TEMPERANCE AT HOME AND ABROAD.
JOHN B. GOUGH gave a lecture on temperance, in Providence, R. I., March 24th, in the course of which he is reported to have said:— “I have grave fears for the future of this country upon this question, if things keep on as they are. In England drunkenness has increased to a fearful extent among women, there being in London alone 16,867 females committed for drunkenness. Drunkenness in this country, in the last twenty-five years, has increased, and it is worse than it was thirty-six years ago. There are more ministers drinking, more women drinking than ever before. Twenty-five years ago you would never see a woman drinking on the cars, but now you can see it every day, and that, too, out of flasks. The cars in these days are made regular grog-shops. The famine in Ireland is drawing a great deal of money out of this country, but I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that not one distillery fire has gone out while this famine has been going on. Over five thousand pounds sterling has passed across the bars of the city of Cork alone during this famine. During the famine of 1848, which was so terrible, over sixty-four million bushels of grain were distilled in Ireland alone. The drunkenness in England is mostly caused by beer, and yet they tell us that beer is a soporific, and needful to the body; but I hope the time will soon come when, by the help of God, we shall sweep such soporifics out of existence. When men tell me that I am exaggerating these things, I say to them, go and investigate for yourselves, and you will then find that they are not exaggerations, but stern realities. The worst drunkards are the educated and the refined, for they will brook no interference, and feel their position more keenly, because they were not born in the gutter, but have been dragged there by that curse, drink. . . . If I had a son, which I have not (and sometimes when I think of the thousand temptations he would be liable to fall into, I am glad I have not), I would take him into the lowest grog-shop in the city, where everything would be repugnant and repulsive, and thus give him a foretaste of what a life of dissipation would lead to. I would not carry him into the gilded palaces where clergymen by their bows acknowledge the custom as right. In the latter place, there is everything to attract, while in the former, everything about the place, the smell, the associations, are repugnant.”