tissues, and that if it did not contain nutrition it saved the waste of the tissues. Good Mrs. Carlisle was perfectly terrified at all this nonsense, and she was taken to the lecture. The lecturer went through a rigmarole of metaphysical, and physical, and technical definitions, and when he had done, good Mrs. Carlisle, as she was wont to pray about everything, put up her arms and said, “ Lord Jesus, save us from the tissues! "(laughter). In this spirit of thoroughness, simplicity, earnestness, and self-sacrifice this good woman lived and died. He would now say three or four words with respect to the occasion of their being then assembled. He said, with reference to all noble enterprises, "Give us the children" (cheers). If the Church of the Saviour.was to prosper, and if we were to see a permanent revival, give us the children. If we were to have an intelligent population, give us the children. If we were to have a growing population that should thoroughly reform and put in order the House where the chairman sat, give us the children (langhter). If we were to put down the drinking customs and the profligate habits of the nation, give us the children (cheers). It had often been said that schoolmasters were great pedants, and imagined that they were very important personages. As a schoolmaster was one day walking in the town where he taught, he met a person, and told him that he was the master of the parish. The person he addressed said, "Well, I had not the pleasure of knowing that." "Well," said the schoolmaster, "I will show you how it is. Some people think that the men are the masters, but they are not, for the women master the men (laughter). And then the women are not the masters, for the children master the women, and I master the children. Therefore, fairly and logically, I am the master of the parish." They would never get a thoroughly Temperance London until they got the children. Give them the children, and then people would not go bamboozled through the world, hood-winked, and talking about intoxicating drinks as "the good creatures of God." Give them the children, and society would become rid of the prejudices in favour of those drinks, and persons would grow up with very strong predilections in favour of teetotalism. Give them the children. because habit was second nature. He believed there were hundreds of drunkards in England whom no process could save, their self-control being almost extinct. The taste for alcohol was not natural, but artificial; and before the artificial appetite was formed, give them the children. Finally, give them the children, because children were not the slaves of custom. Give them the children, and the cause would then have in its favour power, and mind, and heart, and influence, and intellect, which were unshackled, and which might tend, under the blessing of God, to emancipate the country from the curse of strong drink. He had three or four verses to read before resuming his seat. Had he known that the poet laureate of teetotalism, of ragged-schools, of city missions, of omnibus improvements, and of every good movement which influenced this great city, would have been present, he should never have dreamed of trying to write verses (cheers and laughter); but under the emergency of the occasion, and having to supply the place of two absent speakers, he thought he had better supply the place of one in prose and of the other in poetry (great laughter) :— (Loud cheers). We want the little boys and girls A phalanx mighty, brave and strong, And drive the deadly legions back Then let us cheer our Bands of Hope For children's loud hosannas please And He will crown our Bands of Hope That try to save our nation. The children then sang the fifth piece on the programme-" Try again." The Rev. STENTON EARDLEY next addressed the meeting. He said that he took the last words of the song to himself. He had often spoken on Temperance platforms, but he felt that he had never spoken as he ought to have done, and he was now going to "try again." He would first of all congratulate the society that it had not expired under the venom of the House of Commons (hear). He supposed that the honourable chairman was one of those who got sprinkled with the saliva of that little acid drop from Sheffield, although he was still living (cheers and laughter). Let there be but a single generation of sober men and women, and Sheffield would never send up to the House of Commons such a bag of venom as had so recently displayed itself (applause). He supposed nobody could doubt that there was great need for some special work to be directed against the terrible curse of drinking. The conviction had deepened with him day by day that Temperance reformers must go farther back than the adults; and he thought that any earnest honest worker in the Temperance movement would be driven necessarily to the conviction that to save the land they must have the children (cheers). Nothing was more natural. Drinking was often compared to a torrent which it was impossible to stem; but