The Sun.
London, England, 1870-05-20 00:00:00

L ONDON, FRIDAY, MAY 20, 1870.

Yesterday we referred to the possibility of syste-
matically diminishing the aggregate amount of desti-
tution. This morning we have reason to comment
upon the clearly demonstrated possibility of diminish-
ing at one and the same moment—through one and
the same movement—the aggregate amount of both
crime and destitution. To assert this seems like
trumpetting a panacea. And yet to declare as much
as we have here declared, is to argue within
the range of actual, visible, appreciable demons-
tration. Reason as we may, we ourselves being
no teatotallers about total abolition being a
crotchet—there can be no doubt whatever that,
crotchet or no erotchet, it has done, is doing, and will
continue to do, a world of good to an immense num-
ber of men, women, and children in both hemis-
pheres. When advocates of this great movement
insist, as some of them do, in season and out of
season, that —if not " all the ills that flesh is heir to"—
all the crimes that lead to the police van and the
treadmill, to the hulk and the convict prison, to
toiling, like beasts of burden, among felon
gangs, to the solitary cell, to the condemned
cell, to the gallows or to the madhouse,
are, every one of them, more or less,
directly traceable to drink the assertion
thus comprehensively made is hardly in any respect
whatever an exaggeration of the actual fact. Home
sullenness, home neglect, home cruelty are engendered
by it always. Not in the majority of instances, but
as a rule, invariably. The family—imperceptibly it
may be at first, but inevitably and before long—very
appreciably becomes demoralized. Thrift is unknown,
as utterly unknown as comfort, and cleanliness, and
decency. The wages of the bread-winner are
frittered, and drained, and fooled away before
tho bread-winner can reach his miserable
home on the Saturday evening —are frittered, and
drained, and fooled away—Where? Why, in that half-
way house between the home ani the workshop—the
house always handily placed at the street corner, with
a swing door at each angle, so conveniently luring
the ever-welcome customer in at one side, to
let him out again (with dazed eyes and a
lightened pocket) at the other that house
with the plate-glass windows and the ivory-
handled beer-machine, in the glare of whose
gaslights every shilling spent seems at the time a
Splendid Shilling, like that sung of by one of the half-
forgotten poets of the last century. Has not GOUGH
told the wonderful story of his own wretched expe-
periences—told it with an eye of fire and a tongue
of soul-stirring eloquence, born from the pathos of his
long-wasted but, at last reformed life, not tutored
into " thoughts that breathe and words that
burn" by the art of the schools or by the
skill of the rhetorician? Has not the pen-
cil of another great champion of Total Ab-
stinence depicted the horrors called into existence
by the Demon Drink, has not the pencil of CRUM-
SHANK, with a power like that of HOGARTH, laid
bare the abysses of crime that are ready at every
moment to open at the aggsteriug feet of the drunkard,
and engulph him as hopelessly as the yawning earth
and flames engulphed the offending Israel-
ites? A hunndred years ago the famous
prints by WILLIAM HOGARTH depicting the careers of
the Industrious and Idle Apprentices adorned the.
walls of many a workshop and factory in England.