perance Reformers from other measures of an Imperial character, more likely to be carried, and of far more practical importance."

Now, parliamentary discussions show that the Alliance has done much to check the progress of intemperance and promote useful restriction, while the advocacy of Prohibition throughout the country has given a marked impetus to Total Abstinence. If there is any good measure more likely to be carried than Permissive Prohibition, the Alliance will cordially aid in obtaining it, while not abating one jot of its entire claim for immediate Prohibition.

8. "When the country is ready for the Permissive Bill it will not be needed."

This is the grand fallacy of the Times. However ripe public opinion. may be on this or any other subject, it will require to be armed with legislative and executive power to make itself duly felt. Many ages ago the country was ready for laws made against robbery, manslaughter, and incendiarism; and, alas! how needful are these laws still. A sense of the evil of a nuisance is not the same as the power to avoid its consequences, or remove it.

9. "It interferes with the liberty of the subject."

Liberty is power; and popular liberty would be vastly extended by conferring the power of vetoing the Traffic on the ratepayers. Many persons would be saved from degradation and imprisonment, and still more would be elevated in the scale of personal and social influence. No one should have the liberty of carrying on a business inimical to physical and social welfare. Offensive dunghills and cesspools, corrupt butcher's meat, stores of gunpowder in houses, pernicious chemical factories, overcrowded lodging-houses, and many other things are made illegal, because they are injurious to society; but, all put together, they are not a tithe so mischievous as the Traffic in strong drink.

10. "Many persons would be thrown out of employment."

Class interests, or apparent temporary interests, must always yield to the public or general welfare. When power-looms were substituted for our innocent and useful old friends, the hand-looms; when railways were constructed, and many other great improvements effected, a deserving portion of the community suffered, for a time at least, without any cry of pecuniary compensation being raised. Why, then, this extraordinary and sudden sympathy for the publicans?

11. "The Government would be deprived of a large revenue.'

It is a wicked and suicidal policy to derive revenue from temptations to vice and crime. History proves that as the consumption of strong drink has decreased, the public purse has been replenished. In the years of Father Mathew's greatest Temperance triumphs in Ireland, while the revenue from whiskey was immensely reduced, the total revenue had greatly increased. (See Dr. Lees' Prize Argument on Prohibition, p. 128.)

12. "You cannot make men sober by act of Parliament."

This is being done continually. The inmates of our gaols, houses of correction, &c., however drunken previously, are sober enough there. But the point really is, since the people are not naturally drunkards, why

should they be seduced into drunkenness by act of Parliament? We have an excellent law to forbid public temptations to licentiousness, in the form of obscene books, pictures, and the solicitations of prostitutes; should we not have a law to forbid temptations to intoxication, in the shape of gin-palaces, taverns, and beer-shops?

13. "Prohibition would lead to secret drunkenness."

Whatever there might be of this, it could not be nearly so great or so mischievous socially as the present amount of intemperance. Facts prove, what even the publicans themselves admit, that drunkenness, crime, pauperism, disease, and premature death, are in proportion to the number of public-houses. In many parishes, from which such houses are banished, drunkenness, pauperism, and crime are almost nil.

14. "Men's virtuous principles and self-control, under Prohibition, would not be so effectually tested."

Had we not better remove the fences from our factory machinery, railways, and ponds, that children, both small and of a larger growth, may be taught caution and self-government. Surely the Divine Father knows what is proper and safe for His creatures; and He deemed one test or temptation sufficient for his first two human children, though they were perfect. Certainly then, we, in our degenerate condition, have more than sufficient temptations, without liquor-shops.

15. "The rights of a minority ought not to be sacrificed to the will of a majority."

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By rights" we must understand convenience, because men have no natural right to carry on the Liquor-Traffic, but only a civil privilege, which as the State has granted it can withdraw. Unless a majority are allowed to rule in many cases, human affairs must come to a standstill. Except on this principle what legislation could be carried on in Parliament, where a majority of one sometimes decides a most important: measure? Either two-thirds or one-third of the people in a district must have the rule with respect to the continuance of the Liquor-Traffic. Which shall it be?

