2. A "free and friendly" objection, which I have not yet seen answered, is, "Would Wilberforce, or Cobden, or Lord John Russell have diluted their measures, so as to leave the emancipation of the slaves, the repeal of the corn-laws, or the adoption of the Reform Act, to the ever-varying vote of the multitude, in which the accused would have full power to take a part?" We reply, that had magistrates been appointed to grant licenses yearly to whom they chose, to trade in slaves, to deal in otherwise prohibited corn, or to vote for knights of the shire, a "Permissive Bill" giving the people power to ignore such licenses, with a view to the ultimate extinction of slavery, the freedom of trade in bread, and the extension of the franchise, would have been a good "beginning of the end."

3. Quoting Sir Hugh Cairns, an opponent says, "It would be an extreme novelty for the Legislature to forbid the common sale of an article, allowed at the same time to be made, imported, and used." We ask, is not this the law with respect to all poisons? and may not a man paint, carve, engrave, print, and import for his own use, pictures, books, and statues that are repugnant to morality, which the law prevents his exposing for sale?

4. "Legislation can never go in advance of public opinion." This is only partially true. What had public opinion to do with procuring the corn-law, or the Beer Act, or Mr. Gladstone's Wine License Act, or the act just passed for the preservation of game? On the other hand, would public opinion fail him if, next session, Mr. Gladstone should propose an efficient trespass act in lieu of the present game laws; or if, after stating fairly the Alliance case, with all its stirring facts of waste of food, expenditure of wealth, opposition to all good, and especially the iniquity of a Christian Government legalising for money a destructive "Traffic."

Licensed where peace and quiet dwell,
To bring disease, and want, and woe;
Licensed to make this world a hell,

And fit men for a hell below.

5. Should the Chancellor propose our "Permissive Bill," would he find that he had much anticipated the sentiment out of doors?

270,000 petitioners from all ranks have just testified to some ripeness of public opinion in this direction; and as in the corn-law agitation the cry of "Peel is with us" operated magically; so, in the suppression of the Liquor-Traffic, "Gladstone is with us would conglomerate the public sentiment (the Times and all), and a nation of Prohibitionists might be "born in a day." But the revenue! How is this to be raised? The suspension of the drink-Traffic has always improved the revenue on other articles, and a penny in the pound on the present income-tax represents a million.

Even wages might then be taxed at rates varying from a penny to a shilling through the medium of employers, which the employed would, when emancipated from the drink-Traffic, be willing to pay. "The country being vastly enriched, the revenue might be safely left in the hands of a very bungling Chancellor of the Exchequer."

6. "A distracted state of the Church is apprehended upon the cognate question of the use of intoxicating wine at the Lord's table." We say, be of good courage brother! Intoxicating wine may offend some; unintoxicating can offend none. And that which is impure and dangerous, and an unfit emblem of the outpoured blood of the Master, can well give place amongst His disciples to the "fruit of the vine."

7. "The teaching of the Church is not uniform. Whilst many clergymen and ministers condemn the drink as poisonous, and the Traffic as a crime, others extol both." This is a fact to be deplored; but both cannot be right."

And a neighbouring country now wading through a baptism of blood, resulting from the divided action of her Church on slavery; the one section proving from the Word of God the exact conformity of that "domestic institution" with the inspired volume; the other denouncing it, on the same authority, as the "sum of human villainy," may show to others the guilt of using the Bible as a "nose of wax," and perverting it to teach what is monstrous in morals, and revolting to religion.

(See

As a politico-social question intoxicating liquors and the "Traffic" are on their trial before the people's bar. The indictment charges them with causing by far the larger proportion of the poverty, sickness, crime, ignorance, idiotcy, madness, accidents, prostitution, rapes, suicides, murders, sudden deaths, and other evils which abound in our midst; but they are neither principals nor accessories, only instruments. "Blackstone's Commentary," vol. iv., c. 3, pp. 111-17.) "A principal in the first degree is the absolute perpetrator of the crime, and in the second he who is present aiding, which presence need not be actual; there may be a constructive presence. In case of murder by poisoning, a man may be a principal felon by preparing and laying the poison, or by persuading another to drink it who is ignorant of its poisonous quality, and yet not administer it himself, nor be present when the poisoning is committed. And the same reason will hold good as to other murders committed in the absence of the murderer by means which he had prepared before hand, and which probably could not fail of their mischievous effects; as by laying a trap or pitfall for another, whereby he is killed; letting out a wild beast with intent to do mischief, or exciting a madman to commit murder so that death therefrom ensued. In every of these cases the party offending is guilty of murder, as a principal in the first degree. For he cannot be called an accessory without necessarily presupposing a principal; and the poison, the pitfall, the beast, or the madman, cannot be held principals, being only the instruments of death. An accessory is he who is not the chief actor nor present, but in some way concerned either before or after the fact committed. The punishment inflicted on either class of offenders is the same."

