Love & Passion Quote by Thomas Jordan Jarvis

Jarvis is staging a moral emergency and recruiting you into it. The “cry” he describes isn’t random public clamor; it’s carefully sourced from “friends of the school-room,” a phrase that sanctifies his coalition by tying it to childhood, discipline, and the future. Education becomes the clean, respectable face of what is fundamentally a push for state power over private behavior. By the time he arrives at “protection from the curse of drunkenness,” the argument has already smuggled in its premise: that alcohol is not merely a vice but a civic contagion threatening the body politic.

The rhetoric works because it converts a contested policy question into a test of character. “Strong, great, noble citizenship” sounds like aspiration, but it also implies hierarchy: some citizens are being formed, others are being corrected. “Protection” frames the state as guardian rather than enforcer, softening the coercive edge of temperance-era laws that could police working-class leisure and immigrant social life. “Curse” does theological work, borrowing the language of sin and fate to make dissent feel like complicity.

Jarvis, a late-19th-century Southern politician, is also speaking into a post-Reconstruction project of social order: schools, sobriety, and “noble” citizenship as tools to stabilize communities and legitimize governance. His closing move - “every lover of his fellow-men, no matter where his home may be” - pretends to universalism while pressuring opponents into silence. If you disagree, you’re not just wrong; you’re unloving. That’s the subtext: policy as moral sorting, with the state cast as the instrument of salvation.