The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-30 00:00:00

son officialS; by hospital nurses, by the keepers of
lunatic asylums. The evil is indisputably great and
real, but when we come to the important ques-
tion of how to deal with it, the case is by no
means so simple. History and experience have
invariably shown that forcible repression never
answers its purpose. So little has persecution
attained its object that it has grown to be a com-
mon sayingin a political disturbance that it will not
do to make martyrs of the leaders. If it was possible
to arrest crime, vice, and dissipation by legal
enactments we should live in a very different world.
There would be an end of burglaries and pocket-
picking, an end of fraudulent banks and bubble
speculations, an end of a good many things which
the well-wishers of their kind would soon put a
stop to if it were only necessary to fulminate
anathemas against them. But every practical man
knows that such a thing as the legal prohibition of
the liquor traffic is simply impossible. We have
heard that in the model State of Maine, the Utopia
of teetotalism, when a friend pays a visit it is
customary to direct him to open a little cupboard
in a dark corner. What he sees there of course
nobody knows, teetotallers best of all. We may
smile at such a result, but we may be very sure that
a legislation which encourages hypocrisy is no good
thing. Excessive severity invariably reacts on
itself. The excise laws produced smuggling,
the rigid Sabbatarianism of Glasgow which
forbids the sale of beer ends. by a con-
sumption of whisky, which is startling to out-
siders. Those who drink too much will always find
the means to obtain it ; no drunkard will be re-
formed by legal prohibition, and a large and profit-
able trade could never be suppressed by a statute.
The only persons to be affected by the " legal pro-
hibition" would be respectable moderate persons,
who know how to use the good gifts of life without
abusing them. But all these arguments would be
of more value if there were .any serious possibility
of such legislation being attempted, which is
simply out of the question. It would be
opposed to the whole spirit of English
law and government ; it would be rushing at once
to an extreme of despotic interference with the
liberty of the subject, which would be intolerable
even to nations under a political tyranny. If we
are to put a stop to every pleasure or traffic
which may be injurious when carried to excess,
we may as well betake ourselves to mother
earth at once, since food and drink, work and
sleep, study and pleasure may be all alike perverted
from the beneficial designs of the great Giver of all
good to bad ends and disastrous uses. The very
Alliance, whose proceedings we are now dis-
cussing, is a case in point. It shows us
how morality and philanthropy even may, if not
carried to excess exactly, be at least directed into
very foolish and unprofitable channels. When we
remember the great works that are hampered for
want of funds and active help, we cannot but re-
gret to see so much energy and money thrown
away on a hopeless cause, The members might
know if they have any experience of life that
drunkenness is as often the effect as the cause of
evil. It is the effect of vice, ignorance, degrada-
tion, and crime. The criminal class drink because
they are criminals, and find in that wretched re-
source some temporary oblivion. Little chil-
dren are brought up to drink as they are
brought up to swear, to beg, and to
steal, but the cure for this is not to shut up the
public-house, but to open the ragged school. Let
the friends of temperance stretch out the hand of
help to the lower classes—let them remember that
much of the temptation to drunkenness among re.

spectable artisans lies in the depressing influence of

bad air, bad water, overcrowding, and excessive
work on poor food. Such institutions as the Dis-
charged Prisoners' Aid Society for the assistance
and employment of convicts whose time is up, are
powerful enemies to drunkenness and crime, yet
this society has been obliged to shut up its esta-
blishment for want of means, while the Alliance coolly
proposes to raise £lOO,OOO for a visionary object. For
the satisfaction of the friends of humanity it may be
remembered that some few generations back drunken-

ness was as common among the upper and middle
classes as it now is among the lower. When the
public opinion of a man's own class is
against vice, it will gradually die out.

Unhappily exceptions will probably always
remain, but at least, so far as the lower ranks of

life are concerned, we may acquit ourselves of our
responsibility by providing better for their physical
welfare and moral training, rather than by taking
refuge in " legal prohibitions" which nobody will
observe.