Precedent vs. Prophecy.

In other words, precedent of such sort, is of no real force in the entirely changed relation here of governors and governed. The financial reason fails before self-imposed taxation; the social question becomes one of waste rather than privilege, and the moral page 5 issues assume a magnitude and grandeur not found elsewhere, from the very potency of public opinion to mould the future for us and our children. There is indeed still more exalted considerations, if it were appropriate to discuss them, which may be thought to depend primarily on the true solution of this question. Richard Cobden long since said: "Every day's experience tends more and more to confirm me in my opinion that the temperance cause lies at the foundation of all social and political reforms," and if, as Emerson hints in one of his remarkable utterances, we are even in this day weaving the garments of a New Time, which shall be, radically, other and different from any that has gone before, in its beliefs, its growths, its sympathies, its disciplines, its rule of life and relation of man to man, does it not behoove us that we lay deep and broad the base of this reform, in the greatest good of the whole, and not suffer it to append as a corrollary of personal abstinence or indulgence.