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Lorsque le document est trop grand pour Atre reproduit en un seul ciich6, il est filmA A partir de Tangle supArieur gauche, de gauche A droite, et de haut en bas, an prenant le nombre d'imagas ntcessaira. Les diagrammes suivants illustrant la mtthoda. b/ errata nad to lent une pelure, fapon A 1 2 3 32X 1 2 3 4 5 6 THE OLD VICE AND THE NEW CHIVALEY. BY I. TEMPLETON-ARMSTRONG. *' He th( i is drunken, hath lost the reins, Is outlawed by himself." " The man who shall invent a really efficient antidote to this system of voluntary and daily poisoning, will deserve a high place among the benefactors of his race." TORONTO: WILLIAM BRIGGS, 78 & 80 KING ST. EAST. 0. W. C0ATE8, MONTRRAL, QiiR. S. F. HUESTIS, Halifax, N.S. . 1884. 145 Entkred. BcconUng to the Act of the FwliamcBt of Canada in the year one thouaand eight hundred and eighty-four, by L Tkmplkton-Abmstromo, in the Office of the Minister of Agriculture. THE KNIGHT ERRANT. Though he lived and died among us, Yet his name may be enrolled With his knights whose deeds of daring Ancient chronicles have told. Still a stripling, he encountered, Poverty, and struggled long, Gathering force from every effort, Till he knew his arm was strong. Then his heart and life he offered To his radiant mistress — Truth ; Never thought, or dream, or faltering, Marred the promise of his youth. • So he rode' forth to defend her, And her peerless worth proclaim ; Challenging each recreant doubter Who aspersed her spotless name. . , i: I'g wiiff A~~ . s . .- . -; ,. , I. ii < ti, »r . 7 i ' - -v , vi) First upon his path stood Ignorance, Hideous in his brutal might ; Hard the blows and long the battle Ere the monster took to flight. Then, with light and fearless spirit, Prejudice he dared to brave ; Hunting back the lying craven To her black sulphureous cave. Followed by his servile minions. Custom, the old Giant, rose ; Yet he, too, at last was conquered By the good Knight's weighty blows. Then he turned, and flushed with victory. Struck upon the brazen shield Of the world's great king, Opinion, And defied him to the field. Once again he rose a conqueror. And, though wounded in the fight, With a dying smile of triumph Saw that Truth had gained her right. ( vii ) On his failing ear re-echoing Came the shout around her throne ; Little cared he that no future With her name would link his own. Spent with many a hard-fought battle, Slowly ebbed his life away. And the crowd that flocked to greet her, Trampled on him where he lay. Gathering all his strength, he saw her Crowned and reigning in her pride ; Looked his last upon her heauty, Raised Lis eves to Qod, and died. r' OF SCr^RBORO PUBLIC LIC'^ARY. P h THE OLD VICE AND THE NEW CHIVALEY. CHAPTER I. *' Wine ia a mocker, strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise." — Solomon. "Wine produces disorder of mind, and where it doe? not cause drunkenness, it destroys the energies and reir che faculties of the soul." — St. Chryaoatom, SOBER LIFE" is one of the first things prayed for in the Liturgy of the Church of England, and one of the last things any one is likely to obtain by pi^ayer alone. The old Roman husbandman was taught to pray for a plenteous harvest with his hand upon the plough ; and if the world is ever to be liberated from this master curse, it I 10 THE OLD VICE must be by the instrumentality of those who have learned to live as they pray. " This kind can come forth by nothing but by prayer and fasting," is true in our day, of the demon drink. Cardinal Manning, in an article written a short time since on the " Salvation Army," remarked that " The Army " could never have existed but for the spiritual destitution of England; and in like manner we may say that the Temperance movement has been created by the magnitude of the drink curse, and continues to exist as the outcome of a great necessity. It is not a question of what God wills, but of what God's creatures will ; and when perplexed and anxious men and women ask with wonder, What can be done to remedy this great evil ? the answer undoubtedly is, just what you are willing to do. The friends of temperance are accus- tomed to the variations of the teetotal barometer — periods of enthusiastic zeal, when the speedy downfall of the liquor system is confidently pre- dicted, followed by periods of torpor, the tide having ebbed away, leaving the condition of things very much as before. The evil to be re- AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 11 moved does not require less zeal, but rather zeal, backed by more sustained, earnest effort. Tem- perance is, if anything, over-organized and officered if the machinery in existence be com- pared with the membership of the body, while the soul that should energize such a society has been but feebly manifest. When we consider the history of intemper- ance, and the efforts that have been made for centuries to curtail the mischief resulting from it, with the comparatively poor results we are honestly able to chronicle, as the outcome, of all our effort, the magnitude of the evil, and the difficulties in the way of the reformation so sorely needed, are brought home to us. Drunkenness is as old as history. No race or age seems to have escaped its influence. Taking the Bible as our oldest literature, we find that Noah, the tenth in descenv/ from Adam, planted a vineyard. Whether in ignorance of its properties, or otherwise, we are not informed, he drank, however, of the juice of the grape to his own shame, leaving a sad record of the " mock- power, even over a good man. The Jews er's " 12 THE OLD VICE have a legend which was old in the days of our Lord, according to which we learn that, " When Noah planted a vineyard, Satan came and en- quired what he was doing. 'Planting a vineyard,' was the answer. ' What is it for V Satan asked. Noah answered, * The fruits, green or dry, are sweet and pleasant, and from them we make wine to gladden man's heart.' * I should like to have a hand in the ^V 'ng,' said Satan, and Noah having conspnv t ' oan brought a lamb, a lion, a pig, and ape, i nd killed them in the vineyard and let their blood run into the roots of the vine. From this it comes that a man before he has taken wine is simple as a lamb, which knows nothing, and is dumb before her shearers; when he has drunk moderately, he grows like a lion, and thinks there is not his like ; if he drinks more, he becomes like a pig, wallowing in the mire; and if he drinks still more, he becomes like a filthy ape, falling hither and thither, and knowing nothing of what he does." In the very earliest times, when men had only learned to bow in fear before the Unseen, the fermented juice of the soma, or AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 13 moon plant, was one of the chief offerings, the gods were supposed to denght in. Homer makes Hector decline the cup offered him by his mother for this reason : — " Far hence be Bacchus' gifts ! Inflaming wine, pernicious to mankind. Unnerves the limbs and dulls the noble mind. - Let chiefs abstain, and spare the sacred juice, To sprinkle to the gods its fitter ?t8e." Drunkenness in Egypt had gained something like national proportions long before the time of Joseph. The imprisoned cupbearer, who told his dream to Joseph, mentions that it was his office to press the fresh grapes into Pharaoh's cup, and give the cup into Pharaoh's hand ; but that the juice of the grape was used after fer- mentation, as well as before, is only too clearly shown by the pictures we have of Egyptian feasts. " Even women are seen in them with the doubled up lotos flower, the sign of drunken- ness, hanging over their arm, or led out, offe,n- sively sick, by a female slave. Nor are men more temperate, for one is shown, as he is being carried away, resting on the heads of three It I 14 THE OLD VICE slaves ; while another is being taken home in a similar condition, his head resting on the chest of one slave, his heels on the shoulder of another. Workmen had rations of bread and wine allowed them, and there was a fixed allow- ance of two kinds for the priests. At the town of Bubastis, on the edge of Goshen, a yearly carnival at the great sanctuary of Pacht or Sechet attracted often seven hundred thousand people, who drank more while it lasted than they did all the year besides. Another similar festival was held yearly at the temple of Hathor, the goddess of love, at Dendera, which bore the significant name of the drinking feast, the goddess herself, bearing among other names that of " the goddess of drunkenness," or even "the drunken." "The people of Dendera are drunk with wine," says an inscription, speaking of this feast. Rameses III., in his record of his gifts to the gods, reminds those of Thebes that he gave them numberless vineyards, and many gardeners, from the captives of all lands, to cultivate them, and this he repeated to those of i AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 15 other parts, nor did it hinder his adding gifts of nearly two hundred thousand jars of wine to the various temples. Where wine and its use were divinely sanctioned, no class could well be prohi- bited from it. Tradition, ever active in giving celestial origin to strong drink, has assigned the introduction of the art of making " beer " to Osuris, the divinity of Egypt. The Egyptians, it is said, made it first for the common people, from motives of benevolence, that they too might taste the gifts of the gods. Drunkenness was indeed in the end as strongly denounced as among ourselves. A drunkard was called "a temple without a god," or "a house without bread," and men were earnestly warned to shun indulgence. Yet too many drank till " they knew nothing, and could not even speak." Art was employed then as now to make in- dulgence less repulsive, associating beauty with beastliness, in the hope of lessening the defor- mity of vice. The drinking cups of the Egyp- tians were often very costly. They were made of gold, alabaster, fine glazed clay, or glass, and ]l 1 : I ! 16 THE OLD VICE were often of the most beautiful shapes and the finest workmanship. If there be any virtue in antiquity, this move- ment may lay claim to it. It is as old as his- k ry, as modern as yesterday. On every page of the great volume of the past the student may trace the struggles of mankind with this insid- ious and bewitching foe. On the walls of stupendous Egyptian temples you may read the hieroglyphic history of twenty-five dynasties of kings, all of whom drank of the juice of the grape, pressed by Pharaoh's butler, into the cup before the king. You may read it in the poetry of Greece^ the wisdom of Solomon, the teaching of Socrates, the masterly measures of Isaiah, or the philosophic exhortations of Plato. By the laws of Solon, a chief magistrate found drunk, was punished with death. From Plato we learn that, by the Carthaginian law, " no sort of wine was allowed to be drunk in camp, or anything save water, and every judge and magistrate was obliged to abstain entirely from wine, during their period of office." Lycurgus tells us slaves were made drunk, i i,f AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 17 and exhibited in this condition before the youth, in order to inspire in them abhorrence of drunk- enness, as something wholly beneath the dignity of free men. Roman women were forbidden by law even to taste wine, and it is indicated that husbands kissed their wives, to ascertain whether this law had been observed. Pliny ascribes this prohibi- tion to Eomulus, and mentions two cases in which women were put to c'eath for a breach of it, and a third deprived of her dowry The standard of morals then, as now, required greater purity and fidelity from women than from men. For centuries, wine in Greece and Rome was withheld from women, from persons under thirty years of age, and from the admin- istrators of the law during the time of the em- pire. Gradually these salutary laws became greatly relaxed, and in the decline and fall of Greece and Rome, intoxicating liquor played no inconsiderable part. The worship of the Bona Dea — a divinity worshipped by Roman women — originated in the violation of the law forbidding women to touch wine. 2 \% !• I 18 THE OLD VICE The story is to the effect that, a Roman lady found a cask of wine in the house, and was tempted to taste, then drink, and finally became intoxicated. Her husband was so enraged in consequence of so deep a dishonour, that he exercised his authority as a Roman, and had her scourged to death. Reflection brought with it keen remorse, and he determined to pay her divine honours. Her festival was celebrated on the first of May every year in the house of the Consul or Prsstor, as the sacrifices were offered on behalf of the whole Roman people. A cask of wine was always placed upon the altar dur- ing the rites, in memory of their origin. It was vain to expect temperance in women, when men had forgotten the old Roman virtues, in the strength of which Rome had become the mis- tress of the world. Women being, after all, but human beings, are capable of being influenced by example, and when men became drunkards, women were not long able to withstand the evil JLfluence surrounding them. When a great people become addicted to any vice, they must of necessity become corrupters of others. Rome, AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 19 H: like England, introduced her vices where she introduced her laws. Barbarian tribes were not slow in copying the sins of their conquerors, and Roman Provinces soon became a reflex of the vices as well as the virtues of their masters. Beyond doubt we have an evil ancestry in the matter of intoxicating liquors. Among our rude forefathers in their German forests there ex- isted the grossest intemperance. They divided their time between drinking, gambling, and fighting. Tacitus tells us they gloried in passing whole nights and days in eating and drinking, the blood of friends and relations often staining their drunken assemblies. "* As they became more civilized, instead of be- coming more sober in their habits they only craved for finer liquor, and more refined methods of indulging the same vice. They turned their attention to the rich vine-growing districts of Italy, and as they knew no delight greater than victory in war, and drunkenness in peace, vast hordes swept over the plains of Lombardy, im- pelled by no desire to colonize and become a Hi ! ■i tJ 1 If M i - il 20 THE OLD VICE great people, but to gratify barbarous passions by methods equally barbarous. As they lived, so they died. Many tribes believed in f, kind of future state, where brave warriors would re- ceive honour among the gods for their earthly vic- tories, and live on in a state of immortal drunk- enness. Wine subdues the strongest. Tacitus tells us how the Germans indulged their love of strong drink until they became the scorn of the Romans. "Indulge their love of liquor," he writes, " to the excess which they require, and you need not employ the terror of your arms, their own will subdue them." (Europeans have practised the same policy with regard to the Indians of North America, and with the same result.) When they met in their assemblies^ they met in arms, and, inflamed with faction and strong drink, bloodshed often followed We inherit the germ of our drunkenness, and our popular government alike, from our bar- barous ancestors — perhaps courage should be added. Rude and savage as they were, they were brave, even their women were respected as the free and equai companions of soldiers, as- ^' ii III AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 21 sociated by the marriage ceremony to expect a life of toil, of danger, and of glory. Fainting armies of Germans have more than once been driven back upon the enemy, by the generous despair of women, who dreaded death much less than servitude. A brave ma-; was a worthy favourite of their martial deities; the wretch who had lost his shield was alike banished from the religious and civil assemblies of his country- men. The history of strong drink can be traced down the stream of human life to the present day, and in every age the burden of the story is one of sadness, shame, and suffering. Intemperance exceeds all other vices in the comprehensiveness of its devastations, and is, beyond doubt, the most authentic incarnation of the infernal principle. " Down the throat of this monster w^retchedness is constantlv whirl- ing and calling upon delirium to help it.' De- lirium is not slow to answer the call, nor death to follow, and the blackness of darkness rolls over the slain. pi i' ■ 1 1'f ? 1 I 4 if ^^iT' CHAPTER 11. *'Not by flattering our appetites, but awakening the heroic that slumbers in every heart, can any Religion gain followers. " — Carlyle. ** We cannot fight the French by three hundred thousand red uniforms, there must be men in the inside of them. " — lb. "When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house, if any man fall from thence. — Moses. IHE early inhabitants of Britain, it seems, had acquired the art of brewing intoxi- cating liquors before the Roman Eagles were planted upon the soil. Six hundred years after the birth of Christ, drunkenness had be- come an established British vice. In the dark- ness of the human mind, as to the future of the race, we can imagine the Roman world steeped^ indeed, in intoxication, but the uttermost depths of their degradation we are now unable to fathom. The heathen world was a world of death One inscription runs : " I was not, and ■i I n 1 1 : !: I'; (, i ) i i I If f i 11 24 THE OLD VICE became. I was and am no more/' and on the gravestone of a soldier of the 5th Legion, we read : " So long as I lived I gladly drank ; drink ye who live." Drunkenness was the shame of the Church, notwithstanding her exalted teach- ing and heavenly prospects. Cyprian, Augustine, Chrysostom, and other fathers of the Western and Eastern Churches were compelled to lift their voices against the vice of the Christians. Drunk- enness could scarcely be considered a crime, when men with comparitive impunity steeped their senses in liquor in honour of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Apo?