if they could not turn a river when it had grown wide and deep, and its volume was enormous, they should go higher up the stream. As poetry seemed to be rather in the ascendant, he would give an old stave-not his own (laughter) : "A pebble in a streamlet's track, Has turned the course of many a river; A dew drop on the baby plant, Has bent the giant oak for ever." (Applause). He believed there were thousands of the adult population whom nothing could save; but Christian enterprise did not throw down its weapons, and sit down in despair because there were difficulties, but if they could not achieve an object in one way they resolved to try another. Perhaps nobody in that hall was prepared to receive his testimony with respect to the amount of misery produced amongst children by the drunkenness of their parents. He held in his hand a letter from a lady of rank, who was not a teetotaller, but who had been striving for years past to meet and remedy the great distress and sorrow that existed in the the families in her own county of Kent, and especially amongst children. She, in conjunction with others, had established an asylum for the reception of children who were neglected by their natural guardians, and had no proper homes. They had established a branch girls' school at Chelsea, and a boys' refuge at Maida-hill. In the course of her letter she said, "Each child we have sent from Kent has gone simply through the parents' drunkenness. We send no children who can be legitimately inmates of the union, but only those who cannot be there. Indeed, out of the two hundred and fifty girls of the county of Kent who have been in our London school, two hundred and thirty have been sent simply from this dreadful cause." In another part of her letter she said, " A beer shop has been opened in our absence in a before truly peaceful hamlet, and has done its work." They all knew what the work of the beer-shop was. Could the keeper of such a place sincerely thank God on the Saturday night for blessing his honest industry during the week? He (Mr. Eardley) did not know that he could kneel beside a man who earned his livelihood from the misery of others. Instead of such a man thanking God for his prosperity, it would be more consistent for him to thank the devil himself. In an article in the April number of the Cornhill Magazine it was said that if 21 feet were allowed to each public-house and beer-shop of London, excluding club-houses and refreshment-houses, they would form a street of 39 miles! It was stated as a fact, that last year the Government engaged 300 excavators to perform a certain work, and the contractor built for their convenience a small public-house. In the 12 months of 1863 the men spent in it £7,500., which was an average of 10s. per week per man. A few days ago Mr. Commissioner Kerr, in a case which came before him, in which a poor woman having gone into a public-house, and been maddened by drink, had then destroyed £20. worth of property, said, "The time may come when, if people will madden their fellow-creatures by selling them these pernicious things, they themselves shall have to bear the loss." (cheers). He (Mr. Eardley) was delighted to hear that remark. Teetotallers were thankful for very small indications of a smile from the judicial bench. He would call attention to the testimony of a brewer on the sale and use of strong drink. It was contained in an article in the North British Review for February, 1855, by Charles Buxton, Esq., M.P. He said :-" Startling as it may appear, it is the truth, that the destruction of human life and the waste of national wealth which must arise from this tremendous Russian war are outrun every year by the devastation, caused by national drunkenness. Nay, add together all the miseries generated in our times by war, famine, and pestilence, the three great scourges of mankind, and they do not exceed those that spring from this one calamity. This assertion will not be readily believed by those who have not reflected on the subject, but the fact is that hundred of thousands of our countrymen are daily sinking themselves into deeper misery, destroying their health, peace of mind, domestic comfort, and usefulness, and ruining every faculty of mind and body from indulgence in this propensity. It would not be too much to say, that there are at this moment half-a-million homes in the United Kingdom where home happiness is never felt owing to this cause alonewhere the wives are broken-hearted, and the children are brought up in misery, owing to this cause alone. Then the sober part of the community pays a heavy penalty," he said, "for the vices of the drunkard," and he (Mr. Eardley) would add, "the profits of the brewer" (cheers). "Drink is the great parent of crime." In another place he said, "Not only does this vice produce all kinds of positive mischief, but it also has a negative effect of great importance. It is the mightiest of all the forces that clog the progress of good. It is in vain that every engine is set to work that philanthropy