How close the application! The struggle has begun! Our bereaved Queen (may God long preserve and bless her) must be approached; and with the facts before her deeply will she sympathise with the worse than widowed and orphaned victims of the system. And with a House of Peers, whose keen sense of public virtue waits but to be tested; with a bench of bishops unequalled for the purity of their lives and

the integrity of their intentions ; with a House of Commons not insensible to the wants of the people, and with a case in our hands redolent of justice, mercy, and truth, subsidiary to physical and moral education, the promoting of true religion through the spread of the precious Gospel, and thus adjuvant of the twofold interests of humanity in temporal happiness and eternal life, let us "thank God and take courage. A few such educated and earnest advocates of "Alliance" doctrine as Mr. Pope, Dr. Lees, and others, many of whom are now present, sent to the parliamentary support of the member for Carlisle, and the days of the "Licensed Liquor-Traffic" are numbered.

*

SOM

The Immorality and Cruelty of the Liquor-Traffic.
By the REV. DR. BURNS.

may

OME persons may be startled by the title of our paper; and not a think it wanting in charity to stigmatise so large and prominent a class as being employed in a calling at once immoral and cruel. All we desire of such persons is that they will examine our brief statement of facts and principles, and then decide for themselves on the evidence we adduce. It is only requisite to bring the Traffic to a true and satisfactory ordeal, and by that test let it stand or fall. By the Liquor-Traffic, we mean the whole system of making and vending intoxicating liquors as beverages for the people. With the preparation of spirituous medicines, or the use of any alcoholic fluids under the direction of the physician or apothecary, we have at present nothing to do. No doubt but alcohol must be kept for sale for certain purposes, even if we obtained a prohibitory law to-morrow. It is the sale of these drinks, whether wholesale by the distiller or brewer, by the aristocratic hotelkeeper, as well as by the common publican or beerhouse proprietor, that we declare to be both immoral and cruel.

Whatever effect these drinks produce on men using them, they do so irrespective of the persons who may dole them out, or of the place where the sale of them is conducted; and we know not of any class of dealers, or any kind of places where they may be sold, that can possibly give a guarantee that they shall not be evil and mischievous in their results. . We do not think if the holiest person in the community exercised the calling, that they could in any way prevent the Traffic from being immoral and evil.

But what is the test of morality-and to what bar must the Traffic be summoned? Every one knows that things often esteemed harmless by men are abominable in the sight of God, and are clearly condemned in His holy word. We know, too, how custom tends to hide the enormity of evils which prevail in our very midst. Slavery, and the slave trade, once flourished, and formed a part of the commerce of our nation, and

* Mr. Wilfred Lawson.

still are sustained and even eulogised by another people professing to be Christians. Lotteries were once held amongst us by State authority, and in some countries they are yet made subservient even to ecclesiastical and religious purposes.

We have had a criminal code that barbarously executed our fellowcreatures for the most insignificant crimes, and yet they were lauded and defended as most just and righteous; so that we need not be surprised that many persons should gaze on the Liquor-Traffic and see no moral evil in it.

That which is truly moral must be in harmony with God's character and will, and the Holy Scriptures must be the standard of appeal. God's law, which is the perfect transcript of the Divine nature, is holy, just, and good, and unless the Liquor-Traffic is in harmony with purity, righteousness, and benevolence, then is it obviously immoral and cruel. Is not a perversion of the bounties of Divine Providence immoral? Wasting the blessings of God's goodness is certainly sinning against that goodness. But in manufacturing intoxicating drink the precious grain, by untold millions of bushels, is taken and perverted into an article that contains an element of direst evil, and that is perilous alike to body, mind, and spirit. Thus the poor man's food is changed into poison, and becomes his greatest seducer and enemy. As grain it will nourish, and give physical strength, sustain life; as vitiated in the form of intoxicating liquor, it deceives, and tempts, and destroys. Surely this perversion is both immoral and cruel. To waste the food would be wrong, to destroy it entirely worse still, but to change it into a poisonous fluid is worst of all.

