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by Horace Mann (Author)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1852. Excerpt: ... an extemporaneous memory. Those conversant with courts well know that large amounts of property have often been lost, and enduring stigmas have been fixed upon pure characters, by testimony wholly alcoholic in its origin. Often, too, has the assertion of valuable rights been foregone, because intemperance had besotted the witness by whose testimony alone they could have been established. In commercial affairs, what vast amounts of property frequently depend upon the evidence of men whose powers of clear recollection and of precise and intelligent statement are wholly obliterated, though something of the moral sense may have survived, or have been renovated in them! We all feel that a reputation for honor, and virtue, and beneficent action is the third treasure in the universe, inferior only to the smiles of Heaven and the approbation of conscience; and yet, when the profligate in principle or the dissolute in life are found contending with the sober and the upright, do not the intemperate almost invariably espouse the cause of the former? In some parts of our country, numerous instances have already occurred where that sympathy with guilt, which is generated by intemperance more than by all other things combined, has filled the temples of justice with a rout of fraternal villains, rebelling against law, perplexing the minds of witnesses with fear, and overawing the sworn administrators of justice. Nor is it unworthy of remark, in this connection, that the established and regularly-organized tribunals of the land have jurisdiction of only a small part of the controversies which arise among men. The law takes no cognizance of innumerable questions which relate to the performance of domestic, social, or neighborhood duties. In these cases, all persons are ar...
