just the contrary, that would not be sufficient evidence to prove that our movement has failed. The proper comparison is between what we were in 1820, and what we should

have been now had not some beneficent agency arrested our downward progress. These evils left to themselves increase by no simple addition, but in cubic ratio.

Does Dr. Crosby fancy this active movement and vast mass of fact, opinion, and testimony can exist without beneficial influence in an age ruled by brains? He does not, then, understand moral forces or his own times. When, twenty-five years ago, Frederick Douglas was painting the Antislavery movement as a failure unless we would load our guns, Sojourner Truth asked: "Frederick, is God dead?" When I see the Doctor's unbelief in the efficacy of the moral power and the weight of this mass of conviction, I am tempted to ask him: "Is your God dead?"

Dr. Crosby closes by stating his plan and panacea. It is a regulated license. I will not delay you by criticising his or any other license plan. The statute-books in forty States are filled with the abortions of thousands of license laws that were never executed, and most of them were never intended to be. We have as good a license law in this State as was ever devised, and yet it leaves such an amount of gross, defiant, unblushing grog-selling as discourages Dr. Crosby and leads him to think nothing at all has been done. His own city, with license laws, is yet so ruled and plundered by rum that timid statesmen advise giving up republicanism and borrowing a leaf from Bismarck to help us.

License has been tried on the most favorable circumstances and with the best backing for centuries, ten or twelve, at least; yet Dr. Crosby stands confounded. before the result. We have never been allowed to try prohibition, except in one State and in some small circuits. Wherever it has been tried it has succeeded. Friends who know claim this. Enemies, who have been for a dozen years ruining their teeth by biting files,

confess it by their lack of argument and lack of facts, except when they invent them. With such a record may we not say that, even if we have no claim to be considered Crosby Christians, we have a right to ask one fair trial of what has, at least, never been, like license, demonstrated a hundred times to be a failure?

LETTER FROM NAPLES.

Naples, April 12, 1841. EAR GARRISON, I have borne very constantly in mind my promise, in London, to write you, but have found nothing in my way which I thought would be of interest; and these late lines come not as a letter, but only as an excuse. For I know nothing now of interest, except, perhaps, the loss of my "Liberators," which the custom-house of his Holiness-under the general rule, I believe, forbidding all which has not passed the censorship took from me as I went up to Rome, and which now lie at Civita Vecchia, waiting for me if I ever return that way.

"T is a melancholy tour, this through Europe; and I do not understand how any one can return from it without being, in Coleridge's phrase, "a sadder and a wiser man." Every reflecting mind at home must be struck with the many social evils which prevail around; but the most careless eye cannot avoid seeing the painful contrasts which sadden one here at every step, — wealth beyond that of fairy tales, and poverty all bare and starved at its side; refinement face to face with barbarism; cultivation which hardly finds room to be, crowded out on all sides by so much debasement. I have been surprised to find so much faith in Catholicism as seems to exist among the Italians, even those who make what is called the higher classes. Men and women

of every rank, and with every appearance of sincerity, really crowd the churches. Amid the regret with which a Protestant witnesses such a fact, there is much to admire in the democratic method of Catholic worship. No "sit-thou-here" and "stand-thou-there" spirit class out the audience; no hateful honeycomb of pews deforms the church. The beggar in rags, the peasant in his soiled and labor-stained homespun, kneel on the broad marble side by side with fashion and rank, right under the hundred lamps which burn constantly at the high altar of St. Peter's; and this all unnoticed, and seemingly unconscious of any difference between themselves and their fellow-worshippers. This is as it should be. Here, at least, Rome preserves the spirit of the early ages. "T was well said,

"I love the ever open door

That welcomes to the house of God;

I love the wide-spread marble floor,
By every foot in freedom trod."

One pardons much for such a trait, and I have lost half my dislike to the wearisomely frequent priestly dress, since I have seen it worn by a colored man who mingled freely with those about him, and was not stared at as a monster when he entered the frowning portal of the Propaganda College at Rome.

Italy, however, is truly the land where "every prospect pleases, and only man is vile." Here one seems really to stand on the matchless shores of that sea where have passed some of the most interesting events in the history of our race. All Europe is, indeed, the treasure-house of rich memories, with every city a shrine. Mayence, the mother of printing and free trade; Amalfi, with her Pandects, the fountain of law, her compass of commerce, her Masaniello of popular freedom; Naples,