labour, missionaries to the poor, philanthropic enthusiasts, or practical reformers, have been brought frequently and closely into contact with the mass of the labouring population, but tells the same tale. If the money, time, and health which is spent in deleterious indulgence at the public-house were saved for better uses, all our skilled working-men, all above the grade of common labourers, might enjoy wholesome food, respectable houses, comforts for their family, and a chance of rising in the world for themselves. Wherever any trade earned, as is the case with many, wages greatly above the average income of working-class families, the homes of all the workmen in that trade would be improved, their wives better clothed, their children better educated, and the whole family provided with more comforts and enjoyments than their fellows. At present we fear that this is very little the case; that the best-paid classes are little better off than the worst-paid; and that the condition of the wife whose husband is employed in a trade where wages range from 18s. to 28s. a week is often preferable to that of her whose husband's earnings are from 30s. or 35s. to 60s. a week.

Mr. Greg, in his republished Essay On the Principles of Taxation, estimates the average income of a workman's family at 20s. a-week. It is notorious that there are many trades in which the daily earnings of the workman himself range from 5s. or 6s. upwards. We ought, if there were no disturbing element, to find the families supported by these trades better off in every respect than the average of their class. There are some whose condition ought to be as good-whose income is quite as large as that of many families in the lower grades of the middle class. Comparatively very few, however, enjoy additional comfort in proportion to the larger earnings of the "bread-winner:" and they know, and all acquainted with them know the reason why. A class of workmen in this country earning higher wages than their order at large excepting possibly those cases in which the higher wages arise from the necessity of qualifications implying an unusually high average of general capacity and intelligence-do not live better than their fellows; they simply drink more.

We are anxious that this assertion should not be misunderstood. We confine the comparison to classes or trades, believing it not to hold good of individuals. On the contrary, we have reason to think that, as between man and man in the same shop, the better-paid worker is generally the more sober and respectable man. There are exceptions to this, of course, especially in particular trades, where the better workman, being liable to overwork of an exhausting kind, and other unhealthy conditions, becomes more intemperate than his fellows. But what

is the exception between man and man, is, we are afraid, the rule between class and class. Almost all the trades in which wages are peculiarly high are notorious for drunkenness. Miners, cutlers, colliers shipwrights-even, we are afraid, engineers and printers, whose high earnings are the meed of a special education and peculiar skill-are all disgraced, as classes, by intemperance almost in proportion to their prosperity.

Miners and colliers are, as a class, notorious for habits of excess and riot. That their occupation is an unpleasant one, is undeniable; dangerous also, to some extent, but not to that degree that should make those who follow it desperate and reckless; scarcely more hazardous than many occupations which might be named, which do not seem to addict those who follow them to similar intemperance. We can scarcely doubt that the chief cause of the excessive drunkenness among miners must be sought in the unusually high wages received by a class in no respect above the average level of refinement or intelligence; whose ideas of comfort and standard of living are not higher than those of their order generally, and who consequently spend the excess of their wages above the average-if not more than this amount-in the only luxury of which they, in common with the generality of working-men, have a keen appreciation. The men employed in the potteries of the midland districts, like their mining neighbours, are drunken to an alarming extent. In the whole of these districts-collieries, mines, and potteries -we are informed that many a wife finds it hardly possible to extort from her well-paid husband sufficient money for household necessaries. Too often her only means of providing food for herself and her children, is by pawning during the week the Sunday clothes, and divers articles of household furniture, which her husband cannot refuse to redeem on Saturday night; thus spending beforehand the money which would otherwise be entirely consumed in drink. Any stronger evidence of the mischiefs worked by intemperance could hardly be required than this picture of an English home;-the husband working four days and a half or five days in the week, and drinking during the remainder; the wife carrying his and her best clothing each week to the pawnbrokers to raise money for food, while he is lavishing money on drink! This, be it remembered, is the picture not of one home, but of thousands; these are the habits, not of a few profligates, despised among their fellows, but of a numerous and important class of operatives; of a proportion, at least, of that class so considerable as to impart its tone, and bestow its character, on the whole.

Printers are a highly paid class of labourers, and, from the nature of their occupation, require and possess an amount of

knowledge and intelligence far above those of the workingclasses generally. Journeymen on bookwork, in an ordinary printing-office, will earn from 30s. to 40s. a-week, and often much more. Theirs is not a laborious or unhealthy employment; and their general education is such, that we should expect to find their habits far superior to those of ordinary workmen. We fear, however, that in point of fact drunkenness among them is above, rather than below, the average; the more so as a good compositor or reader, even though a drunken man, may hope to retain his place longer than in most trades, from the difficulty of finding a successor. Newspaper printers are still worse, almost in proportion to the greater amount of their wages. Night-work is said to create a craving for drink. It would probably be more correct to say that it increases the temptation to drink; it certainly keeps men away from their homes at unusual hours, reverses the wholesome order of nature, and is no encouragement to regularity of habits. Printers employed on a daily paper earn from 10s. a-night upwards; the average of their wages being, it is said, as much as three pounds a-week. On this sum the temperate among them, of course, are able to keep comfortable dwellings, live well, and dress themselves and families well. Sometimes they take large houses in good situations, and let a portion of them; being thus enabled to live in a respectable street and to make a good appearance. But by far too large a proportion of newspaper compositors are habitual drunkards; drunk not only on Saturday night and Sunday, after the fashion of their compeers in other trades, but daily by the time that the paper is made up,-going home in a state of unmistakable intoxication at three or four in the morning. At paytime their wives come round the doors of the office to coax or extort from their husbands their share of the week's earnings, knowing but too well that this is the only time at which they have a chance of getting any thing at all. The publicans of the neighbourhood, we need hardly say, give every facility to these valuable customers. The beer-can and the spirit-bottle make the round of the offices regularly every night, and give every opportunity for excess to the weary worker at an unwholesome hour and in a gas-heated atmosphere. In one case, we are told, a publican-living in the neighbourhood of the chief daily papers-secures himself against any backsliding consideration for wife and children on his customers' part, by selling, on pay-nights, tickets available for liquor during the rest of the week; anticipating thus the watchfulness of the mother who comes to secure some portion of the week's earnings to feed and clothe her children. What must be the demoralisation of a class among whom such things are usual! It did not

