BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Speeches and Writings of Thomas F. Marshall_, edited by W. L. Barre (Cincinnati, 1858); _Thomas F. Marshall_, by Charles Fennell (_The Green Bag_, Boston, July, 1907).
[From _Speeches and Writings of Hon. Thomas F. Marshall_, edited by W. L. Barre (Cincinnati, 1858)]
Mr. President, we of the "Total Abstinence and Vigilance Society," in our meetings at the other end of the city [Washington] are so much in the habit of "telling experiences," that I myself have somewhat fallen into it, and am guilty occasionally of the egotism of making some small confessions (as small as I can possibly make them). Mine, then, sir, was a different case. I had earned a most unenviable notoriety by excesses which, though bad enough, did not half reach the reputation they won for me. I never was an habitual drunkard. I was one of your spreeing gentry. My sprees, however, began to crowd each other and my best friends feared that they would soon run together. Perhaps my long intervals of entire abstinence--perhaps something peculiar in my form, constitution, or complexion--may have prevented the physical indications, so usual, of that terrible disease, which, till temperance societies arose, was deemed incurable and resistless. Perhaps I had nourished the vanity to believe that nature had endowed me with a versatility which enabled me to throw down and take up at pleasure any pursuit, and I chose to sport with the gift. If so, I was brought to the very verge of a fearful punishment. Physicians tell us that intemperance at last becomes, of itself, not a habit voluntarily indulged, but a disease which its victim cannot resist. I had not become fully the subject of that fiendish thirst, that horrible yearning after the distillation "from the alembick of hell," which is said to scorch in the throat, and consume the vitals of the confirmed drunkard, with fires kindled for eternity. I did become alarmed, and for the first time, no matter from what cause, lest the demon's fangs were fastening upon me, and I was approaching that line which separates the man who frolics, and can quit, from the lost inebriate, whose appetite is disease, and whose will is dead. I joined the society on my own account, and felt that I must encounter the title of "reformed drunkard," annoying enough to me, I assure you. I judged, from the cruel publicity given through the press to my frolics, what I had to bear and brave. But I did brave it all; and I would have dared anything to break the chain which I at last discovered was riveting my soul, to unclasp the folds of that serpent-habit whose full embrace is death. Letters from people I never had heard of, newspaper paragraphs from Boston to New Orleans were mailed, and are still mailing to me, by which I am very distinctly, and in the most friendly and agreeable manner, apprised that I enjoyed all over the delectable reputation of a sot, with one foot in the grave, and understanding almost totally overthrown. I doubt not, sir, that the societies who have invited me to address them at different places in the Union, will expect to find me with an unhealed carbuncle on my nose, and my body of the graceful and manly shape and proportion of a demijohn. I have dared all these annoyances, all this celebrity. I have not shrunk from being a text for temperance preachers, and a case for the outpouring of the sympathies of people who have more philanthropy than politeness, more temperance than taste. I signed the pledge on my own account, sir, and my heart leaped to find that I was free. The chain has fallen from my freeborn limbs; not a link or fragment remains to tell I ever wore the badge of servitude.