ment as to his supplies of butcher's meat, fowl, bacon, eggs, bread, butter, milk, and confectionery. He is ever in danger of having stale food left on his hands. He needs careful, skilful, economical cooks, with kitchen-maids and waiters; and watchful superintendence. But the mere liquor-seller never fears that his goods will spoil by keeping he needs a minimum of attendants, and no skill. If from a magistrate's house an old servant marries, the trade which he covets is apt to be that of a publican; and it is a common complaint, that a community has a drink shop forced upon it against its will, because a magistrate is resolved to reward some dependant by giving him a license.

One peculiarity of the trade is the length of time at the command of a seller of intoxicating drinks. By English law he may open at 4 o'clock in the morning and keep open, for 21 hours, until I A.M. of the following day; and on Sunday, when most other shops are compelled by law to close, his exemption from business is but partial. This might seem to make his trade very gainful. But the enormous competition which the law and the magistrates have allowed, at once keeps his house open, and deprives him of a large part of the advantage. Practically, unless he is himself a capitalist, as happens in some great spirit-shops, any excess of gain does but swell the rent which he pays to a brewer or distiller, or house-owner behind him. If we could believe the rumours of the trade, so sharp is the competition, and so insatiable the demand of rent, that no publican could make a living if adulteration were effectually stopped. But through the remorseless acting of competition, even adulteration cannot in the long run benefit the retail seller. Unskilled agency and light labour, under mutual rivalry, cannot hold

fast the gains of trade. They do but ooze out into the purse of the rent-receiver, probably some great brewer. Indeed, it is a belief widespread among enquiring and observant persons, that publicans oftener lose than make fortunes in their idle and monotonous life. Moreover, the occupation induces habits so unwholesome, that two publicans die for one grocer.

A second peculiarity of this trade is its tendency to lessen the power of the customer to judge of the articles supplied by it. Total abstainers (unless they happen to be converted drunkards) have no desire at all for burning or bitter liquors; but, except when some fine flavour overpowers that of alcohol, regard it as unpleasant. So far from being to them a necessary or a coveted aid to the stomach, it is not even a luxury. On the contrary, the habitual drinker soon becomes dependent upon the liquor, misses it if it be withheld, needs it to keep him in what he thinks his normal state, and fancies that without it he cannot get through the day. Moral considerations and strength of will may keep him from exceeding that modicum which he lays down to himself as sufficient. Happily, this is a true description of the great majority of drinkers: else we should indeed be a lost nation. Not the less is it certain, that in each successive cup the alcohol is tasted less and less; for it dulls the perceptions. The palate, throat, and stomach become less sensitive to it. Hence, on the one hand, many who think themselves moderate, and are never visibly affected in the brain by the amount of their drink, nevertheless drink an undeniably pernicious amount; on the other hand, a painfully large fraction of drinkers lose all power of moderating their potations. Frauds of the trade add, no doubt, to the terrible evil. It is said that salt is put into ale, various drugs into porter; all wines are

specially primed for the English market: but while the trade exists under competition, no superintendence of it by Government will succeed in suppressing such fraud, except by an outrageous public expense, and by a vast establishment of spies, very dangerous and wholly unconstitutional. After two drams of spirits the drinker loses discernment of all taste, except the burning taste; to it also he is duller than at first: and there is nothing so nasty but he will accustom himself to it, as the French to their absinthe. In trades which are not of primary necessity, it is unreasonable to expect Governmental inspection of the articles sold. The enormous expense and the vast patronage are sufficient objections: hence Caveat emptor is the rightful rule. The Saturday Review, a scorner of the Permissive Bill, in deploring female drunkenness, asks: Shall there be a medical inquisitor at every ball, an inspecting doctor in public places to measure the alcoholisation of sus pected fine ladies? to investigate Mrs. C.'s jollity, and to report if Lady D.'s manner is due to Eau-de-Cologne or fatigue? &c. &c.' One might ask why not, when policemen are set about every drinking shop to investigate whether poor men and women are jolly, frisky, half-seas over, or drunk? The expense is enormous, and corrupts the police; the problem is impossible. Yet Mr. Bruce recently wanted to load us with a new army of spies to inspect the liquor, of which the victims are inevitably such poor judges. For in 'drinking on the premises,' after one or two cups, the customer loses discrimination; indeed, every habitual drinker becomes accustomed to some adulteration, so as even to demand it. Wine merchants find that English palates reject unsophisticated wines, and that the usual cooking is indispensable. A very general result of these peculiarities of the liquor is, that the more a

man drinks, the more he is likely to drink. The tendency exists in all, and wins the victory over a fraction of mankind so large as to be a vast national calamity.

