Herald And Tribune

The temperance cause, in common with every other work of God and humanity, has lost a noble and helpful friend in Whittier. While the poet was not able on account of his advancing age and for other reasons, to throw himself into the struggle against the liquor traffic as he did against slavery, yet he never missed a favorable opportunity to attest his hearty sympathy in temperance work and his earnest wishes for its ultimate success. Many were the sweet, tender and cheering messages which went out from the quiet home at Amesbury to those in the heat of the battle with the cohorts of the rum traffic. One of his latest utterances was a characteristically tender message of condolence to Miss Willard on the death of her mother. While the temperance cause can not claim Whittier as its own exclusively, for his work was as broad as humanity, yet every worker in that cause may find a constant inspiration to service in his hymns and songs, many of which in their ringing protest against legalized wrong and oppression seem quite as applicable to the assault upon the licensed liquor traffic as upon the system of human slavery. Surely it needs little or no transposition to make many such lines as may be found in "Voices of Freedom," applicable to the present conflict. Have we not a message in the words as well as those to whom they were written forty years ago:-

"Our fathers to their graves have gone;
Their strife is past-their triumph won;
But sterner trials wait the race
Which rises in their honored place—
A moral warfare with the crime
A folly of an evil time.

"So let it be. In God's own might
We gird us for the coming fight,
And strong in Him whose cause is ours,
In conflict with unholy powers,
We grasp the weapons He has given—
The Light and Truth and Love of Heaven."