Average (annual cost) of four years, ending 30th September, 1850, £26,679; of which £21,344 is traceable to intemperance !" Dr BEGG adds, "The whisky shops florish with renewed energy on the pay days of the Parochial Board. To say that money will stop the progress of poverty under the present system, is as foolish as to maintain that water poured into a 'bag with holes' will fill it."* We add a few brief extracts from the Inspectors of other districts to show that there is but one opinion possible in view of the facts:

GREENOCK: "Number of poor for 1849 was 1,146. One-half may be traced, directly or indirectly, to intemperance."

CRIEFF: "If the effects of 'sprees' and moderate drinking be taken into account, seven-tenths of our pauperism is caused by drinking. A man in good circumstances last year became insane through drinking; 20 men, with one or two exceptions in good circumstances, were all cut off in the prime of life by intemperance, two dying in one day ;-as many were fast progressing to the same end."

FORFAR :-" Forty-two of the paupers have been of intemperate habits. About 58 widows and orphans have been left on the Poor's Fund by intemperate husbands and fathers. In consequence of early drunkenness, the constitutions of many men are nearly worn out by the time they are forty years of age, and when seized with distress they require immediate relief from the Poor's funds; and when any epidemic prevails, fathers speedily fall vietims, often leaving numerous and unhealthy children a heavy burden upon the public."

PERTH:- -"Of the 769 paupers, about one-half of intemperate habits. The proportion of Widows and Orphans left by intemperate husbands and fathers will be about three-eighths."

DUNFERMLINE :- -"Of the £3,900 expended on the Poor annually, about £1,100 may be traced to drunkenness." HADDINGTON :- 06 Were it not for intemperance, the Poorrates would soon be reduced to half the present amount." LARGS:"One third is rather below the mark." OLD DEER :-" One-half have been of intemperate habits but now want of money may be a check. Of the Widows and Orphans, two-thirds may be said to be from the effects of intemperance. The working class of this parish live in a state of intemperance to the extent of five-eighths."

GLASGOW (City Parish):-"I consider every Public-house a moral nuisance-a hot-bed of disease, crime, and destitution." (Govan Parish) : "Drunkenness has to answer for three-fourths of the Pauperism of both sides of the Clyde."

Mr D. MACLURE, of the Parochial Board:-"A spirit dealer in High Street informs me that he draws ten pounds more on the pay days of the Glasgow poor than on any other day of the week.'

* Social Reform. No. II. Edinburgh: 1851.

THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D., Author of 'Civic Economy,'"The Public-house is most deleterious, and by far the most abundant source of Pauperism."

$100. Is ENGLAND any better, in regard to Pauperism, than the Northern part of the Island? Not one jot, as the following facts and testimonies will establish :

On the 1st of January, 1855, the number of Paupers actually relieved was 850,453. Now, as to the chief cause of this, we have already recorded the deliberate judgment of a Parliamentary Committee (§ 6); and need only add some recent testimonies to show that things are, in this respect, little better than they were in 1834-if, indeed, the proportion of Paupers who are so from drunkenness, is not rather increased than diminished."*

Mr GILBERT A'BECKETT, in a letter to the Times, of the date of January 8, 1855, says :- "It has been alleged, on high judicial authority, that nine-tenths of the crime of the country is caused by intemperance; and enquiry would, I think, show that a vast proportion of the Poverty of the country has the same origin."

Mr MOTT, Contractor for the management of the Poor in Lambeth and other parishes, after examining into the history of 300 cases as they came before him, says "I found, in nine cases out of ten, the main cause was the ungovernable inclination for fermented liquors."

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Mr EDWIN CHADWICK, the Poor Law Commissioner, says: "My enquiries have extended throughout the Metropolis, through a considerable proportion of the counties of Berks, Sussex, Hertford, Kent, and Surrey. All the witnesses of considerable practical experience, when questioned as to the causes of pauperism, stated to me that the ungovernable inclination for fermented liquors, was one very considerable contributory cause. The Rev. G. HOLT, Chaplain to the Birmingham Workhouse, says:-"From my own actual experience, I am fully convinced of the accuracy of a statement made by the late governor, that of every hundred persons admitted into the Birmingham workhouse, ninety-nine were reduced to this state of humiliation and

*Mr HAWLEY, of Birmingham, informs us that in visiting the Paupers there, as one of the Guardians, he found no less than nine of his old shopmates, who had found their way to the workhouse through the public-house. The recent returns are as follow:Of whom were

Year er ding January 1st, 1856
Year ending

Receiving Poor Relief. 877,767

1855

850,453

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Able-bodied.

