been uneventful. If they have never sunk to the point of collapse reached in the fifties, neither have they risen to anything like the numerical and moral success of Father Mathew's time. There have been unseemly quarrels in the ranks here and there, secessions and so forth, and some societies have undergone curious fluctuations. For instance, the Good Templars, who numbered over 200,000 members in England and Wales in 1873, appear to have sunk to 97,000 in 1879. I endeavoured a few years ago to obtain the data for something like an estimate of the total temperance roll-call at the present time, but without success. Accurate information is only forthcoming about a few of the organisations; all the rest is guess-work. The following figures were kindly furnished me by the Secretary of the Church of England Temperance Society, which I take to be by far the largest and most flourishing body:

The great preponderance of the juvenile section, which will strike the reader, holds good, and in a higher degree, of the temperance army generally. Its numerical strength is made up of children, who constitute four-fifths of the whole, according to Mr. Malins. This explains the discrepancy between its real electoral insignificance, as proved at the

general election of 1895, and the prodigious extent of membership claimed by its advocates. All the societies, including the friendly and other orders, appear to have large juvenile sections, and then there are the Bands of Hope, which run nominally into millions. But bearing this in mind, one must still believe that even so the numbers are enormously exaggerated. According to Mr. Malins, one person in eight out of the whole population is a teetotaler; other authorities, I understand, claim seven and a half million adherents to the cause, making the proportion about one in five. How does this agree with ordinary experience? For my own part, out of the many hundred men, women, and children I know in all classes of life, there are only two or three teetotalers. Where are the vast hordes of abstainers to be found? In what class of life? Certainly not among the poor, else what would become of the public-house? and just as certainly not among the upper and middle classes. I beg to suggest that a Parliamentary return on the subject would be useful in showing us where we are, and where the societies are, for at present nobody knows.

In making these remarks I would by no means be understood to imply a sneer at the societies. Their development of the juvenile work is wholly in accord with their original aim, which was rather to prevent than to rescue from vice. From the teetotal point of view, which regards taking a glass of liquor as putting one's foot over the edge of a precipice, nothing can be more efficacious than the

policy of keeping the young at a safe distance. On the other hand, those who disbelieve in the precipice theory, and think self-control the manlier and more moral aim, will consider organised juvenile abstinence as at best a doubtful gain. They will see in it merely a movement for making little prigs of the children of respectable parents, who are either in no real danger as it is of ever becoming drunkards, or, in so far as they are in danger, will not be prevented from succumbing, when they gain their liberty, by shackles artificially imposed in childhood. The question of juveniles is thus a matter of opinion; the gain may be denied or affirmed, but it cannot be proved either way.

Putting them aside, therefore, and coming to the comparatively limited operations of the societies among adults, I cannot find any evidence that their direct influence on the habits of the people has been at all important, with the exception of two or three special classes. Father Mathew no doubt produced a great and tangible effect, which was not altogether so transient as it appeared, and the general fall of the drink barometer during the height of the first temperance period was no mere coincidence, though other causes, as I have already shown, co-operated with the movement. But during the last thirty years the failure of the teetotal propaganda to capture any large section of the population is sufficiently proved by the statistics of consumption. The people have drunk more or less, according to the state of their pockets at

different times, but the net result has been to leave the general level of consumption almost unchanged. What has happened is that many of the grossest abuses of the traffic have been diminished or removed, and that there is more moderate and less excessive drinking than there was. If this had been the object of the societies they could claim a large share of the credit; but they chose to go upon total abstinence, and that has clearly failed in its immediate effects. In truth, they hardly touch the mass of the people at all. They are composed, for the most part, of earnest persons belonging to the middle and lower-middle classes, eminently respectable, and never in any danger whatever of falling victims to drunkenness. They are animated-to use Dr. Dawson Burns's words- by a desire not so much to benefit themselves as to do good to others'; and all honour to them for it. But the others refuse to listen to any appreciable extent, and the chief reason is that they resent the whole principle of total abstinence as a needless interference with one of the good things of life and an insult to their self-respect. The very name temperance' has long been a by-word among educated and uneducated alike by being usurped to cover a bigoted and selfrighteous propaganda from which everything temperate was eliminated. The Church of England Society stands out as having recognised this fact, which is known to every one save teetotalers; and its great and growing influence must be attributed. in a large measure to its moderate attitude. It is

one of the youngest of the societies, having been formed on its present basis in 1873, but it is already the largest, I believe, and by far the most influential. When its really temperate character is better understood, and it has shaken itself free from the damaging associations unfortunately connected in the mind of the public with the name Temperance Society,' a great extension of its activity may be confidently expected. True temperance should be, and indeed already is, a national cause; total abstinence neither is, nor seems likely to be.

Liquor Legislation.-Those who are accustomed to hear the liquor question spoken of as a thing terribly neglected by the Legislature may be surprised to learn that during the first fifty years of the late reign at least twenty-five Acts of Parliament were passed for dealing with some aspect or other of the traffic, exclusive of Inland Revenue Acts. Is there any other question which can show an average record of one Act every two years? Considering also the number of Select Committees of both Houses and Royal Commissions that have sat upon it, Parliament cannot be fairly accused of neglect. But, it is said, the legislation has been a failure. That depends on what was expected of it; and if its promoters did expect too much, those who are most anxious for fresh measures are hardly in a position to bring that charge against them, to judge from their own utterances. The Liquor Laws did not abolish drunkenness, and, if they were expected to do so, they were so far a failure; but some of them did