Six Young Men

"Six of the brightest young men from our colleges," last week announced Dr. Clarence True Wilson of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition & Morals, '"have been assigned the task of obtaining the signatures of 5,000,000 U. S. inhabitants to a pledge of total abstinence from intoxicating beverages."

The institutions from which the six crusaders have been selected are Asbury College (Wilmore, Ky.), Boston University, Syracuse University, and Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pa.). The young men will work in pairs. They will start out from Boston, New York and Philadelphia this spring, moving west across the upper half of the U. S., visiting 50 cities per year. They will work the lower half of the country from west to east. In the South the pledge idea has already been started locally, said Dr. Wilson; 665,000 signatures have already been obtained.

The "sacred thirst pledge" of this Methodist campaign is, oddly, not Methodist but Roman Catholic, the invention of Father Theobald Mathew (1790-1856), an Irish Capuchin friar whose statue adorns the main thoroughfare of Dublin in the immediate vicinity of one of that city's most popular bars.* Father Mathew, after working for 24 years in Cork, founding schools, opening a cemetery and engaging in rescue work during the cholera epidemic of 1832, signed the pledge when he was 48 and crusaded all over Ireland on behalf of teetotalism. His pledge, as adopted by the Methodists, reads:

I pledge, God helping me, in honor of the sacred thirst of our Lord and with the help of the Holy Spirit, never to drink intoxicating liquor or to use any narcotic or opiate, and that I will through life exert my utmost endeavors to prevent their sale and use by others.

*The Red Bank, whose oysters receive honorable mention in James Joyce's Ulysses.

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