152,174

144,500

7,674

The pecuniary assessments for the year ending January 1st, 1856, were 8 per cent

higher than the previous year, viz:

Spent in Poor Relief ..£5,890.041

Spent in Management..£1,974,108

Total levied....£7,864,149....

Per Head....68. 3d.

Per Head....2s. l¿d.

Per Head....8s. Ald.

dependence, either directly or indirectly, through the prevalent and ruinous drinking usages of our country."

Mr MILLAR, Assistant Overseer of St Sepulchre's parish, London, says "By far the greater proportion of our new paupers are persons brought upon the parish by habits of intemperance. After relief has been received at our board, a great proportion of them proceed with the money to the palaces or ginshops which abound in the neighborhood."

The BOARD OF GUARDIANS of the City of Bath, recently report-"By the facilities afforded by the beerhouses for acquiring and confirming habits of intemperance, young men have been made vicious and reckless; fathers of families have become indifferent to domestic ties, and too often prefer squandering their weekly earnings in bad company to maintaining their wives and children in decency; in many cases families have been deserted, and left wholly chargeable to the Poor Law Union; while, in all, the profligacy thus engendered and fostered, tends to make father, mother, and children, ultimately dependent for subsistence upon parochial relief.”

Mr ARCHIBALD PRENTICE, the historian of the Anti-Corn Law League, says - "Three fourths of the Pauperism that falls so heavily upon us in Salford, is caused by drinking."

Mr PETFR FAIRBAIRN, the eminent Machinist, in his evidence before the Poor Law Commissioners, says :

"I employ between 500 and 600 men. According to my own observation, fully ten per cent of the men have their wives and children in attendance at the public-house. The poor women may have children they cannot leave at home, and these they bring with them. The wives are thus led to drink, and they and their children are made partakers at these scenes of drun kenness and riot. By the pressure of the wants created by habits of drinking, there is soon no means to purchase clean or respectable clothes, and lastly, no desire. The man, instead of cleaning himself, and appearing at church on Sunday, remains at home in filth, and in a filthy hovel. On the occurrence of the disease to which such habits expose him, there is nothing but the most abject destitution. I have served the office of overseer in Leeds three years, and having attended the weekly board, I have seen the end of this train of circumstances in the applications for relief from parties who had previously been in the receipt of good and even high wages. I have observed the whole train of these consequences in several large works in London, as well as in this town."

§ 101. Some special results of habits of intemperance may be named under this division of our subject.

Take, for example, from the middle ranks, or from the higher class of artizans,- -or even from professions,-the case of the death of a Father, through disease or accident, where the family is suddenly plunged into absolute penury;-or the case where the inebriety of one of the parents has more gradually reduced the household to distress and want.* The boys may rough it;

*The Memoirs of John Kitto, D.D., lately published, furnish an affecting illus tration of the neglect an poverty to which children are exposed through intempe. Tate parents. His father had gradually descended from respectability, in

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but what are the girls to do? They are, probably, unfit to perform any intellectual work, which certainly society has not been careful to provide. There is but one industrial resource open to them that of sewing-and by necessity, therefore, they go to swell that crowd of miserable beings who minister to the thoughtlessness and vanity of fashionable life, or who as the instruments of cheap shops' sustained by the selfishness of the mob, stitch at once a shirt and a shroud. These secondary victims of the Traffic, the Sempstresses and Milliners' Apprentices, first by mutual competition for a daily crust, beat down their reward to the minimum which will hold soul and body together,and secondly, when the crust cannot be lessened, their labor is strained and taxed to the utmost. Can we wonder that, within the charmed circle of such a Death-in-life, where hope is torpid within, and temptation potent without, that so many should fall?

Mendicity is another evil, flowing in great part from the Traffic, which in this case, as in that of Prostitution, acts and re-acts. It first creates the necessity which compels to beg, and then fosters the spirit of beggary which perpetuates the system.

