The

features of the plan. Let me mention an incident illustrating its operation. An English yatchsman had a good sailor who, when trusted ashore, never returned to time or in a sober condition. When nearing Gothenburg, the sailor asked leave to go ashore. To the surprise of the party, the owner granted the leave. The sailor returned in the short space of two hours and perfectly sober. When surprise was expressed at this, he said "I never was in such a place; it is impossible to get drunk." The owner said to his friends, "I knew what I was doing; it is not easy to get drunk under the Gothenburg system." This confidence, so remarkably justified, is due to its principle. The rev. gentleman said that every man behind a bar was a sworn constable. But that is not all. Every publican in England may be a moral policeman if he carried out the terms of his license. It is in the power of our publicans to stop all drinking to excess in public-houses, if they had the will. difference between their position and that of the Gothenburg publican is, that the latter has no pecuniary profit on the sale of the drink. He is a mere agent for dispensing it, under certain strict conditions. All his interest lies in observing those conditions; if he errs, he takes good care to err on the side of sobriety. He makes his profit upon eatables, and by the letting of his rooms. There is no drinking "for the good of the house. It is the money profit which is at the root of all temptation to drink in English public-houses. The Gothenburg principle is to get rid of this temptation, to deprive the retailer of money profit, and to place his interest on the side of sobriety. When Mr. Chamberlain addressed himself to the consideration of this question some years ago, he arrived at the conclusion that this principle may be adopted with advantage in England. The reason is obvious. It does not interfere arbitrarily with the personal liberty of moderate drinkers, therefore it enlists them on the side of temperance legislation. Hitherto, progress has been impeded by the fact that moderate drinkers were reluctantly compelled to take the same side as the Trade. The principle of distribution without profit to the publican, detaches moderate drinkers from the side of the Trade, and unites them with temperance reformers. The principle can be adopted under the scheme of local option, contemplated by the bill of the Church of England Temperance Society. This bill offers local option with the choice of means; the United Kingdom Alliance offers local option without any choice of means, except prohibition. If we could get rid of excessive drinking in public-houses, that would be a great gain; it is by far the largest part of the evil. If we are to endure public-house intemperance until opinion is ripe for suppression, the delay will be long and the injury proportionate. The principle of retail distribution without personal profit, is one upon which the great majority of moderate drinkers will heartily unite with temperance reformers, and therefore local option, with power to adopt this principle and to give effect to it by efficient administration, offers the means of doing the greatest good to the greatest number in the shortest time. Suppression under local option is impossible; regulations will fail under local option, as they fail now, so long as the retailer is enriched by every glass sold; but, leave regulated distribution without personal profit, and public opinion will support the local adoption of measures that will effectually conduce to sobriety while leaving freedom to drink without liberty to get drunk in public places.

W. H. HELLYER, Esq., of Her Majesty's Dockyard,
Portsmouth.

As a member of a Christian Church I desire to protest against the national enemystrong drink, which works so many evils amongst the people. The duty of the National Church in regard to this "Satan in solution," is not to attempt to control, not to restrict, but to do her best to suppress the sale of this dangerous poison. It has been said, over and over again, that strong drink produces drunkenness, and that drunkenness is the national sin. If it is a national sin, I think it is the duty of the national Church of England to do all it can to get rid of it. The dealing with the evil should not be left mainly to this or that society; the whole Church itself should take it in hand by appealing to the people, and tell them that no one need take intoxicating liquor. It is not necessary to health, neither is it necessary to enable one to forget the battle of life. Drink is useless as a beverage; it is useless as a medicine; it is an essentially dangerous thing, so dangerous that even some of our

own clergy cannot escape its snares. I therefore hope that something will be done by the Church to remove this reproach, and that some one will at least introduce into Parliament a measure prohibiting the sale of drink to persons under eighteen years of age instead of sixteen, as the law stands at present, for drink is leading young people to ruin, and I, therefore, while welcoming any reform in the licensing system of the country, would like to see the sale of intoxicants entirely prohibited.

The Rev. E. W. MAKINSON, Vicar of Holy Trinity,
Armley Hall, Leeds.