Concerning mere drink-shops, another peculiarity may be here deserving of notice: that no one, if he can help it, will ever endure such a shop near his own house. Let those who dread lest the Permissive Bill enact one law for the rich and another for the poor' have the candour to look this fact in the face. Some honest trades are physical nuisances, and are not permitted in towns. This is a moral nuisance, yet greater than physical, which no rich man endures. The squire or the peer does not wish his coachman to be made drunk, his horses ruined, the necks of his family broken; therefore, he keeps every such shop at long distance from his house. No magistrate in the kingdom-not one of those who force the shops on a reluctant public-sets one up side by side with his own house. All that the Permissive Bill demands is to destroy that cruel inequality between rich and poor, which refuses to a community of thousands self-protection against that from which every magistrate carefully shields himself.

Further, the drink-seller, in manifold cases, knows certainly that his customer is transferring to him money which is not morally his own to spend. Every married working man employs his wife as his cook

and housemaid. In these characters she has a right to wages from him, which must be paid before he has any right to mere indulgence of the palate. When he has children, they too have a prior right; and the mother, during her times of weakness, ought not to be worked. A labourer who neglects wife and children to gratify his appetite for liquor, is morally guilty, as though spending the money of another. It is quite impossible that the liquor

seller should be ignorant that in a vast number of cases he is enticing a man to the dreadful sin (if we may not call it crime) of defrauding those whom it is his first duty to cherish. No one can enter the trade ignorant of the fact that he will have to make his gains out of the misery and pauperism of neglected children and defrauded wives. Of course, as the law stands, he cannot be prosecuted as one who receives stolen goods, or connives at accepting stolen money; yet in countless cases the guilt is the same in species and immeasurably more cruel. Much less can any magistrate set up a public-house with new license, ignorant on what fraud to wives the publican has to live. Every man of common sense must be aware that if every married workman did his duty from his earnings to wife and children first, and spent on his love for drink only what remained, three quarters of the sales would be at once cut off. Undeniably, so many shops could not possibly be sustained except by the gross and heartless neglect of primary duty by scores of thousands of heads of families -neglect which should be called wickedness, only that it is a form of insanity. Into this insanity the drinkseller and the magistrate deliberately and knowingly entice them. Is such a trade deserving of tender consideration? Most notoriously it makes men sottish and worthless bad citizens, dishonest to wife and children, even short of drunkenness. For one drunkard there are five who spend their earnings wrongfully on drink. Men who would be quiet and peaceful, nowise blamable, are converted by the enticement of the drink-seller into immoral, ill-tempered, riotous, or dangerous characters. Hence orphanhood and pauperism, seduction of girls, foul vice and violent crime; wife-beating, wife-killing, broken hearts of wives, and insanity of drunkards.

Hence, in short, this trade makes

high wages a curse, years of plenty more disastrous than years of famine, holy days more corrupt than common days. It lies in wait for the children of the poor, when it cannot catch the parents; and there is nothing that self-controlled and rightminded parents feel more bitterly. If a rich man dies while his chil dren are young,' complained a small tradesman, 'they are kept from evil by guardians and tutors; but if my life were cut short, what could possibly keep my children from the drink-shop? Only by constant effort and care can I keep them safe now.' It is not at all rare that young people have been carefully trained by teetotal parents, yet when they reach the age of fifteen or sixteen, and can no longer be kept under a parent's eye, they are allured by company into the drink-shop, and morally ruined. At Manchester, less than two years back, such a youth, under age, got intoxicated in a gin-shop, and (as the law commands, for the comfort of those inside the sacred precincts) was expelled into the street after drunkenness showed itself. He drew a clasp-knife from his pocket, and stabbed the man who was ejecting him. The wound proved fatal, and he was hanged for it. His parents were total abstainers, and had reared him in a Band of Hope' and in the Sunday-school. At Leicester, in the last spring, a young man, in a state of intoxication, stabbed four men and one woman in the street. One of the men died of the wound in a quarter of an hour. When secured by the police he was found to have about 987. in his pocket. Many volumes would be needed to contain the mass of crime and misery printed under the head of Barrel and Bottle Work' in the columns of the Alliance News. Week passes after week, year after year, with no cessation or diminution of the ghastly columns, although temperance lecturers, temperance so