Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/600



Progress of Indians—See.

Progress Resisted—See.

PROGRESS, TRUE

Surely we should judge of a man's progress by inquiring what he has been rather than by his present stage alone:

Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem-*pole. Anywhere in the middle you may find a veneration for china pugdogs or an enthusiasm for Marie Corelli—still an advance. Literary people seem to think that every time a volume of Hall Caine is sold, Shakespeare is to that extent neglected. It merely means that some semisavage has reached the Hall Caine stage, and we should wish him godspeed on his way to Shakespeare. It is only when a pretended Shakespeare man lapses into Hall Cainery that one need be excited.—, "Imaginary Obligations."

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PROGRESS UNFINISHED

To the end of his life, the student whose frame remains unshaken, writes on morals and history, on science and on fine art, and his inquiries in all the departments of nature are marked by as keen and strenuous an enthusiasm as when in his youth he traversed the hills and the valleys on foot. Each process becomes but a basis for higher ones; and each successful and wide research but opens the path to new discoveries. As the skiff which the boy builds grows at last to the steamship, and the hut of the pioneer to the palace which the citizen rears and adorns—while yet neither of these is felt to be final with him, or adequate to the highest conception he can form—so the thought of the child expands and accumulates to the science of manhood, and still is admitted insufficient and transient.—

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PROHIBITION

Of course, the experienced drinker can buy liquor in a prohibition State like Maine. Let me say to any old toper present, going to Portland for his summer vacation, that he can find a drink by going into a side street, slipping down a dark alley, rapping three times at a door, wriggling up a back stair-*way, and by much twisting, convolution and squirming like a serpent, find what he desires. But boys and girls will grow up without the temptation of the open saloon. Of course, prohibition is not ideal. Making man temperate by law is a makeshift. There are men who have not been drunk for ten years—they are in Sing Sing.

Perhaps, however, if you can not keep some men from committing crime in any other way, it is best to build a stone wall around them. The ideal thing is law enthroned in the heart, an automatic commandment in the brain and will. But the necessary thing for poorly born people may be legal restraints.—

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An English writer refers thus to some impressions of a brother Englishman, traveling through the United States:

When traveling through the United States some years ago, he was much struck with the difference in appearance of the houses in districts where the Maine liquor law was in force, and soon learned to distinguish where it was adopted, by the clean, cheerful look of the workmen's dwellings, the neatness of the gardens, and the presence of trees and flowers which, in other districts, were wanting. He was not a teetotaler himself, and was not advocating such restrictions; but he could not help noticing the contrast; and he felt sure that in all our large towns great progress in civilization and morals would be effected if such an attraction were offered to the working classes.

It is another of the long line of illustrations showing the intimate connection between moral and material weal.

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PROHIBITION ARGUED AGAINST

At the fiftieth annual convention of the United States Brewers' Association, the following absurdity was submitted as part of a report:

The whole vegetable world is in a conspiracy against the prohibitionist. The bees become intoxicated with the distillation of the honeysuckle; the wasps grow dizzy in