surprise us, after this, to hear from one who knew them well, that "the behaviour and conversation that goes on in the printing office of a daily journal is disgusting to witness." This is the work of intemperance among the best-paid and most intelligent class of operatives in the country; a class who might live in perfect comfort with wife and family, and yet save in ten years enough to set them up in business on their own account,-save between twenty-five and fifty a very comfortable independence for the rest of their lives. What the homes of these inebriates might be, we see in seeing what those of their sober companions are; what they too generally are, we will not closely inquire.

Perhaps the most instructive case in point is that of the Australian gold-diggers. The first adventurers at Bendigo and Ballarat were hard-working, uneducated men, men of the working-class, in fact, neither better nor worse than their brethren at home. They got their money hardly, at the cost of much labour and privation. When they had made a sum on which they might have lived comfortably in "the old country" for the rest of their lives, they came to Melbourne, launched out into the grossest extravagance, and got rid of all their wealth in a few weeks, during which period they were almost incessantly drunk. One digger hired a Clarence, and bought India shawls for his wife or companion; another treated a whole roomful of company to champagne at ten guineas a dozen. Yet all the time they were living in dwellings less comfortable than those of an English factory hand; houses, or rather cabins, separated from one another only by curtains of sized cloth, with floors laid "on the hencoop principle," built in streets that were almost impass-able to women at all times, and to men in wet weather. These people had no better notion of the value of wealth than its power of procuring the means of ostentation and sensual pleaComfort they never knew, and did not desire; but they could appreciate, and after a clumsy fashion imitate, the luxuries of certain kinds which they had seen enjoyed by the wealthy at home. India shawls for their fair companions, brandy and champagne for themselves,-these were the objects for which wealth was valuable to them; and wealth that might have ensured them a life of comfort was squandered to procure a few weeks of riotous luxury. They caricatured, but did not depart from, the habits which distinguished them in the country they had left; where high wages, instead of bringing permanent comfort, brought them the means to enjoy a luxurious dinner on Sunday, and an extra debauch at the public-house.

sure.

Putting aside, then, all clumsy exaggeration, disregarding the rhetoric of fanaticism, and forbearing to enter on the difficult attempt to calculate in figures the calamities which no

men.

figures can enable us to realise, there is evidence overwhelming and indubitable that intemperance is emphatically the curse of our country-that it does more harm, and destroys more good, than any other plague with which England has been afflicted by the visitation of God or the sin and folly of man. We know that it is the cause of very much positive crime and misery, of the extent of which we may form some idea. But how much good it has prevented is a matter beyond the reach of calculation. It is probably one of the chief reasons which make the working-men of England, as a class, the least thrifty and the most improvident in the civilised world. It is through intemperance that Englishmen save less out of twenty shillings than Frenchmen out of twelve francs a week. It is the public-house which makes the workman's home uncomfortable and often even squalid, despite wages which in any other European country would be thought extravagant. It is the love of drink which prevents saving for old age, and gradual accumulation of comforts and of capital, from becoming common among workingIt is the habit of drunkenness which prevents workmen in highly-paid trades from taking rank with the middle classes both in social position and in their standard of living. It is this which makes the workman-capitalist, the artisan who possesses his cottage and land in fee simple, or has somewhere invested his 507. or 1007. of savings, a rare phenomenon; a man distinguished by employers and stared at by his fellows. It is this, therefore, which is the chief cause of one of the worst social perplexities of our age,-the entire and lifelong distinction between employers and employed, the want of any connecting class between capitalist and labourer, partaking the interest of each. There are trades in which wages are so ample and labourers so educated, that but for this cause "the status of a permanent journeyman working for hire," which has so little tendency to promote good feeling between class and class, would be almost as unusual as in the middle ages. If printers were temperate and saving, for instance, how few among them but might aspire to become masters before middle age! In fact, if intemperance were to die away among us, the condition of the class of artisans would, by causes already operating in many individual cases, be materially altered; there would be a continual movement upwards among them; and instead of the rise of a workman into a higher class attracting notice and remark, it would be the natural and usual destiny of intelligent and resolute men:-and intelligence and resolution would be less rare among workmen than they now are. In the ill-paid trades, as that of the tailors for instance, at present notoriously and hopelessly intemperate, the effect of such a change would be nearly