can devise, when those whom we seek to benefit are habitually tampering with their faculties of reason and will, soaking their brains with beer, or inflaming them with ardent spirits. The struggle of the school, and the library, and the church all united against the beerhouse and gin-palace, is but one development of the war between heaven and hell." Again he said, "Looking, then, at the manifold and frightful evils that spring from drunkenness, 'we were justified in saying that it is the most dreadful of all the ills that afflict the British Isles. We are convinced that if a statesman who heartily wished to do the utmost possible good to his country were thoughtfully to inquire which of the topics of the day deserved the most intense force of his attention, the true reply would be that he should study the means by which this worst of plagues could be stayed." "The question is, whether millions of our countrymen shall be helped to become happier and wiser-whether pauperism, lunacy, disease, and crime shall be diminished-whether multitudes of men, women, and children shall be aided to escape from utter ruin of body and soul? The writer would close the publichouses at ten o'clock at night, and he would let the coffee-houses remain open as long as they chose. He further said, "We trust that no squeamish timidity will prevent our statesmen from cutting the knot, and making it the regular duty of the police to see that all the houses for the sale of fermented liquors are shut up at the time proposed." "There is one other regulation which we rather suggest for consideration than recommend, namely, that if any person is found in a public-house, or coming out of it, in such a state of drunkenness that the police have to take charge of him, not only that the drunken person, but also the publican, should be fined; and still more strongly would we urge, that if the individual thus found be a woman, the publican should be fined still more heavily" (cheers). Experience has shown that a Maine-law sustained by public opinion is not by any means so absurd a piece of 66 legislation as it looks at first sight." Mr. Buxton then remarked, "The use of this Maine-law would be not so much to deprive drunkards of their liquor as to remove temptation from those who have not yet fallen.” "We conclude," he said, "earnestly commending the suggestions thrown out in the previous pages to the consideration, if not to the adoption, of our readers. We are face to face with the most prolific source of sin and misery in our age. Let us not be misled by a spurious humanity to deal with it softly. The evils are mighty; the remedies must be strong." When the claims of teetotalism were urged on some persons they asked for its scriptural authority. They always instanced Timothy that much-abused young evangelist (laughter). It was astonishing to see how many men had got his stomach in their pockets. Men did not want any scriptural authority when their motives were their stomachs; but as soon as persons brought high Christian motives to bear on the subject, and abstained from intoxicating liquors for the good of others, objectors asked them for the scriptural warrant for teetotalism. The fact was, there was liberty in the matter. Those who asked for chapter and verse utterly mistook the very genius of the Bible (cheers). It did not say in so many words," Do this," and " Do that ;" but it put a life into men, and said, “ Work that out!" (cheers). That life was a life of love, and love was to be the interpreter of duty. Professing Christians sometimes sang "Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small : Demands my soul, my life, my all!" and they would get into rapture on the subject; and then, perhaps, when asked whether they would give up a glass or two of wine to save their brother, they would refuse to do so. He impeached this hypocrisy in the Church! He liked most of all to appeal to Christians. He believed that the Temperance movement was the work of God, and that the reason why, in times past, mere secular teetotalism had failed was because it was merely secular. The Church of God had not taken up the movement, and placed it amongst its own philanthropic operations, or it would not have been so weak and sickly as it had been in past years (cheers). CHARLES GILPIN, Esq., then said that he was compelled to retire from the chair, but Joseph Payne, Esq., would supply his place. The chair was then taken by JOSEPH PAYNE, Esq. Melodies Nos. 6 and 7 were sung by the children, and a collection was made in the meanwhile. The Hon. SAMUEL L. CARLETON, of the United States, then addressed the meeting. He expressed the pleasure he felt in being present that evening. He had come from that State in which they had outlawed the traffic in intoxicating drinks (cheers). He had been a teetotaller for twenty-five years, and he had the honour of being president of the Band of Hope in the State of Maine. He believed that Bands of Hope were, to the welfare of the world, what Sabbath schools were to the Church of |