^Ies. Festivals in honour of martyrs were degraded into scenes of riot. Ecclesiastical canons of the fourth century forbade any ecclesiastic to visit taverns, and by the Justinian code, monks found in such places were liable to civil punishment, and exclusion from their order. Clement compares the man who drinks to excess to " a ship absorbed into the abyss of intemper- ance, while the helmsman, the understanding^ is tossed about in the billows, and dizzy amidst the darkness of the storm, misses the harbour AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 25 of truth, steers toward that of pleasure, and striking on sunken rocks, makes miserable ship- wreck." The greatest poet of the early Church, Aure- lius Prudentius, born in the fourth century, bewails the growing licence of that early day. How deep the evil had then become may be gathered from his indignant interrogations. " Has vile outlandish inebriety carried you, buried in these excesses, to the sweltering stews of indulgence ? Has a tipsy dancing girl, bent to her will the men whom neither furious wrath, nor idolatry, could overcome by force of arms ?" Gibbon mentions the regret of the founder of the Benedictines, that the intemperance of the age compelled him to allow his disciples half a pint of wine a day, — a moderate allowance com- pared with another rule, that clergymen shall not exceed five pounds of wine yer diem. One monk is said to have deplored the fact, that there were sorts of wine, of which enough could not be drunk to produce intoxication. The clergy, though held to be divine as an !). ii, ■; r ,w IP nmi iMiniwr^jmLMLi.,, 26 THE OLD VICE order, were as frail in their individual aspect as common mortals ; as ambitious, as worldly, as licentious, as wicked, as much needing the restraint of law and the policeman, as their secular brethren, perhaps needing it more. Boniface, an Englishman who became famous as the apostle of Germany, said of the English Bishops of his day ( A.D. 670 ), " that so far were they from punishing drunkenness, that they were guilty of it themselves." In the reign of Edgar it was urged that " priests guard them- selves against drunkenness, and reprehend it in others." Theodorus, in his book of Penances, puts a clerk guilty of drunkenness on bread and water for two weeks, and a Bishop five weeks. Archbishop Anselm orders in his Canons, that priests shall not go to drinking matches, nor drink to "pegs," whence we learn that St. Dunstan, to limit drinking, had ordered that pegs should be placed in drinking cups, so that each person might only drink what liquor lay be- tween the pegs. The expression " to take down a peg " had its orign in this custom, meaning to abate a man of his liquor. AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 27 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, "glutton masses" were held several times a year to the scandal of public decency. Even after the Reformation, the sale of liquor was carried on in some of the town churches to de- fray the current ecclesiastical expenses. The law obliges people in England to this day, to contract marriages before twelve o'clock noon, a law that can be traced back to the intemperance of our ancestors, who dined at twelve, and drank so deeply with that meal, that they were considered incapable of transacting matrimonial business after that hour. The law, therefore, compelled them to marry before dinner, that they might if possible be married sober. Health drinking is a relic of these dark times. Health drinking, and pledging, came in with the Danes, and bear witness to the unsettled state of the times. Men pledged one another that, while the right or sword arm was raised with the cup of liquor, comrade might protect com- rade from danger. Waes hael was the challenge and drink hael the response of our tipsy ances- tors. ?-> w 28 THE OLD VICE III Friar John, and Friar Tuck, need not have been imaginary pictures, but rather a tender handling of real history. Marmion's proposed guide, was neither better, nor worse, than many historical characters, that might be mentioned. *' Friar John of Tilmouth were the man, A blithesome brother at the can, A welcome guest in hall and bower, He knows each castle town and towere In which the wine and ale is good 'Twix Newcastle and Holyrood. " The whole body of the clergy, from Pope to hedge priest, are painted, as busy in the chase for gain : " Bishops and Abbots purple as their wines." A priest of these dark days is repre- sented as singing — " Die I must, but let me die drinking in an inn, Hold the wine cup to my lips sparkling from the bin, So when angels flutter down to take me from sin, Ah ! God have mercy on this sot the cherubs will begin. " Friar Tuck's song, after this, seems to be less a work of imagination than a photograph of the age. " The Holy Clerk of Copemanhurst," sings for his guest's entertainment — m AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 29 ** He's expected at night, and the pasty's made hot, They broach the brown ale, and they fill the black pot. ********* Long flourish the sandal, the cord, and the cope. The dread of the devil and trust of the Pope, For to gather life's roses, unscathed by the briar. Is granted alone to the Barefooted Friar." The Bishop of Durham, in 1220, forbade priests to announce drinking parties in the churches. The Bishop of Coventry, in 1237, forbade priests to go to taverns or to be tavern-keepers. In 1240 the Bishop of Worcester forbade priests to go to drinking matches. These prohibitions might be multiplied by hundreds, standing on the page of history, as sad and terrible wit- nesses of the prevalence of the evils they de- nounce. King John died of drunkenness, a death in keeping with his life and his times. His court was a brothel, where his daring impiety was only equalled by his craven superstition, his undoubted ability serving but as a torch to reveal the greatness of his fall. " Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John," was the terrible verdict of his contempo- raries, and has passed into the sober judgment of history. ■K:'i 'A ' \ V-l I I •If ;i' I < 30 THE OLD VICE Notwithstanding this dark picture of English life, — and English Church life, too, — there were good and noble men in the Church, and the Church, with all her faults, was the one earthly protection of the poor. Women blessed the saints, not without cause, for the shelter of re- ligious houses through periods of license, intem- perance, and foul living. Bad as our own age is, it is pure compared with the impurity of the past; and if we have not learned more virtue, we are forced to be more decorous in our vice. The abuses of these dark times foiled the ener- gies of the noblest men of that age. But, hap- pily, the sheer weight of universal necessity, called into existence a noble band of missionary brothers, devoted to God and mankind. The preaching friars of St. Dominic and St. Francis sprung into life. The life of St. Francis falls like a stream of tender light across the darkness of the time. He took Poverty for his bride, and gave himself up to God and the poor with passionate devotion. The coming of the friars was a religious revolution. They lived for the poor and among AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 81 the poor; they preached and toiled among the plague-stricken and leprous, and while they re- tained their purity, were living witnesses for God in a world that had forgotten Him. But they, too, fell from their steadfastness, were drawn into the general whirlpool of corrup- tion, and ultimately swelled the stream of the Church's unrighteousness. Piers Ploughman, in his vision, tells us how evils attack the Church and mankind. Envy, pride and sloth, helped on by the friars, besiege Conscience. Conscience cries on Contrition to help him, but Contrition is asleep, and Conscience, all but de- spairing, grasps his pilgrim staff and sets out to wander over the world till he find the Saviour of men. When Piers Ploughman's vision was being read all over England, John Wycliffe began his great work as the father of the Eng- lish Reformation. The Church and the world has passed through many changes since the days of Piers Plough- man's vision on the Malvern hills. The Church has been reformed, she has been purged of gross abuses, she has been divided and sub- l :i ( M '5 I "i '. ' ^ A ;i m" 32 THE OLD VICE m f divided, if such phrases are admissible. We have had our Latimers and Cranmers, our Hoopers and Ridleys, our Puritan Fathers and Pilgrim Fathers, our Wesleys and Whitefields, Friars Catholic and Friars Protestant, and an in- numerable host of godly men and godly women; and what is the result ? We are not openly grossly wicked ; our clergy are not drunkards ; oiir legislators are generally respectable, and often able and eminent persons ; the Church is even active and theoretically sound on the drink question and other moral questions, and yet practically so apathetic that the enemy has it quite his own way. We have plenty of law on the Canadian statute-book, but without public opinion to give effect to it. The ministers of religion are much in earnest on this question, but the great body of the people lag behind. Cold, sel- fish, calculating worldliness seals men's lips, and their pockets and their influence. They are fat and flourishing, prudent and prosperous, sleek and comfortable, with plenty of faith in dollars and none at all in enthusiasm and devotion to AND TI Z NEW CHIVALRY. 33 national moral aims. The law of the land and the law of the Church may be most excellent, but they must be made the law of the con- science by earnest, persevering, persistent en- forcement, if any good is to come of it. Intem- perance has destroyed millions of the English- speaking race, and is destroying thousands in Canada to-day. Drunkenness, and drinking habits of every degree have prevailed as a vice of the English race for over twelve hundred years, and what is the result ? Great Britain, while the foremost commercial country in the world, is cursed by an army of paupers, crim- inals and lunatics, which must be counted by hundreds of thousands, while statesmen, phil- anthropists and churches are baffled in the presence of evils so vast, and so deplorable. The same habits will produce the same re- sults in this country, — nay, is already producing them, — and this young country — this Greater Britain, with all the future for her heritage — is in danger of being made dark in her very dawn of life and vigour. " Drunkenness " has been pronounced by Mr. Gladstone " the measure of 8 I 1' 1 1 ^i: ^1 H \ 34 THE OLD VICE P'. -^ our discredit and our disgraj^e " in the old coun- try, and the same may be said of every Christian country in the world. Drunkenness is not only the cause of crime, but it is a crime. To en- courage drunkenness for the sake of gain, is to be guilty of moral assassination, as criminal as any that has ever been practised by the bravos of any land under the sun. The State is guilty of assassination, in facilitating the means of temptation ; the liquor-seller, in making his liv- ing out of what is black ruin to his customers ; and, the whole people are implicated, inasmuch as by the exercise of a free, fearless vote, they might become the saviours of their country. Richard Gobden, declared, more than twenty years ago, that the temperance question lay at the base, of all social and political reform, and a few months ago John Morley, in addressing the electors of Westminster, gave it as his opinion that, the spread of temperance principles, was among the most important questions of the day in England. The same is true in the United States and Canada at this hour. We cannot shut our eyes to the misery inflicted on the in- bon and sayj 3un- itian only ) en- is to al as ravos ;mlty as of is liv- mers ; smuch i, they mtry. wenty lay at and a ig the pinion s, was he day [Jnited cannot the in- AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 35 nocent and the helpless by strong drink. Dean Stanley used to tell in Westminster Abbey of two Edinburgh children homeless and helpless, because the drink fiend had extinguished com- passion in the hearts of their parents, and finally life itself, leaving them helpless waifs in a great city. A pinched-looking, shivering boy, offered a box of matches for sale to a gentleman on the street. In pity for the little salesman, he made the purchase, and, having no pence, gave the boy a shilling, telling him to bring the change to his hotel, at the same time never expecting to see the lad again. Late in the evening of the same day, a small boy of the same class, came into the hotel, and addressing himself to the confiding customer, he asked, "Are you the gentleman that bought the matches fra' Sandy ? " " Yes," was the answer. '■■ Well, there is fourpence out o' ye'r shilling. Sandy cannot come ; he is very ill. A cart knocked him down and ran over him, and he lost his bonnet, and his matches, and ye'r sevenpence, and baith his legs are broken, and the doctor says he'll dee, and that's a'," and putting down \ 'ii ^n ^ ; n 1 hi 36 THE OLD VICE it 1^ 'SI' the money upon the table, he burst into a great sob. " I fed the little man," says the narrator, " and went with him to see Sandy. He was lying upon a heap of shavings in the shed they called their home. He knew me at once. *I was bringing you the money, sir, when the cart knocked me down, and my legs are broken, and — oh, Ruby, little Ruby,' he cried, turning to his brother, 'who will care for you when I am gone ? ' I took his hand in mine and told him I would care for Ruby. He understood me, and was comforted. Raising his blue eyes to mine, he looked the thanks he could no longer u*^^ter, and then the light faded out of those windows of the soul, and Sandy was with God." While we think of little Ruby, we recall Elizabeth Barrett BrowniTig's touching and beautiful lines: "Do you hear the children weeping, O my bro- thers. Ere the sorrows come with years ? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, And that cannot stop their tears. m AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 37 The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, The young birds are chirping in the nest, The young fawns are playing with the shadows, The young flowers are blowing toward the west; But the young, young children, O my brothers. They are weeping bitterly — They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free." ■ fi : ,( i i t li'ii !vi ' 38 THE OLD VICE AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. li ' ■I ; raiiiu GOD'S HELP IS ALWAYS SURE. " God's help is always sure, His methods seldom guessed ; Delay will make our pleasure pure, Surprise will sjive it zest : His wisdom is sublime, * His heart profoundly kind ; God never is before His thne, And never is behind. ill > '•■< ' Hast thou assumed a load, Which few will share with thee. And art thou carrying it for God, And shall He fail to see ? Be comforted at heart, Thou art not left alone : Now thou the Lord's companion art Soon thou wilt share His throne." CHAPTER III. " Hear'st thou not The curses of the fatherless, the groan Of those who have no friend. " "It is strange That this poor wretch should pride him in his woe, Take pleasure in his abjectness, and hug The scorpion that consumes him." — Shelley. ,NGLISH literature, furnishes many sad examples of the power of strong drink over men of the finest intellect. The writings of Shakespeare, give us some insight into the characteristics of the times he repre- sented, and the little group of brilliant men who preceded him in the same field, bear sad testi- mony to the licentiousness of the England of Shakespeare's day. Green, upon his death-bed, painted himself as a drunkard and a roisterer, winning money only to spend it on wine, and forms of wickedness that go hand in hand with ul !. ( i i 1 t ' * I If] 4 if ' .1 40 THE OLD VICE AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. wine. He drained the cup of pleasure to the dregs. He might have written of himself with terrible truthfulness, the lines of a latter poet, the noble but unhappy Byron, "My days are in the yellow leaf, The flower and fruit of love are gone, The worm, the anguish, and the grief Are mine alone. The fire that on my bosom preys Is lone as some volcanic isle ; No torch is kindled at its blaze — A funeral pile." Hell and the after-world were the butts of his unceasing mockery. If he had not feared the judges of the Queen's Courts, he said, more than he feared God, he should have turned "cut- purse." In the worst inn's worst room, this child of genius breathed his last, in the utmost poverty, consumed by self-reproach, and wretchedness. With his dying hand he wrote to the wife he had loved and abandoned: " I charge thee by the love of our youth, and by my soul's rest, that thou wilt see this man paid, for if he and his wife had not succoured me, I had died in the streets." " Oh, that a year were granted me to Ml I*'! 42 THE OLD VICE IP 'I live," cried the dying man, " but I must die, of every man abhorred ! Time, loosely spent, will not again be won ! My time is loosely spent, and I undone." His life was reckless and de- praved, but his pen was pure; and over his poetry there breathes the fresh air of English meadows, free, light, and natural. Peele lived a life as riotous, passing his time between the theatre, the tavern, and the prison ; and died as miserably ; leaving behind him verses of sweet and touching melody, which suggest to the lovers of English literature "what might have been," had he been as virtuous as he was gifted. Marlow was no better, perhaps worse. His writings are like his life, — strong, passionate, magnificent, irreligious, tender, licentious, coarse and terrible. He died at the early age of thirty, in evil company, — whether stabbed by a desper- ado Ifke himself, or by misadventure, was never made clear. The dagger he drew against the life of another, was said to have been struck up in the hope of preventing harm, the point entering his eye, and piercing the brain, causing death. AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 43 His early death saved him from a prosecution for atheism. A few daring jests, a pot-house brawl, and a fatal stab, made up the life of Christopher Marlow. Yet he was capable of great things. His Jew of Malta was the forerunner of Shy- lock; and in Edward the Second, he opened up the series of historical plays, which gave us Gcesar, and Ri<^hard the Third. Shakespeare was only two months younger than Marlow, and, taking up the same work, he for twenty-eight years made the drama represent the whole of human life, with a touch so fine and masterly, that the Bard of Avon has become the' premier poet of the world. Shakespeare gives us Eng- lish history and English life, with a vividness and charm all his own. Take a few lines from Hamlet on this liquor question : • ** The King doth wake to-night and takes his rouse. Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels, And as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down The kettle-drum and trumpet thus body out The triumph of his pledge. Horatio Is it a custom ? tti ill 'ij 44 THE OLD VICE Hamkt. Ay, marry, is't, B%it to my mind, though I am native here And to the manner born, it is a custom More honoured in the breach then the observance. This Jieavey -headed revel east and west Makes us traduced and tax'd of other nations ; They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase Soil our addition, and, indeed, it takes From our achievements, though performed at height. The pith and marrow of our attributes, * So, oft it chances in particular men, That for some vicious mole of nature in them, By the overgrowth of some complexion, Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens The form of plausive manners, that these men, Carrying, the stamp of one defect, Their virtues else, be they as pure as grace, As infinite as man may undergo — Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault. Beaumont and Fletcher give us a similar picture : <4 ii ! 7 111 1 W I'l Lod. Are the Englishmen Such stubborn drinkers ? AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 46 Pieo. Not a leak at sea Can suck more liquor. You shall have their children, Christen'd in mull'd sack, and at five years old Able to knock a Dane down." The English notion of foreigners was not flattering by any means. Every honest English- man believes he could beat ten Frenchmen, a class of beings whom he held in sovereign con- tempt, as a lean and stunted race, who drank claret instead of brandy, who lived entirely off frogs ; miserable infidels, who heard mass every Sunday, who bowed down before idols, and who even worshipped the Pope ! On the other hand, the French were taught to despise the English as rude, unlettered barbarians; surly, ill-conditioned beings, living in an unhappy climate, where a perpetual fog, only varied by rain, prevented the sun from ever being seen ; suffering from so deadly and inveterate a melancholy that physi- cians had called it "the English spleen," and, under the influence of this cruel malady, con- stantly committing suicide, particularly in November, when we were well known to hang and shoot ourselves by thousands. I .■/\ ■* I I ill m ir 46 THE OLD VICE §' In the Tempest we hear a good deal of the bottle. Trinculo encounters Caliban, the savage and deformed slave of Prospero. " Were I in England now, as once I was, and had hut this fish painted, not a, holiday fool there hut would give a 'piece of silver ; there would this monster make a man ; any strange heast there makes a mxin ; when they will not give half a farthing to relieve a lame heggar, they will ley out ten to see a dead Indian. . . . He shall taste of •'■ y hottle, if he have never drunk wine hefore; it will go near re- moving his fit. . . . Open your mouth ; here is that which will give language to you." Stephano's tipsy generosity has captivated poor Caliban. " That's a hrave god, and hears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him. . . . I will sivear upon that hottle to he thy true subject, for this liquor is not earthly. . . . I will follow thee, thou wondrous man.** Trinculo is well aware of his own condi- tion, and much amazed at the poor credulous monster — " a most ridiculous monster, to make a wonder of a poor drunkard." The bottle having enfranchised the poor monster, he carries it in triumph, rejoicing in a freedom which is AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 47 fouler slavery. The Tempest gives us com- mon clay under the influence of strong drink. In Othello we see the effect upon a chivalrous and noble nature in the hands of a designing villain like " honest lago." " Come, lieutenant, I have a stoop of wine, and here without are a brace of gallants that would fain have a measure to the health of black Othello." Cassio, knowing his own weakness, pleads that he has " very poor and unhappy brains for drinking. I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment" " Honest lago " presses his invitation with the usual plea : " They are our friends; but one cup — Fit drink for you'' Cassio remembers his weakness, remembers the effect w^ine has produced before, and still resists temptation. " I have drunk but one cup to-night, and that was craftily qualified too ; and behold, what innovation it makes here " — touching his head as he speaks — " / am, unfortunate in the in- firmity, and dare not t .sk my weakness with any more.' '* What man ! 'tis a night of revels ; the gallants desire it." Cassio has waited to argue the matter with the tempter, and now he H I r t i 48 THE OLD VICE if I li I lifl begins to yield. " Where are they ? " these friends, these Cyprus gallants, that would fain have a measure to the health of black Othello. " Here at the door," is the ready answer. It is the old story. " If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted ; and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door." Sin is as a wild beast crouching at the door of the heart of man, watching its opportunity to leap in. Every fall of man is alike in this. Conscience does not rule the reason as it should, nor reason the understanding, nor understanding the sensual appetites. Cassio has fallen with his eyes wide open, and " honest lago " triumphs in his fiendish work. " If I can fasten but one cup upon him with that which he hath drunk to-night already, he'll be as full of qua'^rel and offence as my young mistress' dog ;" and, sneering at them as a " flock of drunkards," he plans the ruin of the unsuspect- ing lieutenant. lago understands how to humour his dupes. He has drinking songs for the occasion, where words are jingled to suit the reduced capacity of his guests. lago volun- teers the information that he " learned it in Mf AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 49 England, where they are most potent in potting. Your Dane, your German and your svjag-bellied Hollander, are nothing to your English.'* Cassio is charmed to hear of such accomplished drinkers. " Is your Englishman so expert in his drinking ?" " Why," exclaims lago, " he drinks you, with facility, your Dane dead drunk; he gives your Hollander a vomit, ere the next pottle can he filled." The liquor soon does its deadly work. " Friends all hut now, even now, and then, as if some planet had outwitted men, swords out, and tilting one at other's hreast in opposition hloody." A man wont to be civil, whose name was great and honoured, has cast his reputation from him as a spendthrift might his fortune, and now stands beggared and bankrupt before his just and noble general. Cassio can make no answer ; he is speechless, while " honest lago," the foul plotter who has played on noble natures to their own hurt, can give a full and particular history of all that has darkened other lives. Othello, in sorrow and loving anger, can but turn from his lieuten- ant with words tender and terrible for his friend. " Cassio, I love thee, but nevermore be 4 ■ if fa i ! I V ' 1 ii 50 THE OLD VICE lit m officer of mine." Cassio has received his death- wound. " Are you hurt, lieutenant ?" asks the sympathising lago. " Ay, past all surgery," is the mournful answer ; " reputation, reputation, reputation, 0, 1 have lost my reputation ! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial." lago is too much a man of the world, too much a philosopher after a sort, to be much cast down by so small a matter, when his whole mind is given up to the accomplish- ment of greater crimes. As for Cassio, he feels the full force of an aroused conscience, and remorso has laid her terrible hand upon his heart. "Fear for their scourge, mean villains have, thou art the torturer of the brave." " Sue to him again" suggests the ever cool and pliable lago, " and he is yours." " / will rather sue to he despised," is the answer, "than to deceive so good a com- mander with so slight, so drunken, and so indis- creet an officer. Drunk and squabble, swagger, swear, and discourse fustian with one's own shadow. thou invisible spirit of tvine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil, that men should put an enemy in their :^ S;f' ;.l[■'i ;'i AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 51 mouths to steal away their brains I that we should with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause transform ourselves into beasts. To be a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast ! strange ! Every inordinate cup is unblessed, and the ingredient is a devil." Shakespeare had living men enough about him to feed his fancy while he drew such pictures. It is not the demon lago who falls into the pit of drunkenness ; but the open-hearted, sensitive and generous Cassio. No one would care much whether lago wen*^^ to the devil by one method or another ; he seems cut out in any case for the special property of the enemy of mankind ; but for Cassio, with the fire of nobleness in him, with possibilities of gentle goodness and faithful ser- vice before him, to perish thus meanly, poorly, contemptibly, wrings one's heart like the wreck of a goodly ship with all sails set, fully manned and well equipped to ride triumphant over the mighty deep. To sink with every possibility of a successful voyage and peaceful anchorage, has wrung from many a heart the bitter cry of lost ; lost ! lost ! down centuries of English life to the present hour. !H| I '!; ti f 52 THE OLD VICE AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. *' To thee the love of woman hath gone down ; Dark flow thy tides o'er manhood's noble head, O'er youth's bright locks, and beauty's flowery crown : Yet must thou hear a voice — Restore the dead ! Earth shall reclaim her precious thing from thee ! — Restore the dead, thou sea. " Bitter, and sad, and tender, is this cry for the restoration of the " high hearts and brave," that have been gathered to the bosom of "old Ocean," but those who have lost their loved ones by the destroyer, strong drink, never cry, ''restore the dead.'' They can but bow their heads under the dark shadow of a calamity so great, and humbly wait until the "great white throne" is set, and " the books " are opened. THE PR..PZRTY OF SCARBORO • p ~) .": A R y. CHAPTER IV. "Man fabricates The sword which stabs his peace, he cherisheth The snakes that gnaw his heart, he raiseth up The tyrant whose delight is in his woe. Whose sport is in his agony." — Shelley. •'Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." — Paid. JHE Parliamentary histoiy of England, is in great measure, a history of effort to ^p^ check the national intemperance, with what result, the social and moral condition of the millions in free and merry England to-day, bear witness. As early as the year 995 an attempt was made to restrain the evil by law, and every generation since has exercised its ingenuity to invent sobriety, with very little success. The most we can say is, that we are more ashamed of ourselves, and that in all civi- lized countries, the wisest and best of all ranks ^ill' m '■I f I 54 THE OLD VICE IliU If f Ut and conditions, are honestly endeavouring to help forward some movement, for the salvation of the people from this disgusting vice. Old English writers, were anxious, to shift the burden of responsibility for this habit, from their own shoulders to some other country. The Dutch were said to have corrupted honest Britons, then, the French were guilty. In short, we have been asked to believe that the virtues of Britons are their own, and their vices are borrowed from less favoured nations. The drinking phrases in use in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, were con- sidered proof of the foreign origin of this habit. " Half-seas-over " cfuld only come from the Dutch, who were themselves a species of water- rat, and quite at home in that element. " Beastly drunk," however, was credited with being purely native ; and when drunkenness became very pre- valent, writers exhausted their fancy in depict- ing men in the different stages of inebriety, as showing the most vicious qualities of different animals, a company of drunkards being supposed to exhibit the characteristics of brutes. This, to say the least of it, is not fair to the brutes, for AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 00 the vice of drunkenness is perfectly human, and only the human could invent such degradation and misery. Nash, the satirist, classified eight kinds of drunkards. "The first is ape-drunk, and he leaps, and sings, and hollows, and dances for the heavens. The second is lion-drunk, and he flings the pots about the house, calls the hostess foul names, breaks the glass windows with his dagger, and is apt to quarrel with any man that speaks to him. The third is swine-drunk ; heavy, lumpish, sleepy, and cries for a little more drink and a few more clothes. The fourth is sheep- drunk ; wise in his own conceit when he cannot bring forth a right word. The fifth is maudlen- drunk, when a fellow will weep for kindness in the midst of his drink, and kiss you, saying, * Captain, I love thee ; go thy ways ; thou dost not think so often of me as I do of thee. I would I could not love thee so well as I do.' And then he puts his finger in his eye and cries. The sixth is martin-drunk, when a man is drunk and drinks himself sober ere he stirs. The seventh is goat-drunk. The eighth i% fox-drunk, when he is crafty drunk, as many as the Dutch- I ' ■ 'i ' V 56 THE OLD VICE '- m men be, which will never bargain but when they are drunk. All these species^ and more, I have seen practised in . one company at one sitting, when I have been permitted to remain sober amongst them, only to note their several humours." These beast-drunkards, were charac- terized in a frontispiece to a curious tract on Drunkenness, where the men were represented with heads of apes, swine, and such like, accord- ing to the description here given. In writing and speaking of this old vice to- day we do not venture to use so much plainness of speech. We are more polished if we are not more pure. Our drunkards are now suffering from " alcoliolism" our beastly drunkards are "dipsomaniacs" our dangerous drunkards have the scientific complaint called " mania a potu" The ancient ugliness of the vice is invited to disappear, with becoming propriety, under more euphonious and scientific names. Taverns were introduced in the thirteenth century, and very soon became centres of dis- order and crime ; with the increase of taverns came an increase of " vagabonds and beggars." AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 57 The laws regulatinff taverns and alehouses were framed in the hope of protecting society from the results naturally produced by these institutions. So true is it that, society prepares the crime. In the reign of Edward VI., taverns were denounced by Act of Parliament as " the resort of evil-disposed persons, and the cause of much evil rule." Cecil, Elizabeth's great min- ister, saw with alarm the increase of taverns, and pronounced them to be " an evident cause of disorder among the vulgar, who there wasted the fruit of their daily labour, and committed all the evils which accompany drunkenness." In a Blue Book in the reign of James I. it was stated "that the odious and loathesome sin oj drunkenness is of late grown into common use, being the root and foundation of many other enormous sins, as bloodshed, stabbing, murder, swearing, fornication, adultery, and such like, to the great dishonour of God and our nation, the overthrow of many good arts and manu• ". 1' 60 THE OLD VICE reform a nation already corrupted is still more difficult ; hut it is the duty of the Government to make tlie attempt. It has been found by experi- ence that nothing can restrain the people from buying these liquors but such laws as hinder i.iemfro'in being sold." Lord Talbot accused the Government of laying poison in the way of the people, establishing by law a practise productive of all the miseries to which human nature is incident. Lord Lonsdale, pointed out the fact that in every part of the metropolis drunkenness had reduced the people to a condition of utter wretchedness. " No man can pass an hour in public places without meeting such objects or hearing such expressions as disgraced human nature, such as cannot be looked upon without horror, or heard without indignation, and which there is no possibility of removing or preventing whilst the hateful liquor is publicly sold!' The Bishop of Sarum nobly pleaded for the young : " The children, my Lords to whom the aifairs of the present generation must be trans- ferred, and by whom the nation must be con- AliD THE NEW CHIVALRY. 61 tinued, are surely no ignoble part of the public. They are yet innocent, and it is our province to take care that they may in time be virtuous. We ought, therefore, to remove from before them those examples that infect, and those tempta- tions that corrupt them." Lord Harvey ad- dressed the House in a speech of the finest sar- casm, and replete with the soundest argument. He pointed out. that almost every legislator has exercised his authority in the prohibition of such foods as tend to injure the health and destroy the vigour of the people. "Even the Indians," he said, "have petitioned that none of these delicious poisons should be imported f rora Great Britain, they have desired us to confine this fountain of wickedness and misery to our own country, without pouring upon them those inun- dations of debauchery by which we are ourselves overflowed. Lord Chesterfield said, " Luxury, my Lords, is to be taxod, but vice prohibited, let the difficulty in the law be what it will. Would you lay a tax upon a breach of the Ten Commandments ? Would not such a tax be wicked and scandalous ? i i 1 ! i !