Is it not immoral and cruel to deal out what is imminently dangerous to the community? Every man is bound to exercise benevolent and vigilant care over his weak and erring brother. Indifference to those in danger is wrong, yea, highly criminal; but if you induce men to purchase what is fraught with every kind of danger, you become their positive enemy, and inflict on them a most heinous evil. Now, intoxicating liquors endanger the whole man, and expose the user to the most frightful calamities. They injure the stomach, the lungs, the brain, the liver, the blood. They produce all sorts of physical diseases, from confirmed dyspepsia, to paralysis, heart disease, apoplexy, delirium tremens, and sudden death. Now, health is one of the greatest earthly blessings we can enjoy, and that business which tends to its destruction and loss is essentially immoral and cruel. Add to this the injury inflicted on the mind, the weakening of the mental capacity, the premature decay of the intellectual and moral powers, with the frightful and increasing amount of insanity directly and indirectly produced, and say if the Traffic is not immoral and cruel.

Look at the moral degradation this Traffic manifestly causes. It panders to every frightful form of iniquity and vice. It is the chief agent in producing the lowest phases of sensuality and profligacy; it has no equal in hardening the hearts and polluting the consciences of men. It stirs up the deep strata of man's depravity, and prepares him for every deadly sin that humanity can possibly perpetrate. Hence a very large proportion of the crimes of the nation is attributable to these drinks, and

to their Traffic.

This

It is this Traffic which mainly fosters juvenile depravity and early crime, that fills our streets with the most appalling forms of deadly woe and horror in the walking pestilences of fallen women. is the chief agency by which their polluted career is continued, and by which it so often suddenly and awfully ends. To this Traffic, in a large degree, is attributable the social evils of blighted homes, starving families, wretched wives, and grievously wronged children. It is the great manufactory of materials for the unionhouse, the reformatory, and the prison. The records of police courts, of our quarterly sessions and assizes, are little more than a constant exhibition of drink's doings; and, as a rule, nine-tenths probably of the criminal and dangerous classes could have no existence but for this Traffic. Crimes of fearful daring and bloodshed are usually directly connected with this evil system. So, too, it is a fact beyond disputation that nearly all preventive means of crime and suffering are stultified by this Liquor-Traffic. It is the rock ahead of all social elevation and progress; and as its victims are shut up in gaols, or penitentiaries, lunatic asylums, or sent to penal settlements, or strangled on the ignominious gallows, it has in training a supply of men and women to take their place, and to be ready for every evil work. So that this Traffic and crime go on hand in hand; or rather, the one is ever most certainly and disastrously producing the other.

Now, it cannot be needful to attempt to prove what we have just asserted. Our daily journals, the reiterated declaration of magistrates and judges, have made them patent to all who are in any degree acquainted with society; nay, the secretaries and solicitors to the Traffic have affirmed that it is one of imminent moral danger, and that its extension would be fraught with a vast increase of vice and crime.

That it is cruel, as well as immoral, is equally self-evident. It is cruel to destroy or poison a nation's food. It is cruel even to increase the price of the poor man's daily necessary bread. It is cruel to invest a country's capital in a Traffic which gives the smallest remuneration to the labouring classes, while, if otherwise employed, it would give employment to hundreds of thousands who are at present in penury and distress. It is cruel to convey into the dwellings of our peasants and artizans the enemy, that will curse them, and render them pandemoniums of vice and misery. It is cruel to surround poor, weak, and depraved humanity with almost irresistible seductions to evil, degradation, and ruin. It is cruel to make paupers, and maniacs, and criminals. It is cruel to spread disease and suffering, and hurry men on to an early grave, to an awful judgment, and to final perdition; humanity, reason, and conscience all declare it to be cruel. The law and the Gospel equally condemn it. Try it by the rule of equity, by the ordinary principles of justice, and it is manifestly cruel. Try it by the love and goodness and mercy of the religion of Jesus Christ, and it is obviously cruel. Try it by the reciprocal claims of society, and it is wrong both to drink's victims and to the people necessarily accursed by it. Yes, and it is frightfully cruel to those engaged in it. What can compensate for the deadly evils which afflict the vendors of this liquor of death? Is it nothing to harden their hearts, to stultify their moral sense, to deprave all their emotions? Is it nothing