"SOBER BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT."
Cannon Farrar, D. D., in his recent address entitled, "Temperance and Legislation," just published by the National Temperance Society, referring to the cry so often made, that "You cannot make people sober by act of Parliament," says, "Gentlemen, it is not true that you cannot, to an immense extent, make people sober by act of Parliament. You can; it has been done over vast tracts of America. It is being done in wide areas of our colonies. It is done in hundreds of our English parishes where the land-owner has the wisdom to shelter his people from crime and pauperism by the simple rule which he, on his single authority, can make, and make unquestioned, but which hundreds of poor men and poor women and poor children on his estate cannot make, however passionately they desire it, and however deeply it affects their social, moral and religious welfare—namely, that there shall not be a single liquor-shop on his estate. Not make people sober by act of Parliament! Why, at this very moment, to their own immense benefit, you are making 20,000 people, among whom are the very worst drunkards in England, not only sober by act of Parliament, but absolutely teetotalers by act of Parliament. Who are those? Why, they are the poor prisoners now in our prisons, not one of whom from the day he enters prison is allowed to touch a drop of alcohol, and who, in consequence of this restriction, are as a class, in spite of all their other disadvantages, so completely the healthiest class of people in England that there is a lower rate of mortality among prisoners than there is among professional men, and that as the death-rate stands highest of all among publicans who sell alcohol, it stands lowest of all among prisoners, who are absolutely deprived of every drop of it."