■ i ;i I - i'il f 1 62 THE OLD VICE Would it not imply an indulgence to all those who could pay the tax ? ... It appears to me that since the spirit which the distillers produce, is allowed to enfeeble the limbs, vitiate the blood, pervert the heart, and obscure the intel- lect, the number of distillers should be no argu- ment in their favour, for I never heard that a law against theft was repealed or delayed because thieves were numerous. It appears to me, my Lords, that really, if so formidable a body are confederate against the virtues or the lives of their fellow-citizens, it is time to put an end to the havoc, and to interpose whilst it is yet in our power to stop the destruction. Let us crush at once these artists in human slaughter who have reconciled their countrymen to sick- ness and ruin, and spread over the pit-falls of debauchery such a bait as cannot be resisted." The importance of this question was understood by the best men in both Houses, and in the country, nevertheless, their efforts were defeated, and what may be called Free Trade in liquor was declared. Instead of ordering men to rise above their AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 63 circumstances, which few can or will do, a sound political philosophy seeks to alter the circura- staDces, and through them affect the men, by preventing any from being exposed to tempta- tions beyond their strength. In the words of a living statesman, " It is the province of law, to make it easy to do right, and difficult to do wrong." Virtue must come from within; to this problem the advocates of Religion and morality must direct themselves. But vice may come from without. To hinder this is the care of the wise politician. England is, indeed, the mighty mother of nations, but while she has sent her children into every corner of the globe, to make the barren wastes fruitful, and build cities amidst primeval forests, she has sent the slave- ship also, and she continues to send the liquor traffic as an adjunct of her government. The history of American colonization is the history of the crimes of Europe. Injustice drove out some of Britain's noblest children, folly and crime has driven out still more, and now, when this country is building up a national life of her own, it is her most sacred duty to guard her ti H %': ii • 1 ,■• ". . :1 64 THE OLD VICE AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. sons and daughters from this ancient iniquity, which has lain as an incubus for centuries upon the dear mother land. "^^'-.fc^^-e^i^^S^ CHAPTER V. ** They say there are but five upon this isle : we are three of them. If the other two be brained like us, the State totters Was ever a man a coward who hath drunk so much sack as I have to-day." — Shakespeare. " Who knows not Circ6, The daughter of the Sun ? whose charmed cup Whoever tasted, lost his upright shape, And downward fell into a grovelling swine. " Soon as the potion works, their human countenance, The express resemblance of the gods, is changed Into some brutish forms And they — so perfect is their misery — Not once perceive their foul disfigurement. But boast themselves more comely than before." c i' — Milton. |ATIONS, like individuals, must reap as they have sown, and neither can sin without suffering. England gave slavery to her American colonies, and during the civil war, she suffered in thousands of her own chil- dren the just recompense of her sin. The England that goaded our colonies into rebel- 5 V ■Mil ! I ! li •I I'i'i 66 THE OLD VICE lion was an England steeped in intemperance. Drunkenness had been spoken of in both Houses of Parliament as the vice preeminently of the common people. Their betters soon learned to rival them in their love of liquor. Noble lords were not free from the vice, and men in high places boasted of the amount of liquor they could consume before taking part in Parliamentary debates. The ministry of the day was called as much in compliment as scorn, " the drunken Ad/ministration.'^ A Mussulman amtassador visiting the chief Minister of Eng- land, found him lather up to the eyes with soap, rushing about the corridors, calling for his ser- vant, and not quite recovered from his last night's debauch. Holy Mohammed! cried the astonished stranger, saluting him with profound reverence, no wonder the nation prospers when she has a lunatic for her chief officer. Lunatics being con- sidered by the followers of the prophet as the special favourites of heaven. England has not uprooted the evil but she has forced men, if not pure, to be more circumspect and decent. No English politician daro flaunt his intemperance AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 67 before the country, and ask their suffrage. The English working man is not particularly well educated, nor very abstemious, or self -rest rained, but he requires that his representatives in the Parliament of the nation should be im- measurably better than himself, in the matter at least, of common sins. It is a long time since England had a first minister, or any minister, ae^ainst whom the tongue of slander, or the most bitter party spirit, could bring any charge injurious to his moral standing as a man and a citizen. The time is past when men might, under the influence of champagne, rant to their constituents, and meet their opponents with a gay vehemence and a good-humoured imperiousness, in which imper- tinence, perseverance, and presumption formed the chief ingredients. Notwithstanding the acknowledged defects of the age, in both coun- tries we have made progress. It was the abstinence of the Scottish army in the days of Wallace and Bruce that made their raids so effective, and gave the English wardens so much cause to dread them. An old English I' . I - < . p I , « 'Hits i 68 THE OLD VICE chronicle tells us that when the Scotch invaded Northumberland under Bruce, they brought no " carriages with them, nor did they carry pro- visions like other soldiers," for " they lived on flesh without bread, and drank the river water without wine." Each man carried under the flap of his saddle a broad piece of metal, and behind him a little bag of oatmeal, and when the halt was sounded, each man prepared oat- cakes according to his requirements. " It is therefore no wonder," says the amazed writer " that they perform a longer day's march than other soldiers." Scotchmen have not been careful to maintain the hardy virtues of their brave ancestors in the way of liquor. The witchery of wine could not well spread in Eng- land without touching the hardy North. Cecil declared in the days of Elizabeth, that " England s^Dent more in one year on wine than in ancient times in four." With French and English in- fluence combined, it was not likely that Scot- land could resist the more luxurious and, what Gibbon was pleased to designate, "liberal" vices of the age. Sir Walter Scotfs early life gives us jltiB\>rJll^>. ^ AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 69 many pictures of social manners in Scotland, happily now extinct Highland whisky played a prominent part among all classes of the com- munity. Once in his rambles, in the company of a friend, when he was still a law apprentice, they arrived one evening at some out-of-the-way farm-house, and received a kindly reception, but rather a scant supply of liquor. Supper was got through with the assistance of a bottle of elder- berry wine, and a divinity student, who hap- pened to be present, was called upon to conduct family worship. Some progress had been made in their sacred exercises, when the farmer heard a sound that brought him to his feet with a shout, enforced by some stronger language, and, '* Here is the keg at last." As he spoke, in tumbled a couple of herdsmen with a keg of whisky, which was mounted on the table without a moment's delay. The pious services of the household were soon forgotten, and the party caroused till break of day. Nor was life more self -restrained in Edinburgh. "We won't go home till morning," was not only sung 11: I r Wm ' 1 ,1' i ''i:! 70 THE OLD VICE ill V r':h !! II ll iH^^H 1 m 1" but literally acted upon. It was considered a point of honour to get as nearly drunk as pos- sible, and if a man forgot himself, and got quite drunk, the offence was not worth mentioning, if indeed it was considered an offence at all. Scott was a member of a club in Edinburgh famous for its convivial evenings. An incident told in Lockhart's " Life of Sir Walter," gives us some insight into the character of their meetings and the condition of the members : There were two persons of the name of 'Kemp, father and son, in connection with the club, both of whom possessed a remarkable gift of speech- making, to the great concern of equally gifted orators. On one occasion the Kemps were silent for a moment, and John Clark, a friend of Scott's, was called upon for a song ; tipsy, as the com- pany undoubtedly were, they were electrified by hearing Clark strike up in a Psalm-singing tone: " Now, God Almighty, judge James Kemp, And likewise his son John, And hang them over hell in hemp. And burn them in brimstone. " AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 71 We presume the brimstone and hemp had the desired effect in moderating the Kemp oratory. Scott often said, later in life, that of all vices, drunkenness was the most incompatible with greatness. * The man who does homage to the bottle cannot do justice to his own ability, and is likely to leave a troubled record behind him. During the ministry of Pelham gin-drinking was declared to be the master curse of English life. Although drunkenness had been a British vice for centuries, they were anxious to throw the blame of the excessive drinking, as we have seen, on the Dutch. The English, it is true, drank beer, and had added the farther evil of spirit-drinking after their visits to the Nether- lands. "As the English," said Chamberlayne, "returning from their wars in the Holy Land, brought home the foul disease of leprosy ; so in our fathers' days the English returning from service in the Netherlands have brought with them the foul disease of drunkenness." It is certainly true that hard drinking was a vice, not of the people only, but also of the upper classes. Many of the most conspicuous charac- m ■» 72 THE OLD VICE ters were addicted to drunkenness. Addison, the foremost moralist of his times, was not free from it. Oxford, whose private character was in most respects singularly high and even noble, is said to have come, not unfrequently, drunk into the presence of the queen. BoUnghroke when in office, sat up whole nights drinking, and in the morning, having bound a wet napkin round his forehead and his eyes to drive away the effects of his intemperance, hastened, without sleep, to his official business. When Robert Walpole was a young man, his father was accustomed to pour into his glass a double portion of wine, saying, " Come, Robert, you shall drink twice while I drink once, for I will not permit the son in his sober senses to be witness of the intoxication of his father." This education produced its natural fruits, and the entertainments of the minister at Houghton were the scandal of his county. As a politician he was without honour, and as a man, so gross and sensual that even the Court of George II. was shocked at his indecency. It was left to Walpole to organize corruption as a system, AND THE NSW CHIVALRY. 73 and make bribery the normal process of Parlia- mentary government in England. On young men, if we may believe Chesterfield, his influence was most pernicious ; he left no art untried by which he might lead them to regard purity and patriotism as ridiculous or unmanly; and as more than half of the members of Parliament were in the receipt of public money, in the form of pensions, or Government offices, the evil influence of such a minister must have been incalculable. Defoe y in 1708 declared, that after being present at many elections, he had arrived at the con- clusion that " it was not an impossible thing to debauch the nation into choosing thieves, knaves* devils, anything, comparatively speaking, by the power of various intoxicants." In 1751, Fielding, in his pamphlet on " The Increase of Robbers," ascribes the crime of the period " to a new kind of drunkenness, unknown to our ancestors;" he declared that gin was the principal sustenance of more than 100,000 people in the metropolis alone ; and he predicted that should the drinking of this poison be continued at its present height during the next twenty i :!: \ ■i'.'i' 74 THE OLD VICE I • 1 years, there would by that time be very few of the common people left to drink it. Bishop Benson^ in a letter written from London a little later, said : " Our people are now become what they never were before, cruel and inhuman. These accursed spirituous liquors, which, to the shame of the Government are so easily to be had, and in such quantities drunk' have changed the very nature of our people, and they will, if continued to be drunk, destroy the very race." Grand juries declared that the increase of poverty, murders, and robberies in London might be traced to this single habit — the habit of intemperance. Physicians, remarked on the increase of disease following the increase of drunkenness. "We seem," said a writer of 1657, " to be steeped in liquors, or to be the dizzy island. We drink as if we were sponges, or had tunnels in our mouths. We are, without doubt, the grape-suckers of the earth." The brilliant intellect of Carteret was clouded by drink ; and even Pulteney, who appears in his later years to have had stronger religious convictions than any other politician of his times, is said to have shortened his life by the same means. It was at s AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 75 such a time as this that England, partly in hostility to France, and partly in order to en- courage home distilleries, absolutely prohibited the importation of spirits from all foreign countries, and threw open the trade of distilling to her subjects on the payment of certain dues. These measures laid the foundation of the great extension of the manufacture of spirits which has since distinguished us j and, small as is the place which this fact occupies in English history, it was probably, if we consider all the conse- quences that have flowed from it, the most momentous of the eighteenth century — vastly more so than any event in the purely political or military annals of the country. We point with pride to the advancement of knowledge in every field of thought. Yet drunkenness remains to shame us, in the old world and in the new, making void our best endeavours, and standing out, without question, the main counteracting iafluence to the moral, intel- lectual, and physical benefits, that might be ex- pected from the large increase of commercial prosperity, and general enlightenment of our age. * ill! •• » FJ '- ii I mm i CHAPTER VI. '* This is no unconnected misery, Nor stands uncaused, and irretrievable. . . . Let the axe Strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall, And where its venomed exhalations spread Ruin and death and woe, . . . A garden shall arise in loveliness Surpassing fabled Eden. "-^Shelley. "Seven men to a pin — and not a man too much ! Seven generations, haply, to this world To right it visibly a finger's breadth. And mend its rents a little. " — Elizabeth B. Browning, ** We all have known Good statesmen who pulled ruin on the State, Good patriots who for a theory risked a cause. Good kings who disembowelled for a tax. Good popes who brought all good to jeopardy. Good Christians who sat still in easy chairs, And damned the general world for standing up, Now may the good God pardon all good men. — Ibid. N dealing with this drink question we are met by the fact that, Christianity has not chocked the evil in any adequate degree. That barbarous ages should be sunk in such vices is conceivable enough, but that 78 THE OLD VICE countries calling themselves Christian, and tak- ing rank as eminently civilized, should be also the most drunken, is one of the hard things we have to face. The other great religions of the world are free from this reproach. Take Buddhism^ for in- stance, or Confucianism, or MahometanisTn, all exclude intoxicating, liquors, and although they have their vices, which are neither few nor small, drunkenness cannot be charged upon them in any sense as it can be upon so-called Christian peoples. When the Church of Eng- land Temperance Society was organized in England, the liquor-sellers boldly asserted that Christianity had failed to Christianize the English nation, and that in spite of all efforts to the contrary, " Beer was king" There was some ground for the boast. The general elec- tion that resulted in the triumph of Lord Beaconsfield and his party, was contested in many parts of the country under the battle- cry of "The Beer and the Bible, the National Church and the National Beverage" nor was it forgotten that on the ecclesiastical properties of AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 79 the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lishop of London there were public-houses worth ten or more thousand pounds. We are not disposed to admit that the Church has failed, in dealing with what ha'j been well named, " the greatest earthly curse — the sin of intemperance." At the same time we must admit that, multitudes have cherished the most sublime beliefs, and lived the most despicable lives. The Church and the State alike have been ignorant both as to the nature, extent, and re- medy to be applied to this ancient iniquity. Nay, they have only begun in real earnest to re- gard it as a serious evil — an evil alike to the individual and the community. It has been the same in the past ; the history of civilization is the history of reformations. It required thirty years of hard, persistent eflfort, to abolish slavery ; it may require thrice as long to abolish the liquor system, but those who believe in truth and righteousness are not fearful of the result in the end. Take our conflict with slavery for example. Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Anne, " did offer '. >! I A I I I ■'Ill' 80 THE OLD VICE ■ ■:! r i ;, I Ill 'I it: i fi # n: i and undertake, by persons whom she should appoint, to bring into the West Indies of America belonging to his Catholic Majesty Louis XIV. in the space of thirty years, one hundred and forty-four thousand negroes, at the rate of four thousand eight hundred in each of the said thirty years." The utmost care was taken to secure a monopoly. "Her Britannic Majesty by persons of her appointment" was the exclusive trader for France, and Spain, in America. England extorted the privilege of filling the new world with negroes. The Sovereigns of England and Spain, became the largest slave merchants in the world, avarice became a frenzy, while, through the hypocrisy of manners, religion sunk to the rank of a fashion. English ships, fitted out in English ports, ufider the special favour of the Royal family, the ministry and parliament, stole from Africa in the yeaia 1700 and 1750 probably a million and a half slaves, of whom one- eighth were buried in the Atlantic, the victims of the voyage, and yet no general inignation rebuked the enormity. As the trade became AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 81 profitable it became dominant. The manufac turers clamoured for the protection of a trade which opened to them Africa as a market ; ministers of State, embarked their capital in the undertaking, the most God-fearing men were engaged in the enterprize, and soon the party of the slave trade dictated laws to Eng- land. The House of Commons, in the days of William and Mary, proposed to lay open the trade in negroes, " for the better supply of the plantations," and the Statute Book of the time, declares it the opinion of the King's Majesty, and the parliament that, " the trade in slaves is highly beneficial and advantageous to the king- dom and the colonies/* In 1708, a committee of the House of Com- mons reported that the "trade was highly impor- tant and ought to be free." Three years later, another committee reported, that the "planta- tions ought to be supplied with negroes at reason- able rates." A year after, the Queen in a speech from the throne, congratulated her faithful Parliament, on her success in securing a new 6 » i 'I 82 THE OLD VICE W' market for slaves in Spanish America. Thirty- seven years later, the Statute Book pronounced the slave trade, " very advantageous to Britain/' and eight English Judges gave it as their legal opinion that, "negroes are merchandise," and statesmen of repute declared that, " the African slave trade was the pillar, and support, of the British plantation trade in America. Even George Whitefield was confident that God's providence was over the undertaking," " If you take slaves in faith," he said, "and with the intent of conducting them to Christ, the action will not be a sin, but may on the contrary prove a benediction." Even good mei' are often no wiser than their age; and when gain becomes an over-mastering passion, it blinds the eyes to moral good, it saps the principles of virtue and honesty, until every just and noble aspiration is sacrificed for its acquirement. Slowly, but surely, the enormity of the slave trade roused the public mind of England, until, in 1811, the slave trade was declared to be felony, punishable with fourteen years' transportation, pr from three to five years' imprisonment, with V IS AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 83 hard labour, a later act still made it piracy, and as such a capital crime. The Christian Church, was slow to wake up to her duty, in regard to slavery, as she has been in regard to intemperance. The temperance movement was not born of the Church, . nor organized ,/ithin her pale, yet it is bom of the Church's Head, inasmuch as it is the out- come of Divine pity in human hearts. The Church not only failed to lead in this merciful reformation, but she stood aloof for years, if indeed she was not hostile, the result being, that the movement fell into the hands of earnest men who loved the Church but little, although they loved their fellow-men much. Happily, this condition of things no longer exists, and the Church takes her place in the van of this great and merciful enterprise. The slave trade in the height of its power and its insolence, was not stronger than the liquor traffic to-day. We have not only to contend with capital, custom, and a depraved appetite, but with Governments already com- mitted to uphold this system. fi r D i. U : 84 THE OLD VICE When men put their money into a business, they do so that they may receive a suitable return for the amount invested ; when the liquor traffic ceases to pay, it will cease to flourish, and not sooner, because it will then cease to attract capital, and as it is not a benevolent institution, sacrificing itself for the good of the public, it will cease so soon as it becomes unprofitable. In Great Britain the capital in the liquor traffic is estimated at £117,000,000 as against £22,000,000 in the woollen trade, £25,000,000 in the iron trade, and £85,000,000 in the cotton trade. That is to say, one hundred and seven- teen million pounds, in a trade that can only prosper as the nation deteriorates, a trade not built on the interests, or necessities, or wants of the people but upon the demands of their vices, and their shame. Had the State but a small portion of the virtue and enlightenment she claims, she would prohibit the liquor traffic, in the interest of the persons engaged in it, that they might be saved the shame, and the demor- alizing influence of making their fortunes out of the vices of their own countrymen. AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 86 It has been brought home to the people of Great Britain, that the liquor trade loves itself best, that it is essentially selfish, and without patriotism. It loves itself, it loves its unholy gains, and it loves the political party, whatever party that may be, that will give it the greatest amount of liberty to flourish to and fatten on the misery of the land. Its very existence implies a trade interest which seeks to strangle every combination that opposes it, and should it be allowed to continue unchecked, untold misery awaits the nation. The danger, if possible, is still greater in this country with its imported and often hetero- geneous population. Let us waive the matter of total abstinence for a moment, and look at it as a broad na- tional issue The money spent on drink repre- sents not only misery to the people, but danger to the State. Drink has more to do with British pauperism, than either miserable houses or low wages. There is no district in the East end of London so poor, that the liquor-seller cannot farm to his own advantage. Drink is at the a ii ^ 86 THE^OLD VICE root of British pauperism and crime, and the same causes will produce the same result in Canada and the United States. The Anglo- Saxon race have brought to this New World the civilization which the past has bequeathed to Great Britain ; but, unfortunately, they have brought the vices as weU as the virtues of their race. It is for an enlightened people to deal with these old world evils before they have gained greater hold over a rising country. Millions look toward this land of promise, as their only hope for themselves, and their children, and fondly believe that peacefully and without crime, hamainty may here make for itself a new home, and a new existence. Whether these hopes are to be reali^^ed or not, depends certainly upon \>hc people ih "^mselves, but much more than is generally believed upon the conditions under which they live their lives in this new world. The older countries look less or more to th 3 past, this country looks to the future — the whole land is instinct with life, and hope, and longing All aen prophesy pleasant and noble things of ^1! ,]!.;♦" AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 87 this Greater Britain ; and yet there is one evil, one speck upon the unsoiled surface of this new commonwealth, a rent in the bran new robes of liberty and progress, that, unchecked and unre- paired, cannot but darken that bright future and rob you of the fair reward of all your toil and noble endeavour. As you love your country measure this evil, and meet it. As you believe in her future, remove this stumbling block out of the way. As you would welcome strangers from other lands to make your country their home, give them the protection of just laws, and the encouragement of a good example. In this eagerness to "get on" in the world, forget not the blessedness of those who think of others. Remember the dream of Abou Ben Adhem. ** Abou Ben Adhem — may his tribe increase I — Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, And saw amid the moonlight in his room An angel writing in a book of gold. Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold, And to the vision in the room he said, • What writest thou ? ' The vision raised its head^ And with a voice made of all sweet accord Replied the angel. ' The names of those that love the Lord, ' '.-'1 if 1- '< •\ hi' I'; ,t' 88 THE OLD VICE * And is mine one ?' said Abou, * Nay not so,' Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low, But cheerily still, and said, ' I pray thee then . Write me as one who loves his fellow men.' The angel wrote and vanished. The next night He came again with a great wakening light. He showed the names whom love of God had blest, And lo I Ben Adhem's name led all the rest. " — Leigh Hunt. r- r PUBLIC ;: Y OF BORO iii ' I AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 89 ''NO." Would you learn the bravest thing That man can ever do ? Would ye be an uncrowi^'d king ; Absolute and true ? Would ye seek to emulate All we learn in story, Of the noble, just, and great, Rich in real glory ? Would ye lose much bitter care In your lot below ? Bravely speak out when and where 'Tis right to utter " No." When temptation's form would lead To some pleasant wrong — When she tunes her hollow reed To the syren's song — When she offers bribe, and smile, And our conscience feels There is naught but shining guile In the gifts she deals ; Then, Oh ! then, let courage rise To its strongest flow ; Show that ye are brave as wise, And firmly answer " No." ■ m' 90 THE OLD VICE AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. i-''";. 1 ;i,l! yi* Men with goodly spirits blest, Willing to do right ; Yet who stand with wavering breast Beneath Persuasion's might ; When companions seek to taunt Judgment into sin, When the loud laugh fain would daunt Your better voice within; Oh ! be sure ye'll never meet More insidious foe ; But strike the coward to your feet, By Reason's watchword, " No." Ah ! how many thorns we wreathe. To twine our brows around ; By not knowing when to breathe This important sound. Many a breast has rued the day Wheii it reckon'd less Of fruits upon the moral " Nay," Than flowers upon the " Yes." Many a sad repentant thought Turns to " long ago," When a luckless fate was wrought By want of saying " No." ii CHAPTER VII. *' What constitutes a State ? Not high raised battlement or laboured mound, Thick wall or moated gate, Not cities proud, with spires and turrets crowned. Not bays and broad armed ports, Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride ; Not starr'd and spangled courts, Where lowrbrowed baseness wafts perfume to pride. No ! men—high minded men. Men who their dviy know. And know their rights, and knowing dare maintain. These constitute a State." GOOD deal has been said about the pro- longed depression of trade in Great ^^^^^ Britain. The wise ones, so plentiful in every community, were sure Lord Beaconsfield's Government was at the root of the evil, and we were confidently jpromised prosperous trade un- der Mr. Gladstone's administration. Few seemed to remember that the people themselves, as the H (: 'I IN i' ' f II ilHJi ;.. ii s iii ^i! !.;; 92 THE OLD VICE consumers, had it in their own power to im- prove the trade of the country by diverting their earnings into the proper channels. On careful investigation, it was shown by Mr. William Hoyle, that the foreign trade of Great Britain was little, if at all depressed, notwith- standing the difficulty of getting orders exe- cuted promptly by men, who every week went on a prolonged "spree," but the home trade was seri- ously embarrassed, because the people preferred to spend their money on liquor, rather than on clothing, and necessary things. It was pointed out that if the people would agree to reduce their liquor bill one-half, and spend the money thus gained on clothing and home comforts, th i woollen and cotton operatives of the country would not only be working full time, but they would be working overtime. The money spent so recklessly on liquor means more than waste, more even than depressed trade, it means crime, and it means that the better portion of the community have to pay for the care and safe-keeping of the criminal popu- lation. In other words we buy crime, and then pay heavily to get rid of our bad purchase. All I Hi '^1 AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 93 this lies on the surface, and bad as it is, there is worse behind it ; and were it not that we know that the fortunes of the human race are em- barked in a life-boat, and cannot be wrecked, we might despair of civilization. As early as 1751, physicians declared that new forms of disease were being developed through excessive drink- ing; that population was decreasing from the same cause; and the moral condition of the people rapidly deteriorating. The decrease of popula- tion, as a result of drunkenness, had so im- pressed public men at this time, that when a bill for the naturalization of foreign Protestants and Jews were brought into the British Parlia- ment, it was urged as a weighty argument in its favour. Gin-drinking was the master curse of English life, to which most of the crime, and an immense proportion of the misery, of the nation may be ascribed. In the hope of check- ing the evil, a duty of twenty shillings a gallon was imposed, and no one was permitted to sell without paying a tax of fifty pounds a year. Could such a law have been enforced, it would have amounted almost to prohibition ; ■■ 11! I ' If \ . ? [ ' ■ IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 ^Ui 1^ gBi 122 11.25 Hiotographic Sciences Corporalion 33 wht main stmit wiutir.n.y. msm (7U) •79-4509 W ^ ) 94 THE OLD VICE iJ t ( <'! but the passion for liquor was too deep and widespread to be arrested by a mere act of the legislature. Violent riots was the result, and where the law was not defied it was systemati- cally evaded. No Government, however strong in their majority, can afford to neglect unrepre- sented public opinion, selfish and unenlightened though it may be ; by legislating in defiance of such opinion. Governments have produced re- volutions to the overthrow of law, but have never effected reformations. Notwithstanding the increase of civil and political liberty, of which we make so much boast, there is a dark background of moral wretchedness that never sees the light of pub- licity. The essential qualities of national great- ness are, without doubt, moral, and no increase of material prosperity can ever compensate us for the loss we sustain through the vice of in- temperance. The greatest misery often makes the least noise in the world, and many a man and woman to-day is fighting the battle of life with the death wound under their armour, and the conviction in their hearts that for them there pan henceforth be no more sunshiny in the sacred p and of the t, and emati- strong irepre- htened ,nce of jed re- t have ^1 and » much moral )f pub- 1 great- ncrease sate us 3 of in- makes lan and fe with md the a there 3 sacred AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 95 circle of their homes. That nations calling them- selves civilized and Christian should authorize men to engage in a traffic the outcome of which has been evil throughout its whole history, is a singular proof of how little they are influenced by their belief, or at least their supposed beliefs. The liquor traffic has always been dangerous. A. Parliament, the most free and painstaking in the world, has, for centuries, laboured in vain to make this system profitable and harmless, and the result is that, to-day, the British Liquor Trade is the Fourth Estate of the Realm. The utmost care has been taken to secure the most respectable persons to exercise this calling, and in the eye of the law such persons have been found. Yet, such is the rooted belief that the sys- tem is essentially wrong, that from the moment your respectable citizen becomes a liquor seller, he is treated like a ticket-of -leave man, hedged in by law, and dogged by detectives at every turn. It is not necessary to believe that every liquor seller is a monster of unrighteousness, to fear and denounce the system. The Spanish Inqui- sition has been regarded by Protestants as the m '< 'I < > 'I 1 1 !i 'I t p the greatest refinement and the greate..t luxury. Talk of political questions, the man who can see, I think, will observe that in these times there lies beneath all these questions, the great question — whether the profligate misery which dogs the steps of civilization shall be allowed to exist. / believe it is the great political question of the future. If you could only see the right way of doing it, I co'ild know no nobler work than to go with you in that object." " The man," said The Times " who AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 101 shall invei'it a really efficient to antidote this system of voluntary, and daily poisoning, will deserve a high place among the benefactors of his lace." Much has been done toward creating a moral sentiment against dri^ikenness and drinking, and the habit is becoming increasingly disreputable. Drunkenness now means loss of caste ; it is an offence against society. It is no longer an excuse for crime; but the voluntary extinction of reason, a self-inflicted tnadness, for which the drinker must he held responsible. The magnitude of the evil is great, but the apathy of the public ha.", been even greater. Not until the people make their will felt on the side of temperance can we expect governments to honestly devote their energies to the pro- motion of moral and beneficent rather than party ends. \ ^ i I I 5 ■-'\ in . M M • »r ' t; ■r p P nzPTY OF \ -_' I — ' SCARBOPO PUBLIC LlSrJARY CHAPTER VIII. ** Here you look about One at another, doubting what to do, With faces as though you trusted to the gods That still have saved you, and they can do it, but They are not wishing or base timid prayers Can draw their aid, but vigilance, counsel, action, Which they will be ashamed to forsake 'Tis sloth they hate, and cowardice." Society has long endured the evil of drunkenness, pitied the drunkard, and lovingly, with much labour, endeavoured to gather in the social wreckage and drift-wood of this fearful and relentless tide of human misery. Society — the people — must do more, for clearly the liquor system can manufacture drunkards faster than all our temperance effort can save them. The people must strike at the system that produces madness and crime ; if need be, we must be cruel to be kind. Better that a few hundred liquor makers and sellers ii'-r ii I' :-:il: 104 THE OLD ^aCE M^U i i if i should suffer pecuniary loss than that a whole people should be demoralized ; better that they should even be ruined than that a country in its youth should be dwarfed in its stature and retarded in its healthy development. " I im- peach intemperance/' said Dr. Quthrie, "and accuse it of the murder of millions of human souls." And many an exceedingly bitter cry has gone up to heaven from hearts that might never have known the extremity of human wretched- ness but for this evil system. Drink is not the only evil of its kind. " The morphia crave" is not unknown. "We have rea- son to believe," said one writer, "that among cer- tain classes ^f society it is becoming too common, and bids fair to grow into a very general vice. It is found to prevail chiefly among members of the higher and more educated classes of society, such as military authorities, literary men, mer- chants of the higher class, physicians, surgeons, bearing names of the highest reputation, in fact among those who, by the nature of their profes- sion, and the demands of society, are subject to extraordinary strains on their nervous organiza- pe foi AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 105 tion. Its cure is as difficult as the cure of the drunkard. " One injection, administered to a person who has been cured of morbid craving for morphia, will prove sufficient to vanquish the power of resistance against the craving successfully sustained for many months." Such is the terrible vice which threatens, and which, if we are to believe our authority, has already in some measure made a footing among certain classes of our countrymen. Could medical men foresee the irretrievable ruin of many a noble mind, and the terrible unhappiness of many a family circle, they might choose their remedies with less danger to the future of their patients. So strangely is good and evil blended in this world of ours, that the drug that may save life and alleviate human misery, becomes under other circumstances ruin and death. " Surely, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird," was the wondering question of Solomon. Yet we know that human beings down all the centuries, for a moment's pleasure, have walked into perdition with their eyes wide open, and bartered fame, life, and fortune for a moment's '' hi J iHi .111 !l 106 THE OLD VICE :i^ - joy, that could but end in pain, threw away " the white flower of a blameless life," and left behind them bitter memories. When a great battle hai been fought, all the world mourns the slaughter, yet, in England alone, more lives are lost through drink every year than were lost in the Russian war, and at a cost of treasure which exceeds ^ expense of that war by millions. We kr - t' >t men can be selfish, sinful, vicious, p ^.mi.., al without liquor, but we know also that much wickedness would be unheard of, but for this inciting cause. To permit preventable misery, poverty, disease, crime, and death, is neither common sense nor common humanity. It looks as if nations that allow such things, had " eaten of that insane root which takes the reason prisoner," and deliberately said, "I am not my brother's keeper." Self-interest is not avowed as the first law of public and political life, yet it is too often the main-spring of parliamentary tatics. It is not disputed that intoxicating drink obliterates moral consciousness, destroys the rational part of man's nature, overthrows reason, and lays AND THE NEW CHIVALRT. 