16. "It is better not to make laws which are sure to be broken."

Supposing that the mayor of any town were to summon the council, and suggest that since thefts and murders were increasing within their boundaries they had better petition Parliament to abolish the laws against stealing and strangling, would not the town councillors think that their chief magistrate had "got a bee in his bonnet?"

17. "One of the best methods of curing intemperance is to punish drink sellers and drunkards more severely."

The license law is strict. It enacts that a publican allowing drunkenness and disorderly conduct in his house shall be liable for the first offence to a fine of £5; for the second offence, £10; for the third £50. These penalties are heavy; but even the first is very rarely inflicted. How will the objector make the magistrate fine his own or his friend's tenant? There have been upwards of 400 acts of Parliament in connection with the Liquor-Traffic during as many years, and they have been enacted to so little purpose that it seems almost as impossible satisfactorily to regulate the Drink-Traffic as to regulate a mad dog.

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"A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit." As to drunkards they suffer very severely already through their debauched habits; the result shows that suffering is not adapted to reform them. The drunkard's cloak and the ignominy of the stocks have been resorted to, but there is still a numerous race of topers. Can anybody tell us of a complete punitive remedy? "An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure," says the proverb.

18. "Legal Prohibition would favour the rich and deprive the poor man of his pint of beer."

The working man, as well as his wealthy neighbour, might brew in his own house, for his own private or family use, under the reign of Prohibition. If the labouring classes were foolishly determined to have alcoholic wine or beer, they could by co-operation place themselves on a par with their richer fellow countrymen. But, in fact, it is the sons of toil who wisely desire that the public temptations to drinking shall be removed from their path. If the objector be honest, let him help the poor man to vote on the question.

19. "As it is the abuse and not the use of strong drink that does the harm, why should the common sale be entirely prohibited ?"

History proves that there is a tendency in the moderate use of alcoholic liquors to lead to an increased use. The appetite "grows by what it feeds on."

20. “As education advances the people will become temperate."

There would be force in this remark if drunkenness were confined to the ignorant and vulgar; but, alas, history and every day's experience prove the contrary. Poets, statesmen, philosophers, judges, professed teachers of knowledge and manners, as well as the rude rabble, must be reckoned amongst the continual victims of the bottle. Not long ago two provincial magistrates were brought before the London bench for drunkenness and disorderly conduct in the streets after midnight. Were these uneducated men?

21. "Religion is the only complete remedy for intemperance.'

Truly, "the blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin." Be it remembered, however, that we are only saved from outward evils by being guarded against their causes and occasions. Drunkenness is both a physical and moral condition, produced solely by the use of a physical agent and the temptations to the use of it. We can rationally expect the people, then, to be completely saved from intemperance, solely by the removal of the public enticements to it-the drink-shops. How many religious professors, and even ministers of the Gospel, have fallen through the influence of these? How many of our countrymen are kept away from churches and chapels by the same cause? True religion, which is perfect purity as well as love, demands the extinction of the Liquor-Traffic, as one of the greatest offences to God and curses to humanity.

22. "Parliament never yet passed any permissive bill that could bear the slightest comparison to the one now proposed."

Were this assertion quite correct it would still be a very strange objection. If Parliament is never to pass any perfectly new measure, how can it be truly progressive and representative? But the allegation is not

true. The proposed Permissive Bill is identical in principle with several permissive laws that have been enacted.

23. "If drink selling be so great an evil, it ought to have no voice in warding off its own punishment."

For the same reason that the law prohibits a brewer from sitting in Brewster Sessions, we might object to the liquor dealers having votes as to the continuance of their pernicious business. But does not the objector see that the liquor makers and merchants have certainly a voice now in warding off their own punishment, by opposing the imperial law of which he is an advocate?

24. "The Permissive Bill offers no ultimatum but the present system, or absolute extinction."

A singular objection to come from one who says "that drinking is a curse everywhere, and requires, if possible, to be destroyed everywhere alike." How can the Alliance, then, make any compromise with a Traffic which is essentially and universally mischievous?