I HAVE not a word to say on the general question, but I think that a great deal will have been done to-day if this Congress, representing largely the Church of England, should come to the conclusion that there should be a full, a popular, and complete control of the liquor traffic. I also think that a great deal of good would be done if we could reconcile all temperance reformers to the idea of placing the control of the liquor traffic in the hands of the people. Let all work in the lines of popular control, and if that is done a great deal will have been accomplished. The member for the University of Oxford, while approving of shorter hours during which public-houses should be open on Sunday, would like to see them closed earlier on a Saturday night. I can only say that that idea commends itself to my mind. A great deal has been said about compensation to the holders of licenses. I am an advocate of compensation, but I desire that compensation to be fairly reckoned. Let compensation be given after the money which has been expended in poor-rates, in building and maintaining of lunatic asylums, graves, and workhouses, in consequence of the drink sold by publicans has been calculated, and I venture to say when that has been totalled up there will be very little compensation to be given. I rather think there would be compensation to be given, not to publicans, but to the country by the publicans for the mischief, sin, and misery, which the traffic in drink has caused for so many years.

The CHAIRMAN.

It appears to me that even if it were allowable there would be no use in proposing a resolution on the subject, because it is clear that there would be considerable difficulty in passing it unanimously at this meeting. But the object of the meetings of the Congress is not to pass resolutions, but to educate public opinion, and that is what we have to do in reference to the licensing question. There is a great deal of ignorance abroad with reference to licensing, and it is, therefore, well to strive to disseminate information respecting it. Temperance reformers are, no doubt, aware that legislation can never go ahead of public opinion, and it appears to me that our duty seems to lie rather in that direction, and to influence legislation by educating public opinion. Such conferences as that in which we have been engaged will help us to do so, and, therefore, I heartily welcome it.

583

LECTURE

HALL,

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, OCTOBER 9TH.

The Right Rev. the BISHOP OF ROCHESTER in the Chair.

THE BEARING OF CHRISTIANITY UPON THE MUTUAL RELATIONS OF THE RICH AND POOREMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYED.

PAPERS.

The Rev. MAIN S. A. WALROND, Vicar of St. Lawrence, Jewry, London.

DR. TOCQUEVILLE once said, "If the great questions at the beginning of the nineteenth century are chiefly political, those which will convulse its close will be social." He has been a true prophet. We at least in England are feeling the shake of such questions now.

The relation of class to class; the due limits of accumulation; the just tenure of property; the restriction of monopolies; the rights of man-what they include; the rights of labour-its share in the profits of production; the material well-being of the poorer classes-their dwellings, their maintenance when out of work, in suffering and old age, such are the kind of topics which hold the public ear.

Of purely political questions the interest flags; and those who would lead the people find themselves forced to a new departure, to promise legislative effort in the way of adjustment of social inequalities. The speeches of candidates evidence, whilst they guide, the temper of the nation.

It will be the limited purpose of my paper to give an outline sketch of the present circumstances of the poor and those employed in large towns, specially in London, where my chief experience lies, and of the sentiments with which they regard the rich and the employers; and then to examine what help the Spirit of the Saviour affords as to the true attitude of His servants, the rich and the employers, in these serious times.

To save time, I will roughly define the poor as "the wage-earning class and all below them." They may be with equal roughness classed

as

1. Skilled workers, artisans, and the like.

2. Unskilled or partially skilled labourers who are regularly employed. 3. Irregularly employed labourers of all kinds.

4. The residuum-the idle, the unwilling to work, and the incapable. The first class comprises the leading working classes. Those who compose it earn wages enough to live in comfort. They have the support, generally speaking, of the Trades Unions and their great wealth to fall back upon in depression of trade or accident. Those who compose the second division earn wages enough to live decently. They have ordinarily,

however, no Trades Unions to fall back upon, and any lengthened depression of trade or serious illness taxes them hard; but, speaking generally, it may be said that, viewing the rate of wages and the purchasing power of money in regard to the necessaries and even luxuries of life, both these regularly employed classes have never been so well off in any time of English history as they are now, and this in fair ratio to the advance made by the classes immediately above them. These two classes are not poor in the ordinary sense of the word; they are better off than many in what is called a higher station of life. But of those who compose the next class the irregularly employed-this cannot be said. They are poor in every sense of the word, and on them any depression of trade tells at once. They are the most miserable of the working classes; going on often for years satisfied with the wretched earnings of a "day now and then," worn with the constant care of looking for work, and the disappointment of not finding it, demoralised by the temptations of alternating idleness, losing hopefulness, with no prospect for old age but the workhouse. Is it wonderful that men so circumstanced should slide down into the last (most mysterious) class, "the residuum," composed of some abandoned, some, determined criminals, some only too feeble to struggle? A class which never seems to work, and yet lives and increases, festering in a contagion of low tastes and sensualities, sometimes in misery, sometimes in indulgence, sometimes inveterately nomad, sometimes persistently adhesive to special localities, hid away in back streets and crowded courts of great cities always, whether nomad or localised, shameless, fearing neither God nor man.