107 bare the mere animal. The coward is ^ ore craven, the braggart more boastful, the cruel more savage, the licentious more impure, the untruthful more false, and whatever special demon there is in the man or woman is made more manifest. The whole tendency is to brutalize, deaden, corrupt, uncivilize society, and eventually extinguish the greatest of all human functions — reason itself. This new country is face to face with this old evil, the drink curse is as much a fact in Canada as in Great Britain, it is among your greatest national perils, if indeed, it is not your very greatest. It is not a question of whether this man or the other drinks a little too much, or whether they drink at all, no more than in a campaign it would be a question as to the life of one soldier or another. The great question is, as to the battle as a whole. Who is to win it ? The liquor sellsrs, or the people ? The attitude of Canada to this question will determine her attitude in relation to other social questions, if it does not decide her status, and the measure of her national strength in the future. When nations, like in- Mf I! ■ill\ I ;J y' n I i 108 THE OLD VICE » I ! i 'I I dividuals, become diseased they cannot but live with diminished force, and a broken balance of power, instead of in the full buoyancy of bound- ing life. The Canadian people are especially adapted for dealing with this question. Your political life is devoted to home measures. You are hampered with no grave foreign policy, no foreign wars, no trouble with your peaceful Indian tribes, no projects of ambition outside your own country, no consuming desire to shake* your eagles in the face of every people under the sun. You are making a country, and you are at leisure to devote your whole attention to that great undertaking. Here you may find a true " National Policy," — a policy that must relieve national burdens, by dealing with this one great inciting cause of crime and taxation. You may lessen crime, you may lessen insanity* you may lessen your dangerous and idle classes, and in doing it you carry with you the goodwill, and the consent of Protestant and Catholic, and the best men of both political parties. Your position is unlike that of the Mother Country. There they are struggling to secure li' I AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 109 law, here you have it already to hand. In England they are obliged to create a tremendous volume of moral influence before they can secure any legislative enactment which, while it delays legislation, secures its enforcement, as public opinion is in advance of the law, and ready to make it efiective. The people are masters of the situation, could they be made aware of the fact, and could they be made free to act on their ewn convictions. No great political improvement, no great reform, has ever been originated in any country by its rulers. The first suggestion has invariably come from some bold and able thinker, who, discerning the abuse, denounces it, points out how it may be remedied, rouses the people to give national volume and will to their desire, until the solid impact of a nation makes parlia- ments and kings remember why and for what end they exist. It is only thus the voice of the people can become the voice of the legis- lature. Great Britain is making marvellous advances toward this consummation, so devoutly desired by all that are best in the kingdom. It takes little discernment to see that an evil of ^ . 110 THE OLD VICE f;f '.<.., '»\\ ! I .i such long standing must have deep roots, and, notwithstanding, the reiterated condemnation that has been poured upon it from all quarters, the liquor system rests upon the will of the people, and by ihe will of the people alone can it he overthrown. In the words of Burke, " the people are the masters. They have only i>o express their wants at large and in gross. We — the House of Commons — are the expert artists, we are the skilled workmen, to shape their desires into perfect form, and to fit the utensil to the use. They are the sufferers, they tell the symptoms of the complaint, but we know the exact seat of the disease, and how to apply the remedy according to the rules of art. How shocking it would be to see us pervert our skill into a sinister and servile dexterity, for the purpose of evading our duty, and defrauding our employers, who are our natural lords, of the object of their just expectations." To follow, not to force public inclination, to give a direc- tion, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature in the opinion of 'I ■;;■ AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. Ill this great master. In his opinion it would be dreadful if there was any power in the nation capable of resisting the unanimous desire, or even the desire of any very great and decided majority of the people. No progress is real, unless it is spontaneous. Law must represent the sentiments of the community before it can secure their rights. Prohibition, or even stringent license laws, to be effective, must emanate, from the people, and not be the mere will of the legislature. .A powerful govern- ment, and if the government be corrupt, a few powerful individuals, may suffice to carry any measure. The true friends of Temperance desire no such triumph, which would, indeed, be a defeat. Much as they love the Temperance movement, they have no desire to promote it at the expense of purity and liberty. We do not want prohibition by an infringement of the fundamental laws of government in a free country. Prohibition must originate with the people. If the people do not desire it, no effort of government would be of any avail. We cannot change opinions by law. To attack any ,. ti .r^ "Mi£ ?Un-' ' 'KJBgffi f1 112 THE OLD VICE system, however evil, by unjust methods, is to provoke a reaction which leaves it stronger than before. Truth is patient and powerful. Government cannot regenerate society, but public opinion can regenerate government, by changing it until a truly representative govern- ment is secured. Public opinion, in the long run, must control politicians, and no reform can be of real and abiding value to a people, unless the people themselves take the initiative. There is some danger among us of overrating the power of the legislature, and underrating the power that makes the legislature. The liquor system will remain until the hand of the age i» laid upon it, and when that day comes it must perish. The experience of the past teaches that when government and the people differ, government is generally in the wrong. A new country is apt to be so fully occupied with its material necessities, that its politics not unfrequently falls into the hands of political speculators. When, however, tiie people will have a measure, their representative^ dare not say them nay ; and therefore, with the people rests the responsibility ,' 'M' AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 113 of this great question. Until the people are rour ^ out of their indifference on this subject, and nav^e learned to press their demands with earnestness and force upon the Government, the Government have no right to legislate. To legislate in advance of public opinion is not only useless hut mischievotcSj tending only to bring law into contempt. > 1 1' 8 Tr.'Z PRCPiHRTy Cr PUBLIC L13RARY. ' ll' I ' li! :JI 114 THE OLD VICE ONWARD. V 'I tjl i:^' When the wind is blowing, Do not shrink and cower ; Firmly onward going, Feel the joy of power : Heaviest the heart is In a heavy air; Every wind that rises Blows away despair. With the waves contending. See, the ships prevail, Winning aid befriending From the adverse gale : Thus the way contesting. Souls must hold their course. Thus a blessing wresting From each hostile force. When the darts but rattle On the coward's shield, He will quit the battle. Sword and self will yield : ! iii AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. From the fear of failing Shall we cease to pray ? On the foe's assailing Throw the shield away ? Hopeless, and yet winning, Thou wilt wiser be, Wit's-end the beginning Of new faith in thee : Foes, and winds, and weather. To oppose, resolve; Faith and skill together Hardest problems solve. 115 Mi f .1 i: ifr i ii|h CHAPTER IX. •' Words are mighty, words are living : Serpents with their venomous stings, Or bright angels, crowding round us, With heaven's light upon their wings : Every word has its own spirit, True or false, that never dies ; Every word man's lips have uttered Echoes in God's skies." — A. A. Proctor. "Money ! the dumb god That cans't do nought, and yet Mak'st men do all thing)?. " JHE evils of intemperance have never been so much felt and deplored as at the present time, nor the remedy better understood. No one talks of coercing the people into habits of sobriety, but all be- lieve that the silent, though overwhelming, pressure of public opinion must in the long run succeed. No law, custom, or legislature can resist public opinion, and a progressive and en- J If H'ili tSU/l 1 1^ :m 118 THE OLD VICE fi ;/ fill j II II M- lightened people will not long tolerate an unen- lightened and unprogressive government. Rulers follow the age, they cannot lead it. A time will come when the legalized liquor system will be regarded as one of the greatest conspiracies against human nature that ever darkened the history of mankind, and that this conspiracy should have been upheld in countries calling themselves Christian, for the sake of gratifying a greed for that profit which sometimes waits on crime, will not tend to lessen the amazement of more enlightened generations. It was stated • in the New York Independent of April last, that that city, with all its churches, its intelli- gence, its social refinement, its busy and bene- ficent wealth, was governed by the rum power, and by the rum power it is bound hand and foot. The rum business is the one branch of trade which not only is not beneficent, but is fairly entitled to be ranked with the slave trade, as the sum and source of all villanies. And yet the rum business is regulated, or is pre- sumed to be regulated, by law; and law-abiding citizens must not interfere with the legal rights AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. , 119 of those licensed to carry it on. The slaver once had his legal rights. Gradually these rights were restricted, and then withdrawn alto- gether, and now he is a criminal, hunted every- where, and by all nations, on the high seas. " Our Excise Commissioners " says the Inde- pendent, "are the creatures of the Board of Aldermen, and thirteen of the Board of Alder- men are directly interested in the liquor business, and all the rest but two, it is believed, are in- directly interested in it. The same is true, to some extent, of the Police Commissioners. " The laws are inadequate in some particulars. Why have we not better ones? Because the rum power fills the seats of the New York and Brooklyn representatives in the Legislature. Why are the present laws not executed ? Be- cause the rum power elects the aldermen who confirm the £lxcise and Police Commissioners. Who rules the city ? The rum power. How much longer will the people submit." How long will THE PEOPLE Submit? is the main question in every country that can boast of a free franchise. It is as the people will, and r!l .' ii " 1^ t\ fW.V, H t ^ 120 THE OLD VICE when the people will, this evil tyranny must fall, like every other tyranny, when it had ex- hausted the long-suffering patience of humanity. All that United Protestant Christendom together raises annually for missions would not pay the liquor bill of the United States for three days. What is the result of the liquor system in this new country ? What is the result of one hundred years of liquor domination? "If all the victims of the rum traffic, we are told, were gathered together before our eyes, we should see a thousand funerals a-week from their number. Placed in procession five abreast, the drunkards of the United States of America would form an army one hundred miles long, with a suicide occurring in every mile. These are terrible facts in a new country with the broad volume of the past to guide and warn men of the iniquities that have destroyed millions of England's bravest and best. Canada, with a population about equal to London, is said to have an army of 30,000 victims of the liquor traffic. Thirty thousand human beings bound hand and foot in the AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 121 fetters of a cruel and most galling slavery. Thirty thousand drunkards, the fruit of a legal- ized system of slaughter, from which the State derives its proportion of the gain. When one looks at the palaces of the liquor kings, one feels like the slave who gazed upon the monuments of Egyptian despotism. " These are the archives of our masters, detailing like a scroll the history of their cruelties and their oppression. The mortar that daubs them has been tempered with human blood, every brick is cemented with tears of women and children, every slab founded on the body and bones of murdered men." Yet this . system is legal, and to the law we must bow while such laws remain ; but in this free country, in the full exercise of the parliamentary fran- chise, Canadians, Americans, and Englishmen need not be slaves, except they will it so. It is for you, in your united strength, by your free suffrage, to '* Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife ; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws." 1; i ill' !• •■ I'l^ :m|: 122 THE OLD VICE To-day hundreds of thousands are born in sin and cradled in iniquity, and fore-doomed, by the social conditions around them, to a life of abject- ness and bondage. The State, empowered and supported by the voice of the people, cannot do all things ; but the people's representatives can, in obedience to the people's behest, pluck this germ of human misery from its throne, and lay it in the dust, an uncrowned and despised thing, that God's creatures may have a fairer field for their energies on God's earth. The Persians called liquor "The mother of sin;" and the experi- ence of ages has demonstrated the truth of the assertion. " Wine and wassail," said Lord Ches- terfield, " hath taken more strong places than gun or steel." The history of this gigantic iniquity has never been written, and never can b© written by human pen. The world's greatest crimes have never seen the light of day, and the uttermost of human misery has never yet found expression. There are crimes that men feel they dare not confess to themselves, or to one another : deeds of darkness too dark for any measure of wholesome publicity. There are AND THE NEW CHIVALBY. 123 by-paths of greed and cunning, steps of misery and death, that lead to the fair reward the world covets ; but behind the golden lure that makes men bold in unrighteousness, there is a treasuring up of wrath against the day of wrath. " Some men's sins are evident, gqing before unto judg- ment, and some men also follow after. In like manner, also, there are good works that are evident, and such as are otherwise cannot be hid." "Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished." *' madness ! to think the use of strongest wines And strongest drinks our chief support in health, When God, with these forbidden, made choice to rear His mighty champion, strong beyond compare, Whose drink was only from the limpid brook. " H ' ^ 1; i. 124 THE OLD VICE "HE NEVER SMILED AGAIN." ■' ;l;:i I : i: " The bark that held a prince went down, The sweeping waves rolled on, And what was England's glorious crown To him that wept a son ? He lived — for life may long be borne Ere sorrow breakj its chain — Why comes not death to those who mourn ? He never smiled again. There stood proud forms around his throne. The stately and the brave ; But which could 'ill the place of one — That one beneath the wave ? Before him passed the young and fair. In pleasure's reckless train ; But seas dashed o'er his son's bright hair-^ He never smiled again. He sat where festal bowh went round, He heard the minstrel sing. He saw the tourney's victor crowned, Amidst the knightly ring : il AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 125 A murmur of the restless deep Was blent with every strain, A voice of winds that would not sleep — He never smiled again. Hearts, in that time, closed o'er the trace Of vows once fondly poured, And strangers took the kinsman's place At many a joyous board ; Graves, which true love had bathed with tears. Were left to heaven's bright rain ; Fresh hopes were born for other years — He never smiled again." CHAPTER X. " This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world. England, that was Wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of herself. " — Shakapeare. LL the crimes on earth do not destroy so many of the human race, nor alien- ate so much property as drunkenness," may^ seem an exaggerated statement, yet we have every reason to believe that it can be demonstrated as true. The incident which Felicia Hemans gives ex- pression to, in " He Never Smiled Again," is well known, and is one of the most touching in English history. Henry the First united in himself the blood of Cerdic and the Conqueror, and was the first English sovereign since the Conquest. Notwithstanding the heavy burdens i T i' W 'i u ^ 4 ? 