COMMIT ΝΟ SUICIDE

As our time is valuable, I have to stop here, but will read you on another occasion the second volume of this historic work, which contains the period from the Roman King, Numa Pompilius, to the Californian Senator, Paul Neumann.

OF all the innumerable virtues which I am constantly practicing, temperance has always been my pet; and for good reasons. St. Origen, one of the highest Bohemian authorities, speaks in terms of profound and just indignation of a sin of such magnitude that it requires two to commit it. Now this sociable and otherwise rather agreeable sin must have a counterpart, or antagonist, in some double-barreled virtue, or else vice would have an advantage over virtue and would be more perfect than virtue, which is absurd. Looking over the long index of virtues practiced in this Bohemian congregation, I find temperance the virtue and counterpart of the social sin condemned by St. Origen, because we never commit a temperance without inviting a friend. Now,

my beloved brethren, this is all clear and intelligible; and, theoretically, temperance would be all right, if it were not for the existence of serious obstacles and grievous mistakes in regard to the practice of the virtue.

There are some benighted people who mistake total abstinence for temperance. Temperance is moderation in all things; total abstinence is an extreme, and as such intemperance in its worst form, because it is unnatural. Temperance is the territory that separates two extremes. Between arctic ice and the scorching heat of the tropics stretches the temperate zone. This zone is inhabited by the most temperate nationsthe Americans, the Irish, the Dutch; and this is not the only circumstance from which it received its name; like the temperate zone, temperance is the intermediate state between total abstinence and total intoxication.

What says Horace, that great authority of our Bohemian church? "Medium

tenuere beati," which, literally translated,

means:

Blessed be they that walk

On a line of chalk

Through a given room diagonally.

There is another even more serious mistake interfering in the sacred cause of temperance. There exists in the mind of many people an erroneous impression that water is the most temperate beverage, and, I am sorry to say, there are fanatics who really use it as such. My dear brethren, water is really a very useful fluid. It was created for washing, for bathing at the Midsummer High Jinks, for the sale of nautical instruments, for painting in water-color, for the construction of bridges, and last, but not least, for the cleaning of bottles.

We have here in this town a microscopical society whose members are visible to the naked eye and derive their name from the circumstance that they look into glasses of the microscope. Each member of this society will state that each drop of water