spend in such things as the family could enjoy in sober gratification.

The whole question may be regarded, too, from

another point of view.

The amount raised by indirect

taxes in this country was the financial year 1873. means neither more nor less than that this vast sum is withdrawn from production. It is a sum of money, in reality, "needlessly advanced by traders and producers, which ought to be productively employed and reproduced, yielding profits at each turn of the capital," and the realised profits of which alone ought to be taxed. To show what such a sum is capable of doing, it may be remembered that, when wages were not nearly so high as at present, the wages fund averaged £20 a head of the population. On that basis the diversion of the money advanced by the trading community into a productive channel would be equal to founding a town of 2,181,455 inhabitants, or larger than Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Glasgow added together, with all the increased material prosperity which such a town would add to the country, and which would be able to bear its share of taxation without restricting trade, and would in fact reduce local and national burdens, by employing a vast number of

£46,936,782 at the close of Now, in other words, this

persons now considered as an idle and surplus population. Truly the question of pauperism cannot be said to have been fairly grappled with while such an enormous amount of labour cries in the streets, and a deaf ear is turned to its earnest supplications. The evil of this withdrawal of capital goes further, too, for, as Mr. Robert Donnell points out, "We can hardly ask the United States to give up their thirty-five per cent. duty on linen if we are to retain our three hundred per cent on their tobacco." Thus, because we tax a luxury, a trade in a necessity or comfort is prevented between two great nations; and so with other countries and other commodities. Indeed, as Mr. T. E. Cliffe Leslie shows, the amount of money advanced as above mentioned is "withdrawn by a system which closes our coasts and rivers to local enterprise and foreign trade, our factories to improvement, and our laboratories to invention; forbids the free cultivation of our fields, creates monopolies, and maintains exorbitant duties on the produce of foreign nations, who retaliate with duties which, by curtailing the market for our manufactures, augment, in accordance with a well-known law, the cost of production, and therefore their price to consumers at home.”

There is yet another consideration on this head. It

is one which ought to have great weight with honest men. "It is said," remarks Professor Leone Levi, "that the Emperor of China proudly rejected every consideration of revenue when urged to admit opium at a duty. There was indeed something sublime in his declaration. 'It is true I cannot prevent the introduction of the flowing poison; gain-seeking and corrupt men will for profit and sensuality defeat my wishes, but nothing will induce me to derive a revenue from the vice and misery of my people.'" Now, in this country, teetotalers share with their less rigid compatriots all the advantages of an organised government. The army and navy protect the property of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, as well as that of Mr. Bass. The same police supervision is exercised over the person and property of the one as of the other; and laws are not made for the good of one which do not equally apply to the other. Yet to a very large extent this is paid for by the duties on intoxicating drinks. Is it a just system which allows hundreds of thousands of persons to enjoy the advantages of government, and yet contribute little or nothing towards the cost of that government? Is it not an immoral position in which to be placed, that of sharing the advantages of a government largely paid for out of the sale of that

which is the cause of so much misery and vice? That the drunkard should be the "mainstay" of our constitution is, as Sir Wilfrid Lawson pointed out in his speech on the Budget of 1873, "mean, cruel, short-sighted, and fraught with evil to the State." Indeed teetotalers may rest assured that no Government will attempt to legislate effectually on the liquor question as long as such a large sum as the cost of the army and navy is raised from the consumption of drink. The Chancellor of the Exchequer likes a surplus, and if it be legitimate to obtain it from intoxicating drinks, it is equally legitimate for him and his Government to offer greater facilities for their consumption, in order that the surplus may be as large as possible.

The following conclusions, therefore, seem perfectly logical First, that duties of Customs and Excise do not restrict the sale of intoxicating drinks; secondly, that the best way to do so is to teach men the folly of drunkenness, and as that is a long process, to at once cheapen the articles which compete with intoxicants, in order that policy may dictate what imprudence neglects; and thirdly, that it is not only unjust and impolitic, but highly immoral, to raise a revenue from the consumption of "flowing poisons."

There can be little doubt, I think, that if you would

have a nation less drunk, you must offer it greater encouragement to be more sober; and above all things do not tax those beverages which are among the principal inducements to sobriety with those who will drink something or other. It has been well said that the concession of the "Free Breakfast Table" would do more good to the working classes than closing half the gin shops; and would be a greater benefit to the commercial world than the discovery of a gold field. Of course this reasoning leads to the conclusion that it would be better that the consumption of light wines and beer should displace that of spirits to a very large extent. I should not be sorry to see this, and I urge it as an additional reason why the duties should be removed. It is a great pity that there is no pleasant unintoxicating beverage in England, and the nearer we can approach such a thing the better. Indeed, prior to the treaty of Methuen (1703), French wines were drank in this country to a very great extent; but the foolish policy of that treaty developed a taste for the strongly brandied wines of Spain and Portugal,a method of cultivating taste which may have had something to do with John Bull's liking for ardent spirits at the present day.

Why, in France, where brandy is cheap, I have not