Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 March 1878 — Acting Under Excitement. [ARTICLE]

Acting Under Excitement.

There its a great fear, on the part of some amiable person b who write for the public, lest, in certain excited movements of reform, there should be those who will take steps for which they will be sorry. They argue, from this, that it is not best to have any excitement at all, and especially that nothing should be done Under excitement. It so happens, however, that tire path of progress has always been marked by sudden steps upward and onward. There are steady grow th and steady goiDg, it is true, but the tendency to rut-making and routine is so great in human nature that it is often only by wide excitements that a whole community is lifted and forwarded to a new level. Men often get into the condition of pig-iron. They pile up nicely in bars. They are in an excellent state of preservation. They certainly lie still, and, though there is a vast capacity in them for machinery, and cutlery, and agricultural implements,— though they contain measureless possibilities of spindles and spades—there is nothing under heaven but fire that can develop their capacity and realize their capabilities.

There are communities that would never do anything but rot, except under excitement. A community often gets into a stolid, immobile condition, which nothing but a public exeit-mtnt can break up. This condition may relate to a single subject, or to many subjects. It may relate to temperance, or to a church debt. Now it is quite possible that a man under excitement will do the thing that he has always known to be right., and be so.ry for it or recede from it afterward; but the excitement was the only power that would ever have started him on the right path, or led him to stop in the wrong one. It is all very well to say that it would be a great deal better for a drunkard, coolly, after quiet deliberation and a rational decision, to resolve to forsake his cups than to take the same step under the stimulus of social excitement, and the persuasions of companionship and fervid oratory, but does he ever do it? Sometimes, possibly, bnt not often. Without excitement and a great social movement, very little of temperance reform has ever been effected. Men are like iron; to be molded they must be heated; and to say that there should be no excitement connected with a great reform, or tbat a reform is never to be effected through excitement, is to ignore the basilar facts of human nature and human history.— Dr. Holland, in April Scribner.