Far be it from me , also , to hint , my respectable friends , at the show of dirty faces which you would present without my pains to keep you clean . Nor will I remind you how often , when the midnight bells make you tremble for your combustible town , you have fled to the town-pump and found me always at my post firm amid the confusion and ready to drain my vital current in your behalf . Neither is it worth while to lay much stress on my claims to a medical diploma as the physician whose simple rule of practice is preferable to all the nauseous lore which has found men sick , or left them so , since the days of Hippocrates . Let us take a broader view of my beneficial influence on mankind . No ; these are trifles , compared with the merits which wise men concede to me -- if not in my single self , yet as the representative of a class -- of being the grand reformer of the age . From my spout , and such spouts as mine , must flow the stream that shall cleanse our earth of the vast portion of its crime and anguish which has gushed from the fiery fountains of the still . In this mighty enterprise the cow shall be my great confederate . Milk and water -- the TOWN-PUMP and the Cow ! Such is the glorious copartnership that shall tear down the distilleries and brewhouses , uproot the vineyards , shatter the cider-presses , ruin the tea and coffee trade , and finally monopolize the whole business of quenching thirst . Blessed consummation ! Then Poverty shall pass away from the land , finding no hovel so wretched where her squalid form may shelter herself . Then Disease , for lack of other victims , shall gnaw its own heart and die . Then Sin , if she do not die , shall lose half her strength . Until now the frenzy of hereditary fever has raged in the human blood , transmitted from sire to son and rekindled in every generation by fresh draughts of liquid flame . When that inward fire shall be extinguished , the heat of passion can not but grow cool , and war -- the drunkenness of nations -- perhaps will cease . At least , there will be no war of households . The husband and wife , drinking deep of peaceful joy -- a calm bliss of temperate affections -- shall pass hand in hand through life and lie down not reluctantly at its protracted close . To them the past will be no turmoil of mad dreams , nor the future an eternity of such moments as follow the delirium of the drunkard . Their dead faces shall express what their spirits were and are to be by a lingering smile of memory and hope . Ahem !
Dry work , this speechifying , especially XXXXX an unpractised orator .
Until amid as for if in on to with without