Excerpt from Five Speeches on the Liquor Traffic, Delivered Since the Session

These speeches are dedicated to the Right Hon. John Bright, by his permission - a permission which implies nothing more than sympathy with any honest attempt to bring political influ emees to bear upon that national evil against which he did vigorous and early battle. Nor is it possible to place on more permanent record what has been spoken from the platform without acknowledging a debt to the statesman who, by his example, has shown all who believe that they have a righteous object how to appeal widely and fearlessly to the convictions of their fellow countrymen and who, (by those constitutional reforms which, thanks to him, have been secured within the last few years, or are now on the eve of accomplishment, ) has brought it about that such an appeal shall produce far more prompt and decisive results than formerly upon our legislative action. Others but plant and water the ground which has been cleared by his labours of thirty arduous years; and all that we can do to express our gratitude is to resolve that we will employ the method which he has taught us in behalf of no cause about which we are afraid to pray that God will give the increase.

Every one in the three kingdoms, who thinks or feels, is agreed that something must be done, and that soon. The movement in furtherance of which these speeches were made, (a movement which has evoked, among the classes to whom the question comes most nearly home, an interest and an enthusiasm at once striking and pathetic, ) will have done something to ensure that, whatever step is taken, it shall be a bold and straightforward one in the right direction. A Government which proposes to suppress, without delay, a large proportion of the existing public houses, will have at its back the great majority of our working men, and the bestnineteen-twentieths of the Temperance party for that party knows well, from its experience in the United States, and in our own colonies, that, the less a nation drinks, the more rapidly its opinion shapes itself into a determination that the temptation to drunkenness shall disappear from its borders. As for vested rights, (if such rights can exist in the teeth of {an express legal declaration that they are granted only for a year, ) it is to be presumed that, when the exclusive privilege of selling an article is restricted from a larger to a smaller number of monopolists, those who remain in the enjoyment of it can contrive and afford to buy out their com petitors. The business which the people at large have in the matter is to insist that a complicated machinery for compensation by means of a license tax shall not admit of being turned into a cover for post poning the extinction of drink-shops. It is earnestly to be hoped that, in dealing with the liquor tra c, the minister will take counsel, not with those who have a private interest in its maintenance, but with those who have nothing beyond a public interest in the morality and the welfare of the entire community.

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