And if these are the circumstances of the outward life of the wageearning classes, what is their temper towards the rich and to the employer? I speak not without knowledge. It is a temper of a growing sense of injustice, of bitterness, of suspicion, of class alienation. Representatives of the higher classes of labour will tell you of the selfishness of the employers, how they ever thwart the interests of the employed; how they ever oppose all legislation which favours labour; and how, when, as in some cases, their opposition fails, they use in practice every means to stultify legislative enactments. They will point to large employers of labour who are quite ignorant of their own craft, who rarely come in contact with their men, but leave all to foremen and overlookers, investing their money with only a view to a good percentage, ignoring all moral obligations towards those they employ, beyond mere payment of wages, in amount, if considered as a fair proportion of the profits of production, utterly inadequate.

Whilst the lower classes of labour and "the residuum" will look at you, should you go amongst them, as a stranger, as one whose thoughts are not their thoughts, nor your ways theirs. You are of the enjoying class, they are of the poor and suffering; your class is careless of theirs, and theirs of yours; perhaps there rises in them a sense of bitterness at the contrasts of life, which leaves behind a spirit of silent enmity, and that is all. But that spirit of enmity there are leaders whose utterances are daily feeding, bidding "the residuum" and the lowest classes see in their own degradation witness of the usurpation of the higher classes, and denouncing, in open thoroughfare, the robbery of the rich as the cause of the misery of the poor.

These feelings towards the rich and the employed lie behind the cry, now arising with some insistence from the wage-earning class for readjustment of the distribution of property, and which the new departure in Social Legislation it is hoped may satisfy, or at least silence-a cry which varies in tone with the class that utters it, ranging from the calm and reasoned appeals of the higher class of labour for greater share in profits, or chance of possession of land by constitutional means, down to the wild and indiscriminate hungriness of the idle and dishonest for unlicensed appropriation.

What help, then, does the teaching of the Saviour afford as to the true attitude of His servants at such a time-specially to us of the rich and the employing classes?

First of all it surely prescribes to us the honourable attitude of investigation. We must search and see to what extent the feeling of class alienation I have described exists; what is at the bottom of it; what mistakes, what ignorance and misconceptions may be charged against the classes that entertain this feeling; but specially what neglect of duties and sympathies, or faults of arbitrariness, patronage, and condescension lie at our door.

We must examine, too, the appeals and demands of labour and of poverty. We must not be resolutely deaf to them, as only the selfish clamour of an advancing democracy. We must search and see what inequalities, what injustices, what unlawful restrictions there may be in our social state which warrant them. We must have regard to past history; we must sift present facts; we must try to be unbiassed by our own interests and prejudices; we must look on the things of others, even their opinions, and try and put ourselves in their place. We must believe that those who differ from us can be right; we must at least ascribe honest motives for their words and conduct. Most of all we must seek at such time to be filled with the gentleness of the Saviour, and to be guided by His enlightening Spirit. For, indeed, the bold and bald demand of rights we hear preferred on the one side, and the equally boid and bald denials on the other, warn us that we may be nearing a problem, attempts to solve which nearly a hundred years ago desolated France-the problem how to reconcile the rights of property and the rights of man-a problem which lies at the root of all social questions-a problem which can be solved neither by arrogance nor tenacity-a problem, in the abstract, of the union of two contradictories, but which, in the concrete, may be found to be soluble, in a community filled and fraternised by the Spirit of Christ.

Again, the next thing that the Spirit of Christ will teach us is the sacredness of our duty as citizens at this time. Once a Christian might have been content to limit his sense of duty to his home, and towards the individuals whom he encountered in daily life, leaving politics as matters beyond his practical interest. But civilisation in its advance has developed a wider philanthropy, which affects larger issues than those of home life and its surroundings, and has given us the responsibility of larger sympathies than those between one individual and another. Politics are the science of such philanthropy, as legislation is its effective force. Politics teach us duties to classes as well as individuals, and bring us into sympathy with conditions of life of which we have no experience.