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

154 Te Siuppressiont of thle Liquor Traffic
themselves, the exaction made and enforced has the effect
of sensibly reducing their domestic comforts, and of preventing them having either that physical or intellectual
recreation, or providing that class of education for their
children, which they could otherwise have secured. Ratepayers have a heavy interest in this question which they
have not sufficiently realized; for, allowing that many of
the charges are permanent, and that a reduction of the
rates would not be greater than one-half by the removal
of public facilities to drinking, who can estimate the
relief which that reduction would impart? Could it be
effected by the fiat or device of any statesman, he would
become at one bound the most popular member of his
class, and memorials in his honor could be raised in his
lifetime wherever the benefit of his action was enjoyed.
But if to strong drink and the drink traffic two-thirds
of our pauperism is due, it is not too much to expect
that, with the exclusion of this cause, a relief from onehalf of the burdens would be speedily possessed. One
other effect of the poor and county rates is not to be
omitted-that the exercise of private charity becomes
doubly burdensome, and is often felt to be so difficult as
to lead to a neglect of the claims of those who are willing
rather to suffer unnoticed than to parade their sufferings
before the eyes of strangers. Hence two results, each
very injurious, arise: the duty of private benevolence
becomes needlessly severe, and it is so inefficiently discharged that the most deserving objects of charity-those
to whom a little timely aid would be exceedingly serviceable, and whom it would preserve from pauperism-are
frequently left to struggle and to perish. It is in vain that
the visitor of the public-house is left to take the consequences of his folly; the carelessness or insensibility
that leaves him to his fate becomes judicially visited by
consequences that weigh upon the neck, and pierce into
the vitals of the society that ought to have foreseen, and,