Excerpt from What a Curse!, Or Johnny Hodges, the Blacksmith: Founded on Fact

Can nothing be done to put an end to the evils sof intemperance? Such, at the present day, is a very common interrogatory; not from those alone, at the heart of whose domestic happiness this canker-worm is already at Work; not from those alone, who have lived in unpardonable ignorance of all, that has been so happily accomplished; but from the most enlightened friends of temperance, who keep the run and the record of its way; Who study this deeply-interesting subject, as they study a science; and who, at the same time, are not so blindly in love with a favorite scheme of consum mation, as to forget that no remedy for moral evil can be effectual, which is calculated to produce a greater mischief in one direction, than it proposes to remove in another.

Can nothing be done, say they, to' remove these evils of intemperance. 7' Have tho'se' eight thousand societies, which are said to exist in the United States, done nothing? Undoubtedly they have ex erted a benign and blessed influence, upon the hearts of many thousands, Who have been persuaded tosubscribe the pledge - still farther, they have ope rated most happily upon many more, who, for some reason or other, have withheld their hands from the pledge, but who have become respectable temper ance men, in word and in deed. And has not something been done - Nothing for me and for mine, says the poor widow. I have but one son; he will not subscribe the pledge; and he will drink ardent spirit; and the rum-seller will sell it; and he says it is lawful, and that therefore it is right. My son is a drunkard. I brought him into life; I nursed him and reared him with care; I have watched over him in sickness; I have pinched and spared, that he 'might be better clothed and better fed than myself; and I am now the heart-broken mother of a thankless child. Societies have un doubtedly been useful to the world but they have done nothing for me. Cannot something be done to save the last hope Of a poor widow?

And has nothing been done, by that multiplying engine, which, for years, has been employed in scattering, over the surface' of the earth, journals and magazines, tracts and tales; and irrigating the moral world, as it were, with refreshing and invigo rating showers It may be so, says the miserable, broken-spirited wife; but I am sure it has done nothing for me. I am a drunkard's wife; such, for years of bitterness, I have lived; such, I doubt not, I shall die. I gave to a faithless promiser a devoted heart, and my humble store of worldly goods; he has broken the one and wasted the other. The press may send forth its legion of messengers; but he will not read one of them all; and, should he find one in my hands, he would hurl it into the fire, as he has done before. My children are beg gars; my spirit is gone; and, as I rock my child in its cradle, by the fading embers of a midnight fire, wating for the return of a drunken tyrant, I say within my wretched heart, in the language Of Job, I' would not live always! Cannot something be done to stay this desolating plague?

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