CONSCIENCE AND REFORM.

Evening Post, Volume LVII, Issue 23, 28 January 1899, Page 4 (Supplement)

CONSCIENCE AND REFORM.

The real battle of reform is fought always on the field of the mind' 'and the soul of the individual. The contestants are conscience on the one side and somemore or less refined form of self-indulgence on the other. The self-indulgence may be anything from actual pandering to a vicious appetite to dislike to do a conspicuous and unusual thing. The first stage of reform is the awakening of conscience, which always follows the perception of wrong conditions. Conscience thus awakened imperatively demands that something be done. What? The attempt to answer that question is the second stage. Selfindulgence enlists ingenuity on its side, and there follows a series of attempts to stifle or satisfy conscience by palliatives or compromises, attempts to perform the impossible feat of serving God and Mammon. But the history of the world has yet to show the first instance of the success of such attempts. The human conscience thus aroused by a vision of wrong will never be quiet again till that wrong be abolished, utterly and finally. The temperance question is to-day in the second of these stages. The moral iniquity and the economic idiocy of allowing things to go on as they have become evident, and conscience in demanding a change. Interest and self-indulgence are misleading many good and honest people by the suggestion of plausible compromises which shall enable the drinker to drink, and the seller to sell, and shall yet, somehow or other, prevent any barm from resulting. The air is full of plans ; license high and low, the Gothenburg system and its American cousin, nationalisation, and the rest, all of them attempts to legislate in such wise that two and two shall make three. A great many people whose entire honesty and good faith we should be the very last to question, are being misled by these ingenious attempts to satisfy

conscience by specious argument and empty promise. The ultimate collapse of all these schemes cannot be for an instant doubted. This question is a moral and economic question of the first rank. It is open. It con never be closed till it is closed right and closed for ever. — National Advocate.