No doubt there is a certain amount of mendicity of a transient character which cannot be traced directly to drinking. Sudden death will sometimes visit the sober husband, who has not had time to save; and his widow, after her goods are pawned, will beg rather than go to the workhouse. But it should be here recollected that the prevalence of professional or chronic mendicity is the great hindrance to effectual private relief in such cases, by the suspicion thrown over all beggary; and that the reluctance of honest persons to go to the workhouse is but the disgust to be numbered (even in thought) with the majority of its inmates-known to be the Traffic's Customers. A commercial crisis, a master's bankruptcy, or a strike, may come now and again, and cast numbers of operatives out of employment for a time. Save for the Traffic, however, these would seldom occur. Many of our agricultural poor, we concede, with large families, can not live on their wages without extraneous aid. With a Maine-law, however, we again assert, the wages of these men would inevitably rise. Allow, then, that of the mendicity of Britain, one-fourth has no direct connexion with the Traffic, what of the remainder ? (1.) As to its extent: Observations made at thoroughfares leading into 13 towns, ranging from Nottingham to Dover, shows that in one autumn day 783 mendicants entered those towns.*

consequence of drinking habits, until he finally lost social caste; and he who afterwards so distinguished himself as a Biblical Scholar, had, while a poor, sickly boy, to get a miserable and precarious crust by grubbing mong ashes for bits of iron-a Plymouth mud-lark. Afterwards he suffered much in the workhouse, and still more subsequently from the tyranny of a brutal master. Under Buch training, how few rise to virtue and distinction-what multitudes are tempted to vice and crime !

* See Edinburgh Review, July 1842. pp. 475-9.

In two-thirds of the cities and towns of Britain, while these vagrants were passing through, others in equal number were also subsisting on the almsgiving of others. Multiply this 783 by 2, then by 300 days of the year, and then by all the cities and towns of the empire; and how frightful will this social evil appear! (2.) As to the Revenue of these mendicants. It was found that the average receipts were 4s. 6d. per day, besides broken victuals and clothes. Often it was found that the head of the vagrant family stayed in the Public-house to enjoy himself and be out of the way of the police, while his 4 or 5 children ranged the town in different directions. When the day happened to be a good one' the supper was enriched with an extra pint or two of beer! Begging, it would seem, is the next profitable 'profession' to thieving, since a begging family will, taking the average, extort £60 per annum from the public; and the petty thief £100, and the educated' from £150 to £300 a year. There is, then, in the very midst of us, various wandering tribes-not lessening but increasing-tribes engendered in the mud of the Traffic-who live the most profligate and intemperate of lives-having a language, manners, and customs of their own. This population consists of Lurkers (whose art consists in getting up 'briefs' to play the various dodges of the Fire-lurk, Sailor's-lurk, Foreigner's-lurk, Accident-lurk, Sick-lurk, Servant's-lurk, Collier's-lurk, etc.); of High-fliers (or letter-writers); of Shallow-coves (impostors who go in coveys or schools, and earn most money; including the Shallow-motts, or almost naked women); of Cadgers (of the 'downright' or from door to door, and on the fly'); etc., etc. This population has its signs and free-masonry, its haltingplaces and Public-houses, and succeeds in extracting, by cajolery, or deception, not less annually than £1,500,000 out of the pockets of the public. They must 'pick up' a good deal of property, and prepare a great number of young persons for stepping over this border-line of beggary into the adjacent territory of crime. Necessity here, again, presses for some efficient remedy that will strike at the source.

While the temptations of the Traffic continue, our workingclasses will be kept poor, since their earnings are dissipated to a frightful extent at the Public-house. Rarely is anything put by for a rainy day'; and when a contribution is put into a club, the meetings being held at a Tavern, generally double the amount saved is squandered in the process of doing it! It is the public-house that keeps the poor man down.

The Rev. JOHN CLAY supplies some valuable statistics in the Appendix to the 'Report of the Select Committee on Publichouses,' 1853. Excluding the higher classes, youths, and teetotalers from the calculation, Mr CLAY finds there is in Preston one Alehouse to 28 working men and tradesmen ; and in Black buin one to every 25. This means, in plain English, that to