have been met by one gigantic evil that defied attack, and impeded progress in every direction. We have heard much lately of a certain socalled "social evil," as if the one intended to be thereby designated were the saddest and greatest over which we had to lament. Lamentable and

huge it indeed is, but it is dwarfed by the side of that greater and wider evil to which it is itself closely allied, and from which almost every other form of vice and crime directly or indirectly springs. Yes, I announce no new discovery; drunkenness is the chief curse of that great majority of the community which go by the name of the working and the lower classes classes most exposed to the temptations of intoxicating drink, and least provided with the means of resisting them. Resist! how can he resist? if you license for his seduction the temptation by which he is sure to fall, and surround him at every step he takes with the attractions of the public-house. You will hear with one accordant voice from every missionary labourer, amid the dwellings of the poor and depraved, that this is the great obstacle which they have to encounter. They will tell you that in those flaring gin-palaces (contrasting so luringly with the dark and wretched abodes in which its surrounding victims dwell) have been formed the habits and dispositions that are not only the parents of ignorance and crime, but the almost indomitable barriers to any measures that can be devised for enlightening the one or lessening the other. Nor is the obstruction to be found only among those whose character and career drive them at last to the workhouse or the gaol. The well-to-do artisan, the youth of our factories and workshops, the men who have become husbands and fathers, the women who have become wives and mothers; that portion, in short, of our working classes who have risen in the social scale as the heads and members of homes and families, are affected, more or less, in their lives and characters by their familiarity with the public-house. It is this that is their chief degradation, not their poverty. Poverty, indeed, may become the occasion of such heroic sufferance and elevated resignation as to lift instead of lower in the scale of humanity those whom it afflicts. In the neighbourhood of the cotton manufactories the spectacle may now be seen of thousands of the working classes submitting so patiently and forbearingly to sudden destitution as to make our admiration of their fortitude equal to our pity for their misfortunes. Yet of them even it may be asked, whether this destitution would have been so sudden or so wide-spread, if all that had needlessly gone into the hands of the publican had been sent to the savings' bank. Without disputing the propriety of the congratulations we have heard at assize and session, on the lightness of the criminal calendar in districts of the greatest poverty, may not the suggestion be well-founded that the decrease of crime is owing, in no small degree, to the decrease of its main incentive? May not the misfortune which has brought poverty have also enforced abstinence; the want of wages have stopped the supply of drink, and the supply of drink lessened, for a time, the harvest of crime? I speak from my own experience of many years' residence in a colony where wages were, at times, fabulously high; and at such times the calendar that came before me in my judicial capacity was invariably heavier than when

wages were lower. To a certain extent, indeed, the scale of wages seemed to determine the scale of crime, and induced me on more than one occasion to give expression to the opinion, that the so-called prosperity of the working classes meant in reality nothing more than the prosperity of the publican. To him, certainly, in Australia, fell the chief share; the return made by him to the State for his license to sell being about one hundredth part of the cost to its exchequer of the crime engendered by his Traffic. This remark is, indeed, applicable to the mother country. Those, in whose presence this address is read, are well aware how many of our judges have declared that three-fourths of the national crime may be traced, directly or indirectly, to intemperance. For myself, I assert, without fear of being charged with exaggeration, that, if the two colonies of New South Wales and Victoria could shut out the introduction of all intoxicating drinks, crime would be there almost unknown. Whether such a result would follow in this country, I will not predict; but who can doubt that if what is admitted to be the chief cause of it were to be entirely, or in great part, removed, the criminal part of our population would be insignificant compared with its present extent. And yet, in the face of this, we are told that no cause is made out for the interference of the Legislature. That drunkenness is the chief source of the crimes and vices of the British population, is a truth nowhere more clearly recorded than in that very statute book which is so loth to adopt the only true antidote against it.

What, for instance, can be a more emphatic acknowledgment of the consequences ascribed to it than is contained in the preamble of the act passed in the 4th James I., cap. 5, the words of which are as follow:"Whereas the odious and loathsome sin of drunkenness is of late grown into common use within this realm, being the root and foundation of many other enormous sins, as bloodshed, stabbing, murder, swearing, fornication, adultery, and such like, to the great dishonour of God and of our nation, the overthrow of many good arts and manual trades, the disabling of divers workmen, and the general impoverishment of many good subjects subversively wasting the good creatures of God," &c.