1' 128 THE OLD VICE ■i It. H the people endured, and their bitter suffering from plague and famine, they loved him as a king who had given them the blessing of peace for thirty years. Conquerors and conquered were fast becoming blended into one people. Norman haughtiness had become tempered with love toward the hardy Saxon. The old order was changing, giving place to a new and a better. The Norman name itself was disappearing, and from castle to cottage the people were English all. Henry's hope was centred on his son, William the Atheling, who, with a crowd of nobles, ac- companied him on his return from Normandy, in 1120. They sailed from Barfleur with affair wind, and were soon out of sight of land ; but Prince William, with his gay and reckless re- tinue, remained behind until pressed by his older councillors to embark. The sailors, as well as their captain, Thomas Fitz-Stephens, had spent the interval in finish- ing their debauch, and put to sea drunk and incapable of their duty. In haste to follow the king, and unable to manage their ship, they ■ ;. ■ AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 129 were dashed on the rocks, where the ship soon foundered. Little cared the roaring waves for the name of prince or king. One terrible cry, ringing through the silence of the night, was heard by the royal fleet; but it was not until morning that the fatal news reached the king* Fitz-Stephens clung to the mast and could have been saved, but when he knew that the prince was lost through his recklessness, he threw him- self into ' he sea that he might not survive so terrible a disaster. " Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell, Then shrieked the timid, and stood still the brave, Then some leap'd overboard, with dreadful yell, As eager to anticipate their grave ; And the soa yawn'd around her like a hell. And down she suck'd with her the whirling wave, Like one who grapples with his enemy. And strives to strangle him before he die. " And first one universal shriek there rushed, Louder than the loud ocean, like a crash Of echoing thunder, and then all was hushed. Save the wild wind and the remorseless dash Of billows ; but at intervals there gush'd. Accompanied with a convulsive splash, A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry Of some strong swimmer in his agony." 9 ii!l i i i'l ^1 m 130 THE OLD VICE I 1 1 Not a man on board the white ship that car- ried Prince William, but, like Gonzalo, would « have given at that terrible moment a " thousand furldngs of sea for an acre of barren ground, ling, heath, broom, furze, anything ;" but all in vain ; they were cheated out of their lives by drunkards, as many brave and loyal souls have been since then. The death of the prince was not only a cala- mity to the king, who "never smiled again," but to England, as it was the source of those civil wars which, after Henry's death, desolated the land. If we need further lessons from the past, we may turn to the fifth chapter of Daniel, and read it in the light ot ancient history. The scene is a banqueting hall in the proud, luxurious, and licentious city of Babylon. The host is Belshazzar, the last king of a mighty empire, and the guests " a thousand of his lords." " Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine beforo the thousand." Here, indeed, "there was a sound of revelry by night." The monarch drinks to his distinguished company ; and court and AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 131 king are among the gayest of the gay. Regard- less of the dread extremity of their country, and the invading army around their walls, the whole population were given up to the proverbial splendour and intoxication of a Babylonian feast. On this fatal night the king comes forth from the seclusion that enwraps Eastern sove- reigns, and mingles freely with his noble guests. Belshazzar is like an ordinary mortal in his cups. He thinks • " Bacchus' blessings are a treasure : Drinking is the soldier's pleasure." And soon: — " Sooth 'd with the sound the king grew vain, Fought all his battles o'er again, And thrice he routed all his foes, And thrice he slew the slain. " He vaunts him of his conquests ; he believes himself utterly invincible ; eternity, he thinks, is written in his destiny ; he hugs that security " which is mortals' chiefest enemy." " Belshazzar, whiles he tasted the wine, com- manded to brinf^ the golden and silver vessels which his father, Nebuchadnezzar, had taken i|^ 'it 'fi I 132 THE OLD VICE out of the temple at Jerusalem ; that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein." From the temple of Bel are brought, at his behest, the sacred vessels of the Jewish worship, that the women of his harem may drink wine from the holy vessels of the sanctuary, in the midst of a drunken revel. The very frenzy of fate was upon him. At this very moment the army of Cyrus had closely invested the doomed city, and for one brief but brilliant hour, at least, the Persian king was the central man of the world. Babylon was considered impregnable. Well stored and well defended, the king had grounds of confidence. So effective was the defence so far, and so confident the besieged, that nothing but hunger, of which they had no fear, could subdue them. Belshazzar's heart is haughty. It seems to him as though Babylon has not only conquered nations but gods ; the sacred vessels of the Jews being proof of such conquest. They drank wine and praised the gods of gold and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone. / ii \\ ' \ AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 133 / Suddenly the whole scene of boastful impiety and reckless daring is changed; every face in that gay assembly is blanched with terror; and the princely eye, that a moment before flashed with proud de- fiance, now glares in helpless horror and amaze- ment. "Each in the other's countenance read their own dismay." " In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick, upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace ; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another. The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers;" but Belshazzar's wise men are as helpless before the mysterious writing as their master. "The king was greatly troubled' and his countenance was changed, and his lords were astonished." " The queen, by reason of the words of the king and his lords, came into the ' banqueting house." She may have been the wife of Nebuchadnezzar, Nitocris herself, the archi- '!f I ' k If H 1' 134 THE OLD VICE tect of some of the great out- works of the city, and said to have been the builder of the third pyramid. Babylon was founded by a woman — Semiramis, of whom later ages loved to chronicle marvellous deeds and heroic achievements out- rivalling Alexander the Great — and might even now have been saved by a woman had the king been less blind to the peril of the hour, or less impenitent when the whole bitter truth was laid before him. It is the queen-mother who remembers Daniel. "There is a man in thy kingdom in whom is the spirit of the holy gods ;" and Daniel, who as a youth had refused the king's meat and the king's wine, is called into that hall of revelry, pride, and terror. Daniel had been forgotten in such a court, and now his message is a bitter one, although told without bitterness. He was to tell a great king, in the midst of his nobles, that he is king no longer, and that his kingdom has been rent from him in the midst of his gay pomp and pride. He reminds the king that kingdoirs and kings are in God's hands, and that when Nebuchadnezzar forgot God — when his AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 135 heart was lifted up and his mind hardened in pride, as Belshazzar's was at that moment, he was deposed from his kingly throne, and his royal dignity taken from him. But Belshazzar had for- gotten the lessons of the past, or rather he had defied the past; for although he knew, he humbled not his heart, and " the God," said the faithful Daniel, " in whose hand thy breath is, and whose is all thy ways, hast thou not glorified, God hath, therefore numbered thy kingdom and finished it : thou art weighed in the balance and art found wanting, and thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians." How mad and besotted that assembly was may be inferred from their conduct ! The mystery of the hand-writing has terrified them for a mo- ment; but once it has been deciphered, the revel is resumed, and they forget in the brilliant de- bauch the doom that hangs over them. Cyrus had already made canals to draw off the greater portion of the Euphrates above the city, that his soldiers might pass along the river bed, and he waited for some great festival when the attention of soldiers and citizens alike •|i 136 THE OLD VICE r m m would be diverted from the besiegers. Events answer his expectations exactly. Belshazzar has forgotten his enemies in the banquet. The people follow his example, feasting and dancing. Drunken riot and boastful security took posses- sion of all. The very sentries forget their du- ties, and neglect to close the water-gates. In that night the dikes were cut, the canals carried off the water, and the Medes and Persians passed up the river walls. Thus, without a struggle, Babylon fell into the hands of her enemies. While Belshazzar is feasting, and the tide of mirth runs high, Cyrus enters the city. Her hundred gates of bronze, the pride of Baby- lonians, admit her conquerors. To and fro in the panic of that night, messenger encounters messenger with evil tidings — " the city is taken at one end, and the passages are stopped, the reeds burned with fire, and the men of war affrighted." The fierce mountaineers of Media dash through the streets like wild beasts let loose : they scent blood, they care not for the splen- dour around them, they care but to slay, and li' J i AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 137 spare not. They revel in a festival of slaughter, whereto trembling multitudes they may admin- ister the cup of death. Belshazzar and his thousand lords are at last aroused by the clash of arms, and the battle-cry of Medes and Persians within the palace. Some sparks of their ancient valour remain un- quenched by the winecup's fearful and fatal witchery. Sword in hand they meet the in- vader, and sword in hand they die. Babylon has fallen through her iniquity. The city of the Sun-god has perished in her intemperance ; the golden city has ceased, and the crash of her fall is heard throughout the world. " It shall be no more inhabited forever, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation. No man shall abide there, neither shall any man dwell therein. Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldee's excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation, neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there, neither shall the shepherds make their folds there." How ii! i: ':t1 138 THE OLD VICE hath the oppressor ceased! The golden city ceased ! The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked, and the sceptre of the rulers. " Belshazzar's grave is made, His kingdom passed away ; He, in the balance weigh'd, Is light and worthless clay. The shroud his robe of state. His canopy the stone. The Mede is at his gate. The Persian on his throne. " I iHi III AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 139 THE RIGHT MUST WIN. " Oh, it is hard to work for God, To rise and take His part Upon this battlefield of earth, And not sometimes lose heart ! " He hides Himself so wondrously, As though there were no God ; He is least seen when all the powers Of ill are most abroad. " ril master's good, good seems to change To ill with greatest ease ; And, worst of all, the good with good Is at cross purposes. " Workman of God ! Oh, lose not heart, But learn what God is like, And in the darkest battlefield Thou shalt know where to strike. »( ifli >«! PI Ii» 140 THE OLD VICE AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. " Thrice blessed is he to whom is given The instincts that can tell That God is on the field when He Is most invisible. " Blest, too, is he who can divine Where real light doth lie, And dares to take the side that seems Wrong to man's blindfold eye. " Muse on His justice, downcast soul * Muse and take better heart; Back with thine angel to the field. And bravely do thy part. " For right is right, as God is God, And right the day must win : To doubt would be disloyalty. To falter would be sin." — Faher m \i «■ w. CHAPTER XI. ** Defer no time ; delays have dangerous ends. • • • • * • " God is our fortress : in whose conquering name • ••••• Let us resolve to scale their flinty bulwarks." " Opinion shall be surgeon to our heart." — Shakspeare. JHERE is nothing more discouraging to Temperance Reformers than the sel- fish apathy which seem^ to envelope Christian people in regard to aggressive action in the temperance movement. " Opinion " ap- pears sound enough, and resolutions of the most thorough and drastic character can be carried in almost any assembly; but what we require is public opinion in motion, public sentiment active, aggressive, self-denying, persistent, and determined to effect its beneficial purpose. Qreat Britain is labouring to obtain a whole- some law against the manufacture and sale of fU\ r ! n M ■ 1 f' 142 THE OLD VICE intoxicating liquors. Canada has such a law already upon her statute-book ; but a law is nothing unless it is enforced, and until there has been a general attempt to enforce the Canada Temperance Act of 1878, you cannot well demand additional legislation without being accused of something like caprice, after the manner of the inefficient workman, who is always laying the blame of his failure upon his tools. The Scott Act must be received as an honest measure, honestly intended to confer upon the people the power to give effect to their will on the liquor question. The Act is not perfect ; but most temperance people, looking at it from the standpoint of the actual condition of the country, and the possible as regards legislation, will be inclined to pronounce it fair, and fairly workable. The Act provides for every legitimate use alcohol may be put to, granting that it may have some such use. " From the day it comes into force, no person shall by himself, his clerk, servant or agent, ex- pose or keep for sale, or directly or indirectly, on any pretence, or upon any advice, sell or barter, or in consideration of the purchase of any other AND THE NEW CHIVALBY. 143 property, give to any other person any spirituous or other intoxicating liquors, or any mixed liquors capable of being used as a beverage, and part of which is spirituous or otherwise in- toxicating." The exceptions being when it is required " for exclusively sacramental or medi- cinal purposes, or for bona fide tise in some art, rade, or manufacture." In such cases it can only be sold by " such druggists and other vendors as may be specially licensed by the Lieutenant-Governor in each Province, the number not to exceed one in each township or parish, nor two in each town, and in cities not exceeding one for every four thousand inhabi- tants ; such> sale, when for medicinal purposes, to be in quantities of not less than one pint, to be removed from the premises, and to be made only on the certificate of a medical man, having no interest in the sale by the druggist or vendor, affirming that such liquor has been prescribed for the person named therein. When wine is required for sacramental pur- poses the same care is used, and the " signature of a clergyman," affirming that the wine is required for such purpose, is necessary. ' !! Hfi iiE i till the most hardened drinkers were under the table. In the reign of George the Second an Act was passed regulating the importation of arrac, or " Rack," as it was sometimes called. Arrac was often rendered more dangerous by the addition of extract of Indian hemp. " Rack punch " be- came popular, and for the first time British vice AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 155 received fresh stimulus from Indian" liquors. Fortunately the reign of the second George is connected in our minds with other and more interesting events. If England was experiment- ing with new intoxicants, she was at the same time achieving fresh victories by her arms. Olive in India and Wolfe in Canada, were ex- tending the dominion of the British Crown, and earning for themselves undying fame, and we can all for a moment forget British vices in the contemplation of British valour. In the earlier ages of Rome, wine was both rare and costly. Four diflferent kinds of wine are said to have been presented, for the first time, at a feast given by Julius Qsesar, in his third Consulship, forty-six years before the birth of Christ. But soon the study of wines became a passion with the Eomans,, and the most scrupulous care was bestowed upon every process connected with their production and preservation. They soon acquired such a taste for these liquors, that they laboured to find out methods by which wine could be doctored, so that the dissipated might be able to swallow lii; tl ir i I- 156 THE OLD VICE H 'hi' I CHAPTER XIII. " Go to your bosom, Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know." • « • • • • • ** The vice is of a great kindred." • •••••• " It is not enough to speak, but to speak true." — ShMkeapeare. IHE system that lies at the root of these vast