A FREE TEMPERANCE MEETING.
SIR WILFRID LAWSON gives an account of a country temperance meeting in England where all present had a free and easy time. Everybody felt at liberty to express his mind. "Three excellent clergymen spoke. They harped on the elastic and indefinite word 'moderation,' condemning intemperance, but setting up Timothy as their model man, morally and constitutionally; lauding and magnifying sobriety, but commending the temperate consumption of alcohol. When they had concluded, an elderly farmer rose and said: 'I've heard that kind of talk for the last forty years, and I can't see that people are a bit more sober now than when it commenced. It reminds me of what I once saw take place at a retreat for imbeciles. It is the custom there, after the patients have been in residence for a certain time, to put them to a kind of test to see whether they are fit to leave the asylum or not. They are taken to a trough full of water, with a small pipe continually running into it and supplying it. They are given a ladle and told to empty it. Those who have not regained their senses keep ladling away, while the water flows in as fast as they ladle it out; but them as isn't idiots stop the tap.'" —Exchange.