" And meanwhile the Good Templars and Sons
of Temperance swarmed in the land like a plague of celestial locusts.
There was not a hamlet without its uniformed phalanx, its affecting
exhibit of reformed drunkards. The Kentucky Legislature succumbed to a
travelling recruiting officer, and two-thirds of the members signed the
pledge. The National House of Representatives took recess after recess
to hear eminent excoriators of the Rum Demon, and more than a dozen of
its members forsook their duties to carry the new gospel to the bucolic
heathen--the vanguard, one may note in passing, of the innumerable
Chautauquan caravan of later years.
Beneath all this bubbling on the surface, of course, ran the deep and
swift undercurrent of anti-slavery feeling--a tide of passion which
historians now attempt to account for on economic grounds, but which
showed no trace of economic origin while it lasted. Its true quality was
moral, devout, ecstatic; it culminated, to change the figure, in a
supreme discharge of moral electricity, almost fatal to the nation.
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