25. "This bill supposes two antagonistic courts, the magistrates who grant the licenses, and the ratepayers who assemble to veto them; and this jarring, clashing system would be going on in perpetuity."

The case is not correctly put. Under the reign of the Permissive Law, if two-thirds of the ratepayers in any locality decided to have no publichouses, then no licenses could be granted by the justices, and this blessed immunity would continue until the people recalled it. The magistrates would only have to enforce the will of the ratepayers. We see no room for jar or clash at all.

26. "It is not likely that the magistrates will quietly surrender their licensing power.'

Many of them are very dissatisfied with the present system, and would gladly be freed from their responsibility; and those who are content with things as they are must yield to the force of public opinion. 27. "Would the Traffickers be found napping if any district was about to take steps to exorcise the drink and shut up every house that sold it? Fired with the liquor dispensed by the interested and enraged landlords, drunken mobs would be created, and there would be fighting, riot, and bloodshed; and, whichever side was victorious, this would constantly be repeated."

The storm of angry passions would be greater if the doom of the Liquor-Traffic had to be sealed at once and for ever by the Legislature. But are we to allow the wholesale destruction of our fellow-countrymen, lest we should provoke riot and bloodshed? On this principle we should give up the election of members of Parliament, for there are always riots in certain places when they are chosen; and the Gospel should never have been preached, either by the Apostles or by Wesley and Whitfield, when such uproars were occasioned by it! No drunken and furious mobs could effect a tithe of the mischief which the legalised Drink-Traffic it continually producing. A brief tempest is by no means so desolating as a constant pestilence.

28. "For so comparatively feeble a body as Temperance men to assume the character of a distinct political and parliamentary power, will result in disappointment."

The numerical, social, and political importance of the friends of a Permissive Law is greatly under-estimated. There are above 60,000 members of the Alliance, and large numbers outside of it who are favourable to its principle. The concentration of their influence, electorally, has already resulted in the return of some members to Parliament; has modified some of the mistaken measures of the Chancellor of the Exchequer—has awakened attention and originated discussion throughout the country-the natural preludes to a still more powerful and general result. The organisation of the friends of sobriety, order, and morals, into a distinct political power, is fully justified by the consideration that there is hardly any public question which has a more important bearing upon the welfare of the people than the suppression of the Liquor-Traffic. It is bound up with all their domestic, social, material, and spiritual interests. To seek, therefore, the speedy and satisfactory settlement of this matter is as much the duty of the true patriot, the genuine philanthropist, and the practical Christian, as of the Temperance Reformer.

The Policy and Prospects of the Permissive Bill Agitation. By THOMAS BEGGS, F.S.S.

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S the objects of this Convention are of a practical character, I propose to submit a few suggestions on the policy and prospects of the Permissive Bill agitation. I am invited to this course from having observed that an opposition has sprung up in quarters where it was least expected; an opposition which is active and somewhat vehement. claims of the Alliance are receiving from the general public a fair share of attention, and a majority of the men engaged in the different fields of philanthropic labour have manifested a deep interest in its progress. It was natural that the Traffic itself, as well as the interests which have grown up with it, and which now support and fortify it, should regard the Alliance with hostility, and little more could be expected from the press. It was hardly anticipated, however, that we should have to meet an opposition from the leaders of Temperance Associations, many of whom had assisted in our early struggles, and who are in some great degree responsible for the fact of our existence. If it be, as they assert, that our position is injurious to the Temperance cause, they assisted in gaining that position for us. I do not wish to upbraid them on that account with any inconsistency; I most cheerfully accord to them the right to alter their convictions, and to act upon those altered convictions. It might be well, however, if they would review the steps by which they have arrived at their present conclusions, and inquire whether our policy or their own is most calculated to retard the great work which it is the aim of all Temperance Associations to accomplish-viz., the annihilation of the drinking system.

It would be mere trifling to attempt to follow the objections urged against us from the quarters referred to-arguments founded upon the