evils, is a system based on law as well as custom; and a nation which licenses evil weakens thereby its moral power, and sows the seed of its own dissolution. When we compare ourselves with our ancestors a century or two ago, or even at the beginning of the present, we are apt to consider the comparison altogether in our favour; yet we are bound to confess that there are yet many streaks of barbarism still discernable, and among them we are inclined to rank the liquor system. It is not more than four years since an Englishman was tried at Sheffield for the crime 11 162 THE OLD VICE of selling his wife for " a quart of beer." Mr. T. D. Sullivan, the member for Westmeath, in- terrogated the Home Secretary in the House of Commons, as to whether " the Government would take steps to remove the impression which seemed to exist, that the sale of wives was a legitimate transaction." A woman, some time before, sold her child at Oldham for " a pint of beer," and seemed to consider the transaction bona fide, and in all respects satisfactory. That men should sell their wives for beer, and women their children, is, after all, not so marvellous, when multitudes everywhere are selling them- selves, soul and body, into slavery for the gratification of an insane passion. In the pot- teries and mining districts of England alone, at least five cases have been recorded within the last few years of men selling their wives for liquor^ or money to be spent on liquor, at one grand sitting. Those who have looked into the subject say that the market varies. Some- times a wife put up at public auction brings about two hundred dollars and a supper; at other times " a quartern of gin," with occasion- AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 163 ally a bulldog puppy "thrown in," to make a good bargain. The sale usually takes place in a public-house, with the full consent of all the parties most immediately concerned. Occasionally, to give due solemnity to the proceedings, a halter is put round the wife's neck, before she is knocked down to the highest bidder. The most deplorable feature in these revolting transactions is that the seller, the " chattel/' and the buyer all firmly believe that they are taking part in a strictly legal trans- action. It is their rough-and-ready method of divorce and re-marriage, and all parties seem to approve of it. In time past " wife sales " formed a distinct feature in the social life of the people. For a Briton to sell his wife at Smithfield was recog- nized on the French stage as a characteristic feature in any ^\&j professing to picture the manners of " perfidious Albion," just as in India, at the present time, the English are always represented on the stage of the native theatre as intoxicated. " Go sell your vife at Smi'fiel'r' is supposed to strike home to the marrow of !' ' if I 164 THE OLD VICE Jr! 1 i-;:" illH If'' ^ every English working man in France. A man at Pontefract, in the early part o£ this century, put his wife up to auction in the market-place at a shilling, and finally disposed of her for half-a-guinea. A man at Canterbury sold his wife publicly in the cattle-market for five shil- lings. Another, a beer-house keeper, advertised the sale beforehand, and carried through the transaction in a business-like manner. A man at Dudley sold his wife for sixpence. In 1877 a wife was transferred for the sum of forty pounds, the articles of sale being drawn up at a solicitor's office, the money paid, and the wife handed over in the gravest possible manner. We might multiply such cases by the score. At some time in the past such transactions were doubtless legal, and the Sheffield knife- grinder who sold his wife for a quart of beer must be considered as a " survival " — a remnant of the boyhood of Euglish society. A man who loved his beer, and valued his wife when she could be turned into liquor, is a specimen of the drink-loving residuum of free and independent Britons. Perhaps we should not scrutinize too tM AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 165 severely the social etiquette of the residuum of England in the matter of wives, since even among the French settlers of Canada, under the shadow of "the first gentleman in Europe," wives were received by the "cargo," and an- nouncement duly made "that a supply had arrived, and such as had the means of supporting a wife should have their choice." This col- lection of mixed goods was usually announced as consisting of "tall, short, fair, brown, fat, and lean," and we learn that so great was the demand that sometimes in a fortnight the whole consignment would be disposed of, and fresh orders booked for another cargo. In 1667 a consignment of young ladies arrived by the king's special bour^iy, eighty-four from Dieppe, and twenty-five from Rochelle, among whom there were fifteen or twenty of very good birth, and several of them were stated to be really " demoiselles." No doubt they comforted them- selves with the thought that *' The fair ladies were The shoot of some highly respectable stem. Nay they count, never doubt it, some kings in their tree, And lament the lost acres once lorded by them. •3:'; i ■> •:! i i€ 't ! 166 THE OLD VICE ji m ■i ■Fll HI.' :■ «■ Never think that such creatures so exquisite grew In the haunts where vice and dishonour are known, Nor deem that girls so unselfish, so true, Had mothers 'twould shame thee to take for thine own." They complained, it seems, sometimes of neglect and hardship during the voyage, somewhat to the alarm of the consignee, who hastened to protest his willingness to do all in his power to " soothe their discontent, for if they write to their friends at home how ill they have been treated," he ex- plains, "it will be an obstacle to our plan of receiv- ing next year a number of select young ladies for our colony." If the importation of wives under the Jesuit rule, in the seventeenth century, is an amusing chapter of history, their attitude on the liquor question is certainly an instructive one. The colonists were not free from the vice of intemperance, but the Indians were wholly given up to it. They drank, in their savage simplicHy, expressly to get drunk, and when drunk iboy were worse than the wild beasts in their native woods. On th<. other hand, it was profitable to sell brandy to the Indians, and the white man cared little for the results of his trafiic, so long t;,, f, ■!. I AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 167 J ■ hi as he could fill his coffers and mend his fortune. The Church, as represented by the Jesuits, cared supremely for the red man, and they abhorred a traffic which thwarted their noblest efforts, and robbed them of the fruit of their self-deny- ing labours. They demanded that the white man who could be convicted of this offence should be excommunicated, and when spiritual penalties failed, they decreed that the offenders should suffer the extreme penalty of death, and soon after two men were shot, and one whipped, for selling brandy to Indians. The evil was, however, too wide-spread to be checked by such means ; and, too much severity proved as pernicious in the end as too much laxity. Most of the colonists being implicated, terrible excitement followed, the priests were defeated, and brandy reigned supreme over red men and white. Brandy was too powerful for the devoted Jesuits. They had braved the rigour of climate and the ferocity or savage tribes, but the white man's fire-water, which the Indian love of liquor and the fur trade made it the interest of the white man liu l':i 1 1' .■ • 1: 168 THE OLD VICE i . ii to sell, marred, if it did not annihilate, their missions. " All the rascals and idlers of the country," wrote a Jesuit father, " are attracted into this business of tavern-keeping. Our most dangerous foes are drunkenness, luxury, im- purity and slander. Our missions," he continues, " are reduced to such extremity that we can no longer maintain them against the infinity of disorder, brutality, violence, injustice, impiety, impurity, insolence, scorn and insult which the deplorable and infamous traffic in brandy has spread universally among the Indians of these parts. In the despair in which we are plunged, nothing remains for us but to abandon them to the brandy-sellers as a domain of drunkenness and debauchery." The Quakers in Pennsylvania had lifted their voice against the same crime — the selling of :tum to Indians. Ihey were among the first Temperance Reformers, and have always been in the van of every beneficent and Christian en- terprise. Yet, with all our eflforts, so subtle, so deadly and so profitable has been this system, that all the moral and Christian efforts that have IE ^^ V P !.- . AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 169 been put forth, have but served in some degree to hold the evil in check, but in no measure to abolish it. It was hoped that in Great Britain, with a growing Parliamentary sentiment, and the abundant labours of the United Kingdom Alliance, the old Temperance Societies, Salvation Army, Church of England Temperance Society, and many other organizations, that some marked diminution of the liquor bill of the country would be the result. The most it seems that has been achieved, is that the rising tide has been stemmed and the fearful deluge of evil kept within bounds. There is money in this business, therefore, it goes on in its cruel greed, and men have learned that : — 'if ** Friends, beauty, birth, fair fame, These are the gifts of money, Be but a moneyed man, persuasion tips Your tongue, and Venus settles on your lips. Get money, money still. And then let virtue follow, if she will." w ! i! ■ru,. 170 THE OLD VICE AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. LIFE AND DEATH. "What is Life. Father?" "A battle, my chi'd, Where the strongest lance may fail, Where the wariest eye^^ mav >e beguiled, And the stoutest hes ': " : vt quail, Where the foes are gather mI fji every hand, And rest not day nor night, And this feeble little one must stand In the thickest of the fight." "What is Death, Father ?" " The rest, my child, When the strife and the toil are o'er ; The Angel of God, who, calm and mild, Says we need fight no more ; Who, driving away the demon band, Bids the din of the battle cease ; Takes banner and spear from our failing hand, And proclaims an eternal Peace." "Let me die. Father ! I tremble, and fear To yield in that terrible strife !" " The crown must be won for Heaven, dear. In the battle-field of life. [tried, My child, though thy foes are strong and He loveth the weak and small ; The Angels of Heaven are on thy side, And God ia over all." CHAPTER XIV. " I* a man walking in the spirit and falsehood, do lie, saying, I will prophesy unto thee of wine and of strong drink ; he shall even be the prophet of this people." — Micah iii. 11. jEN or twelve years ago, John Ashworth visited Edinburgh, and in company with z^^ Sir James Simpson, and one or two friends, made a midnight tour of the city. Sir James Simpson had a lady visiting him at the time, the daughter of one of the great ducal families of England, who at her urgent request was permit- ted to join them. Among other places, they visited the police cells. They were con- ducted along corridors, and down flights of stairs, which seemed in the dim light to lead to an inferno, and in very truth, did lead to the drunkard's hell upon earth. In a room, which may be called a dungeon, by the light of their conductor's lantern, they could see on the 172 THE OLD VICE ■•!• I; ^ i. I ^ tH floor a number of women, who had been brought in that evening. Many of them had been fight- , ing, and there they lay with dishevelled and bloody locks, torn and begrimed garments. Some of them were asleep, their heads resting on wooden pillows, while, perhaps, they dreamed of green fields and flowers and the simple gladness of village homes. Others, it seemed, had less pleasant dreams, as their faces were distorted, and their poor unwashed hands clutched at some imaginary antagonist, while they cried out in fear or rage. The squalor, the filth, the clotted and bloody hair, the vile stench, the reeking fumes of liquor, the plank beds, the dim light, the venerable Doctor, the refined and beautiful lady, the stolid policeman — all made up a picture such as no pen can describe. They turned away sick with horror and shame, and subdued by . pity in presence of misery so complete and apparently so hopeless. "0 woman, woman," cried Charles Kingsley, " only true missionary of civilization and brotherhood, and gentle forgiv- ing charity, it is in thy power, and perhaps in thine only, to bind up the broken-hearted, to ■in AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 173 » preach deliverance to the captives. One real lady, who should dare to stoop — what might she not do with us — with our sisters." Not one, but hundreds, of noble women have stooped ko lay loving hands on the wayward, the sinful and the lost. The act indeed is beautiful, but the result far from satisfactory. Few are saved of those who fall so low. Society prepares the crime, licenses the temptation, with supercilious hypoc- risy damns the victims, and receives with bland and easy courtesy the men who pocket the pro- ceeds of madness and crime. *• How easy to keep free from sin, How hard that freedom to recall, For awful truth it is that men Forget the heaven from which they fell." Some of the fallen may yet be saved — some : not all ; but thousands may be preserved from falling by the removal of the temptation. Are the Canadian people brave enough to make sacrifice, and put forth effort, to remove the temptation. Some fifty-four years ago the English people demanded Keform, and hard, and stern, and bitter was the conflict ere they 174 THE OLD VICE f{ M ill ' ! 1 ■'! 1 ■,i''il M i: I ' wrung it from their masters. The union hymn sung in those days has power yet to stir the blood of old men who have long made their homes away from that "dear, dear land, dear for her reputation through the world." " Lo ! we answer, see we come. Quick at Freedom's holy call. We come, we come, we come, we come, To do the glorious work of all. And hark ! we rise from sea to sea. The sacred watchword. Liberty!, " God is our guide ! from field, from wave. From plough, from anvil and from loom. We come, our country's right to save And speak a tyrant faction's doom. And hark I we rise from sea to sea. The sacred watchword, Liberty ! " God is our guide, no swords we draw. We kindle not wain's battle-fires. By union, justice, reason, law. We claim the birthright of our sires. We raise the watchword, Liberty ! We will, we will, we will be free." AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 175 After singing this hymn on the seventh of May, eighteen hundred and thirty — let the day never be forgotten — one hundred and fifty thousand men uncovered their heads, and with one voice and one heart said, " with unbroken faith, through every peril and privation, we here devote ourselves and our children to our country's cause." And not until the same spirit animates the temperance reformers can the large results so much needed and so much desired crown their labours. The Canadian people have secured a Temper- ance Law, and the Canadian people can enforce it, if they will. What avails your vast territory, rich in all manner of productiveness, and big with blessings for generations yet to be, if, with the key of the situation in your hands, you permit evil to enter and close the gates of mercy, of which the Law has made you guar- dians, on the tempted and the young ? When Sir Charles Napier was fighting in India a young officer rode up to him, " bloody with spurring, fiery red with haste," and saluting him, said : " I have taken a standard. Sir Charles." The old ■1 w. m m :! n 176 THE OLD VICE soldier took no notice, but continued writing his orders as though the young man had not spoken. Astonished at so much indifference to so great an event in his young soldiership, he repeated the announcement, more loud and more em- phatic, "Sir Charles, I have taken a standard from the enemy !" " Go and take another then!" was the thundering reply from a brave man, who never stopped to congratulate himself on his achievements while one rebel banner waved defiance to his arms. One and another county has put the law in force against liquor, but there should be no time to sit down and rejoice even in that. Aiotlior, and another must b' con- quered, until the whole Dominion haa made trial of the law on your Statute Book. If the drunkard cannot be persuaded to give up strong drink, then you must remove strong drink from the dn^ kard. The law may not do all its friends hope and desire, but give it an honest trial and let it do what is possible. The reign of liquordom has been a reign of crime and shame, the reign of Law may be, by the blessing of the Most High, a reign of virtue and peace. It is with nations as with individuals : AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. 177 ** Self- reverence, self-knowledge, self-control. These three alone lead life to sovereign power. • ••••• And, because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequences." Who should take the lead in this movement ? The liquor interest will not, and the govern- ment dare not. ±i is left for the people them- selves wno are the sufferers, and the sovereign dictators in all matters touching law. Success may be delayed, but it is sure. The kingdom of heaven will come, thanks to the human-divine Saviour, who was holy, harmless, undefiled and separated from sinners, but it must come from within. The people must be educated and in- spired with pure, patriotic and Christian zeal. They must feel that they are fighting, not only for the present, but for posterity. It is said that Venetian merchants in the middle ages, in a moment of fervour, had the image of Christ stamped upon their coin, while Florence imposed a tax upon her woollen manufactures to build that noble cathedral, which, even now, is among the wonders of the world. We are not anxious to see the image of Christ stamped upon our 12 178 THE OLD VICE AND THE NEW CHIVALRY. ■^i i countiy's coin, not at least, until our country has earned her coin by methods more satisfactory than some in vogue at the present time. But we would like to assure ourselves that patriotism is not dead, that Christianity is not powerless in the nineteenth century, that self-sacrifice is not a thing of the past, and that Christ is still a living force among us — nay, that the only real power in the universe is the Divine Will, with which we may ally ourselves and become mighty for good. 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