TEMPERANCE.

W. C. T. U. CONVENTION, OCTOBER 18, 1906.

A few years ago Boston was honored by the presence of delegates from the International Peace Society holding their annual convention in Tremont Temple. Among those present were representatives from many lands, including men and women of world-wide reputation Pastor Wagner from France, Baroness Von Sutton from Germany, Dr. William Walsh from Scotland and, by no means least in eloquence and charm, a Chinese woman physician who addressed the gatherings in the pure English of a Wellesley graduate.

I seem to see the same forces, if not the same personalities, assembled before me to-day. Your movement no less than the mission of the peace delegates has a universal appeal because, sad to say, it also fulfils a universal need. Intemperance like war knows neither latitude nor longitude, and the army that pursues it in all its habitations must fly the flag of every nation under the sun. Such an army must be nonpartisan, nonsectarian, international, and thus incidentally promote the spread of the spirit of human brotherhood; for, as far as I know, there is no race or sect or country free from the plague of inebriety.

But if the evil is great and I think it is hardly possible for the wildest extremist to exaggerate it the forces of redemption are stronger still. You all know what Father Mathew did for Ireland, what Lady Somerset has done in England, and the signs of the times point to the sure, if gradual, triumph in America of the cause for which so many genuine apostles have lived, the cause for which you, whom we are proud to welcome as our city's guests on this occasion, are sacrificing time and energy and means with no thought of personal reward.

You will find, I think, right here in Boston manifest evidences of improvement: In the diminished consumption of liquor, the reduced number of arrests for intoxication, and the comparative absence of disgraceful exhibitions in the public streets. Here, as elsewhere, the working class, and that includes all of us except a negligible fraction, are learning that alcoholic indulgence is the surest means of impairing the faculties and reducing earning capacity. Employers, in selfdefence, are raising the standard among their help, the labor unions are exerting a powerful influence within their own ranks, and thus economic pressure, adding its force to the social stigma and religious and ethical appeal, is writing the legible marks of sobriety, happiness and health on the population which you will observe during your sojourn here.

What this means to the state and the city everyone knows. As drunkenness decreases, crime, poverty and disease, its legitimate offspring, must tend to disappear, and the people at large will be relieved of the burden of supporting a huge multitude of delinquents and incapables.

Speaking then as an official I am glad to offer you my warmest sympathy in your noble efforts at reform. Speaking as an individual I might go further. You have pitted your strength against one of the gravest evils of society. You seek to forewarn the young, to protect the innocent, to redeem the unfortunate. No one who is a father can refuse you honor and trust. Each of us would like to keep far from his own household the dangers you combat, and to that end I know no means, on the whole, more efficacious than the influence of good women. I welcome you, then, as true friends of humanity, whose efforts make for a cleaner and stronger civic structure and lay every family in Boston under a debt of personal gratitude.

MICHAEL ANAGNOS.

AT TREMONT TEMPLE, OCTOBER 24, 1906.

MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I bring the warm sympathy of Boston's people to this meeting this afternoon.

The life of Michael Anagnos, dividing itself into two distinct periods, offers two noble figures to our study and emulation-the Greek patriot and the American teacher.

A Boston gentleman, zealous for the liberation of the Greeks, found him, a youth in his native land, who consecrated his young ardor to the high cause of liberty. Their acquaintance ripened into friendship, and thus by what may seem a happy accident our country gained one more immigrant destined to a career of distinguished usefulness. In this land of opportunity the fervor of his aspiring manhood ran into new channels, and when the time came to select a successor to Doctor Howe, no one seemed more fitting than young Anagnos to direct the great institution which has so long aided and extended the fair credit of our beloved city.

I have said that this may be somewhat accidental, but in the deeper sense there was little that was accidental in our friend's career. It was no accident that Mr. Anagnos, with his generous nature, should give his powers to the cause of his oppressed fellow Greeks; it was no accident that a promising scholar and journalist should attract the attention of the educated American sympathizer; it was no accident that this lover of freedom should be drawn to the home of liberty, which has opened its arms before and since to Lafayette and Kosciusko, to Kossuth and Davitt, to John Burns and Henry George and other liberators from many lands; it was no accident that the hands which had striven to

release fettered limbs should feel themselves well occupied loosening the bandages on sightless eyes. The patriot and the teacher in this man, as in so many others, blended naturally, and I do not know which is his higher title to esteem.

Forty years of life in Boston did not cause Mr. Anagnos to cease to be a Greek. Although his fellow countrymen here were few he identified himself with their interests and stood frankly but not obtrusively before the community as a representative of a minor people. He was not ashamed to be a hyphenated American, if to escape that reproach meant ceasing to remember the country of his origin. It would be strange, indeed, if the pretensions of latter races led him to forget he was a kinsman of Socrates and Alexander, a defender of those matchless nations which over two thousand years ago raised civilization to its acme in the capital of Attica.

In one respect, however, this modern Greek rejected the wisdom of the ancients. The old Spartans exposed their puny infants on Mt. Taygetus. Our modern Sparta has its cradle for the frailest of these castaways, realizing that in the least of their helpless bodies there abides a glowing soul, and justly fearing the wrath of Heaven that should follow the sacrifice of that priceless jewel.

It is in this character that we know Michael Anagnos best not as a mountain rebel, but as the shepherd of the sightless flock who are his chief mourners to-day. The statesman and the soldier may well envy this private citizen his wreath of tribute the love of the afflicted among whom he walked, imparting strength, renewing hope, devising practical helps—in a word, maintaining worthily the traditions of that great school for the blind in which modern science and Christian charity all but duplicate the sweetest miracles of the Galilean.

THE CITY CLUB.

AT THE OPENING, DECEMBER, 1906.

A few years ago some one coined the phrase "civic pride" to designate a special form of patriotism. It meant, of course, loyalty to one's city. The city, after all, is the first social unit we grasp and the one that affects us most immediately. It has a particular atmosphere which envelopes all its citizens, a particular outlook upon life which it communicates to them. Every fine old city is as individual as a human being. We can tell a New Yorker, a Washingtonian, after a short acquaintance. And we cannot talk with them long without realizing that, while the people beyond the Rockies and along the Mexican Gulf are our compatriots and our brethren, their influence upon us is remote after all, and it is neighborly contact and the reactions of daily intercourse that mold us to a particular stamp and style.

This local loyalty is the spirit to which the City Club is dedicated. It flings a new banner to the breezes across the pathway of our daily travel and emblazons on its folds the personified figure of Boston to stir our imaginations and awaken a fruitful enthusiasm in our breasts. Not the Boston of 1776 or of 1861 not a limited Boston adjacent, let us say, to the Public Garden or the Old South Church, but the live Boston of to-day and to-morrow, the whole Boston, the real Boston. We do not for a moment forget the past or slight its mementos and achievements, but we know that as the men of the past did not live in a dreamy retrospect but built new traditions over the débris of those they inherited, so we shall show ourselves their rightful heirs by discarding a part of our heritage from them by meeting our own problems in our own way precisely as they met theirs.