One would have thought that a Legislature using such language as this would have struck directly at the root of the evil, instead of being content with merely paring its branches or striving to stint its growth. The latter, however, was all it attempted; and hence arose a policy of toleration that has gone on year by year, adding contemporaneously both to the crime and the revenue of the nation, until the two seem to have become inseparable.

Unfortunately, the revenue thus increased has become a main source of supply to the national exchequer, and in that fact lies the secret, if secret it be, of parliamentary opposition to prohibitory legislation. The formation indeed of a budget, in the absence of the items I allude to, would truly be a formidable matter; but considering the national benefit to which such a budget would be the certain prelude, the difficulty were surely one which a Christian statesman should not be loth to encounter. It would be a difficulty, at all events, for which he need neither blush nor apologise ; and when the time arrives to face it, should the country be willing to

make pecuniary sacrifices for self-elevation, such as it is now making for self-defence-in order to strike powerless an internal enemy more to be dreaded than any foreign foe-if, in fine, it should have come round to the conviction that a nation's true glory consists more in its virtue than its wealth or power, no Chancellor of the Exchequer need fear to announce a deficit arising from the course I have supposed. Until that time arrives, we must be content to hear and refute, as we best can, the fallacy that "drunkenness is an immorality beyond the scope of legislative interposition!" If that which, for upwards of 500 years, has been the growing ulcer in the national health, infecting it with moral and physical disease, until pauperism and crime have become almost a recognised part of our institutions, is one beyond the province of the Legislature, what comes properly within it?

"What is it," said an American writer, thirty years ago, "that gives to civil government the right to interfere for the correction of the various evils that exist among men? Or, rather, what is it that makes it wrong— a plain omission of duty-for Government not thus to interfere? We can think of only three material circumstances. These relate to the magnitude, the extent, and the nature of the evil complained of. If it be small, limited, or private, although by no means clearly wrong, it is not clearly right or a duty for the Legislature to interpose. But in regard to the evils resulting from intemperance, it is evident, at a glance, that neither of these objections exist. Those evils are in magnitude enormous, in extent all-pervading, in nature public, and injurious to the community as a community. The almshouse and the penitentiary are standing and melancholy memorials of this truth, for drunkenness— we had almost said drunkenness alone-peoples them both. Yet of these institutions every good government feels itself bound to take peculiar care; and in nothing does our own free legislation more conspicuously exhibit its humanity on the one hand, and its judicious severity on the other, than in providing for the relief of the poor and the just punishment of crime. The objection in question involves, therefore, this singular principle, that while it is not only the right, but the duty and immemorial practice of the Government to see that poverty, actually existing, be not thrown upon the charity of a cold world, but find a sure refuge in the permanent establishments of the State; and that crimes, after they are committed, be visited with that degree of retribution which the public justice and security demand-this same Government cannot legislate preventively, concerning the acknowledged source of nearly all the poverty and crime in the commonwealth, without an arbitrary violation of its charter and of the people's right."

It is not, perhaps, just to say that our own Government has made no attempt to check this evil; but it is equally clear that all its attempts have been hitherto failures. Restriction of licenses-increase of dutiesimposition of penalties-encouragement of French wines-establishment of beerhouses have all in turn been tried, and all found ineffectual. The reason is obvious; in all these measures the selling of intoxicating drinks has been recognised as a trade to be regulated, instead of a nuisance to be suppressed. Till the Traffic itself be stopped, all other

checks will be found useless; so long as the sale is licensed, there will be buyers and drinkers, no matter at what cost. To convince the House of Commons of this truth may not be a quick or an easy work; but, thanks to the efforts of the societies which are taking part in this Convention, the task has lost many of its difficulties. Public feeling and opinion have been thoroughly aroused upon the topic, and the petitions that were presented last session, bearing nearly a quarter of a million of signatures in favour of a Voluntary Permissive Act, will render nugatory the principal objection that made the senate turn a deaf ear to anything in the shape of a prohibitory law-the objection that such a law was a violation of public liberty and repugnant to public feeling! That language can no longer be used in regard to the Permissive Bill. If the Legislature will not strike the blow itself, it can hardly refuse to allow it to be dealt by the British people at their own request. Such a boon will be but an addition to the privileges of those municipal institutions which have done so much for the advance of our country, and been so valuable a lesson to its people in the science of self-government. If, by an exercise of the powers they now ask to have conceded to them, they should succeed in putting an end to the Traffic in intoxicating drinks, they will effect a reform far more beneficial than Parliament has ever accomplished for them, and will secure a blessing for themselves and their country exceeding any within the power of either extended suffrage or vote by ballot to confer.

