Part 18 (1/2)

His love of education and his fondness for books have made themselves felt. He has been one of the foremost in founding and sustaining two schools--”Oak Grove Seminary” and the ”Erskine High School.” The latter partly owed its existence to him. He has started and built up a number of libraries, and he has wished to leave coming sons and daughters supplied with a fountain from which to draw. Not a few of the college graduates who have gone out from China received their first impulses to higher aspirations from him, in one way or another.

In temperance work he has taken his part. He began to speak for total abstinence as a boy, which has been his theme ever since, and he took active part in securing a majority for the Prohibition amendment in the State of Maine.

For many years he was an active member of the ”Sons of Temperance,”

and as Grand Worthy Patriarch of that organization he did much permanent good in the State. In this work he was intimately a.s.sociated with Ex-Governor Sidney Perham, Neal Dow, John Kimbal of Bangor, D.

B. Randal, the aged patriarch of the Methodist Church, and others of the ablest advocates of the Maine law.

It was once a law of the State that the selectmen of each town should appoint some suitable man to fill his cellar with various liquors, and whose sole right it should be to sell such articles. For one year Eli Jones was appointed to act as liquor-agent for the town. Strange picture, that of a well-known Quaker minister and prominent advocate of total abstinence holding the office of drink-dispenser to his townsmen! It can be imagined with what feelings the toper would enter his yard, make known his desire, and what words of advice he would receive instead of the foaming gla.s.s.

It is needless to say that no cellar was stored that year, and during his term of office the community abstained.

In 1852, at the time of his first visit to England and Ireland, but few Friends in those countries had heartily espoused the cause of total abstinence. Since that time a great change has taken place. ”To hail from Maine is _now_ no discredit to the visitor. _Then_ a specimen from Maine was looked upon with some distrust.”

It will not be out of place to refer here to his connection with the origin of the ”United Kingdom Alliance.” Its essential declarations are as follows: ”1. That it is neither right nor politic for the state to afford legal protection and sanction to any traffic or system which tends to increase crime, to waste the national resources, to corrupt the social habits, and to destroy the health and lives of the people.

2. That the traffic in intoxicating liquors, as common beverages, is inimical to the true interests of individuals and destructive of the order and welfare of society, and ought therefore to be prohibited. 3.

That the history and results of all past legislation in regard to the liquor traffic abundantly prove that it is impossible satisfactorily to _limit_ or _regulate_ a system so essentially mischievous in its tendencies.... 7. That, rising above cla.s.s, sectarian, or party considerations, all good citizens should combine to procure an enactment prohibiting the sale of intoxicating beverages, as affording most efficient aid in removing the appalling evil of intemperance.”

This was a union against intemperance on a most uncompromising platform, and its work during the last quarter of a century has been enormous. The simple facts of Eli Jones's connection with this organization are as follows: As he was returning from Dublin yearly meeting to London he found himself in company with Nathaniel Card, a Friend of Manchester, England. Their conversation turned upon temperance, for our friend had not been silent on this subject during his stay in Ireland. Nathaniel Card became much interested, and wished to take an American temperance paper, as well as to have a copy of the Maine prohibitory law. He was given the address of Neal Dow, and a correspondence was opened. About eighteen months after this conversation, Eli Jones being in Manchester, three gentlemen called on him. Nathaniel Card was one of them, who as speaker said, ”We are the officers of the British and Foreign Temperance Alliance, and whatever results come from its formation _began_ with our conversation on our return journey from Ireland.”

Many English Friends have been connected with this organization, and Eli Jones had the opportunity at the time of his later visits to England to attend some of the meetings and to hear the beneficent results of its far-reaching influence.

His work for the advancement of peace has been lifelong. He has strained his eyes to catch glimpses of a better era, in which the literal and spiritual teaching of Christ shall be fulfilled in a universal brotherhood of men and nations; and he has lived to see already ”a flood of prophesying light.” When over eighty years old he was sent as a delegate to the Friends' Peace Conference at Richmond, Indiana, in 1887, and his voice was often heard discussing with younger men and women the wisest course for binding nations into families by bonds of love, so that rust may dull the carnal weapons of war,

”And the cobweb be woven across the cannon's throat, To shake its threaded tears in the wind.”

He has always looked with joy on the advance of the human race, and he has had uncompromising faith in actual and triumphant progress.

Nothing has made his crowning years more bright than the thought, ever present with him, that the good is gaining a gradual ascendency, and that man's lot, already a happy one, is becoming more happy. He has seen nations that have sat in darkness rising to stand in the joy-bringing light, and he has trusted the future will bring mature fruit. This buoyant hope has not only made his life joyous, but has pervaded all the messages of his later years, and he has shown that optimism which every true Christian must feel, for his Master ”doeth all things well.”