One could advertise, whether one was an author with books to promote, like Emerson or myself, or whether one was a politician or an activist with an agenda to urge, like Abraham Lincoln or Susan B. Anthony or some other mental defective.

Advertising, all the same! What could be more American?

Now, for a word about my sponsors:

I had begun on the lecture circuit even before I published those letters anonymously in the St. Louis New Era. My intent was simply to support myself during the conception and writing of my guidebook and—in the process—have the chance to emerge from the suffocation of the old family manse now and then.

However, at this point in time, my ideas for writing a guidebook were in a nascent phase so...I fell back on an old topic I knew well: Temperance.

[The fiddler stares with an imploring sort of sarcasm.]

Well, someone had to support my writing!

I cannot say anything I ever told anyone about laying off the "daemon rum" was shoddy advice! Certainly, I mended torn and frayed family fabric here and there, in cities as diverse as Lebanon, Ohio and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Perhaps I even saved a life or two in Lynchburg, Virginia or Florence, Kentucky! At the very least, I offered those present at my lectures in Defiance, Missouri or Greensboro, North Carolina a fresh perspective on how to conduct their affairs. What is the harm in that? If one is to wage a "Crusade," surely Vice is a fine foe to pick! Who could possibly be maimed in a war on an improper noun?

To be sure, as my ideas crystallized and my writing progressed, I started to slip in more and more about that fabled Pacific Coast.though I took care not to mention those "delicious fruits" that yielded that "most generous wine."

Ah, that wine! [The fiddler most likely resumes an old favorite, "Loop #3, Signs & Wonders".]

At every lecture stop, I was treated as a guest of honor and then subjected to the barbarism of a fine meal without a fine wine! Oh, how California spoiled me!

Yet, to abandon my temperance plank would have been unthinkable at such a moment! Father Theobald Mathew was preaching hellfire and temperance across the land—an Irish monk who managed even to get the ear of Presidents Fillmore and Taylor! Congress gave him an honorary seat! The mayor of New York City put him up at his mansion! Sarah Polk, the First Lady, forbade hard liquor at the White House! Temperance was—as I said earlier—all the rage.