But here, perhaps, some will echo the too common cry, that such legislation is an attempt to make men moral by act of Parliament. Now, I am not sure if men could be made moral by act of Parliament it would be either very oppressive or ridiculous. But those who put this cry into our mouths know perfectly well that it is an excuse for not meeting us on the ground we really take. They belong to that class of antagonists who "show, by censuring what we have not said, that they cannot confute what we have." What we really say is this-that an act, whether of a voluntary or compulsory nature, which should have the effect of putting an end to the public sale of intoxicating liquors, will cause hundreds of thousands to be sober whom the Traffic alone now cause to be drunk; and that increased sobriety will be followed by increased morality; or, at all events, that the chief impediment to moral progress will be removed. This seems an

intelligible proposition enough, yet there is a portion of the press, as well as of the Parliament, which appears determined not to understand it, or to understand it only as a proposition to be ridiculed and contemned. Now, it has been truly said that, "except the affectation of unnatural and disproportionate seriousness in trifles, nothing can be more offensive than levity on subjects really serious and important;" and surely a more serious and important subject could hardly arise for consideration than what is admitted to be the great social curse of our age. Even if the remedy proposed for its removal seems to its opponents unattainable or impracticable, derision is hardly the channel through which that opinion should be conveyed. There is something of unseemliness, not to say irreverence, in speaking contemptuously of a cause in which great and good men have employed, and are employing, their best energies, and whose object, if attained, would bring a

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blessing upon our country beyond all that legislators or philanthropists have yet procured for it. Of this reformation it has been well said, that "whoever should be the author would gain with God an everlasting reward, and deserve of his country a statue of gold for a perpetual memory of so meritorious a work." The work now, let us hope, is fairly in progress, and let none who are engaged in it be deterred from its prosecution by any amount of ridicule or sarcasm, come from what quarter it may. Let not such epithets as Quixotic" or Utopian scare them from the path they have entered, nor let them pause in their career to attempt the impossible task of refuting a sneer. Well does Mr. Ruskin observe, that "Quixotism" and "Utopianism" are two of the devil's pet words, and that "through them, oftener than through any other, the purest impulses, and the noblest purposes, have been diverted or stayed." "Whenever," he says, "you hear a man dissuading you from attempting to do well, on the ground that perfection is utopian, beware of that man; cast the word out of your dictionary altogether. Things are either possible or imposible; if impossible, you need not trouble yourself about it; if possible, try for it. It is utopian to hope to give every child in this kingdom the knowledge of God from its youth; but the utopianism is not our business-the work is." It is very utopian to try for the entire doing away with drunkenness and misery; but the utopianism is not our business-it is our work. Small help can we as yet boast of from our statesmen and senators, but among the few there is one whose name is in itself a tower of strength to our cause, and a rebuke, as well as an answer, to the sceptical and fainthearted.

Let us not, then, despair of our work; it is one in which the State must follow if it will not precede; but follow it will when it hears the voice of the people clamouring with as much energy and determination for their great social, as they did, years ago, for their great political reform. For that they had a long and hard battle to fight, but triumph came at last, and triumph shall as surely be the end of the one in which they are now engaged. How long it may be in coming I will not venture to predict, but until it does England will in vain struggle to reach that moral ascendancy in which a country's highest happiness and truest glory consists; and without which all other kinds of pre-eminence are like so many points to attract the avenging lightning that, sooner or later, strikes down the power of the mightiest nation whose rise is unaccompanied by the observance of this fundamental truth.

Legislative Action and the Temperance Movement. By JAMES REWCASTLE, Honorary Secretary of the North of England Temperance League.

I

DESIRE, by way of introduction, to direct attention to the mutual affinity and correspondence between the operations of law and the general influences of civilisation. Their relations and tendencies are the same as is the position of the one, so of the other. Signs of progress