The bases of the temperance reform: an exposition and appeal./ With replies to numerous objections. By Rev. Dawson Burns.

I46 The Suppression of the Liquor Traffic.
furniture and decoration? How can they start fairly in
their educational rivalry, when the animal nature is first
developed and, in regard to millions, always the most
powerfully? How can the education of the school and
class-room hope to eradicate intemperance when, as Lord
Brougham has said, "it is the common enemy-it attacks
even persons of cultivated minds"? When and where
has education shown its power to empty the liquor-shop?
Yet, as we have seen, so long as the latter acts, it acts
adversely to social sobriety. The Beer Bill in one year
opened more new seminaries of drinking than there were
educational establishments in the kingdom. "' To rely
upon popular improvement alone, and take no measures
for removing the great cause of crimes [intemperance,
and therefore the drink-shop, the great cause of that
intemperance] would be to lull ourselves into as perilous
a security as theirs who should trust to the effects of diet
and regimen when the plague was raging; or in that
confidence, before it broke out, which should take no
precaution against its introduction." * The epithet
"pest-house," as applied to the drink-shop, may appear
to some unnecessarily strong; but if, as we have shown,
the seed of the intemperate appetite is the alcoholic drink
itself, and if the diffusion of that drink is the sole object
for which the liquor-shop, as such, exists, and if the result
is seen in the raging of a national "plague "-a name to
which our national intemperance is entitled by general
consent-the place where sodreadful an evil is systematically produced is a veritable " pest-house," and no legal regulations, or fumigatory process, can give to it a clean bill
of health, or ensure society against the deadly contagion.
2. Thle influence of the liqzfuor traffic on social ezlils of
thAe realest magniluzle calls for careful conszideraztiozn.
* Lord Brougham's Inaugural Address before the Social Science Congress
at Bradford, i859.
AP