THE RECHABITE MEETING.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 46, 9 December 1871, Page 3

THE RECHABITE MEETING.

The annual meeting of this body was held on Tuesday evening in the Odd Fellows’ Hall. In truth it must be said that never was there | within the four walls of the Odd Fellows’ j Hall to be seen so great a number of persons j whoso countenances gave silent evidence of health, happiness, and contentment. Added to these pleasant features was the novel appearance which the wearing of the sashes of the different grades or offices gave to the assembly, most of those worn being of blue silk ornamented with a star of silver over the letters 1.0. R., worked in silver cord. Extensive preparations bad been made in the decoration of the Hall, flags of all descriptions banging from the walls and across the room. The stage had also been decorated, the chief ornamentation being composed of cut flowers aud foliage. In tlio centre of the ball the large chandelier bad been neatly festooned, the side lights being wreathed with arboreal prunings. To the left of the chair were ranged the choir, and it is pleasurable to be able to state that, although there was an absence of any ostentation in the manner of rendering the pieces the majority were given in a manner that told of a great deal of attention in the working up. The ensemble was exceedingly cheerful, and it is not in any way surprising that the proceedings throughout were of tbe most agreeable character. As had been announced, the Hon. W. Eox took the chair, and in opening the meeting, The Chairman stated, among other interesting matters, that there was no portion of society so much interested in the matter of total abstinence as the female portion of the community. The drinking question he considered a 3 absolutely a woman’s question—one in which all tbe powers of female influence should be brought to bear. The customs of society, particularly in tbe colonies, proved the undeniable necessity for the creation of temperance societies, and lie especially advocated those of the Rechabite order. If proof were needed of tbe effects of the drinking customs the statistics of tbe country gave it in abundance, for while tbe cost of government in Great Britain was £80,000,000, tbe total annual consumiition of alcholic liquors was estimated at £103,000,000. There was no doubt whatever that the cost of government was very considerably augmented by the crime resulting from the trade in liquor, and while this was the case to a great extent in the home country, still more so was it in this colony, the rate per head in England being £3 3s, and in New Zealand £6 11s, or more than double. He would point out another fact which even moderate drinkers might profit by, and that was that tbe putting aside of the price of a pint of beer or a nobbier each day would, at the end of a year, amount to £9 2s 6d, a sum nearly equal to the amount required to insure the life of a man of twenty-five years of age for the sum of £4OO. The chairman then went into the general object and history of the movement, stating that temperance societies were first started for the purpose of preventing the consumption of ardent spirits only, but this was found not to accomplish the objects desired, and afterwards seven men belonging to Preston, Lancashire, started the total abstinence societies, which had over siuce flourished in all parts of the world. The Odd Fellows and Foresters might be very desirable bodies for the furtherance of good fellowship and brotherhood, but those objects were also secured by the Bechabites, who did a great deal more to improve the condition of its members than did either of the other bodies named. There were these advantages : —That total abstinence promoted a Lealthier existence and a longer life —facts which were proved by the willingness of the insurance companies to insure the lives of total abstainers at lower premiums than those of other persons. As an instance of the progress made by the societies in Victoria he mentioned that in that colony there were 50,000 total abstainers, 6,000 of whom were Recliabites. The annual report was then read. Mr W. Johnson congratulated the Order on the numerous attendance as an evidence that the Recliabites were spreading in Wellington. According to the report they had heard that evening, theirnumber had in a short time sprung from twenty-three to sixty-eight, and with the honorary members added, they made a total of over eighty subscribing members. He confessed he was afraid at one time that the society was going to die ; but it now was like some of

the children he saw in the Hall —the older it got the stronger it grew. A great help to them would be the formation of a ladies’ tent, and he should also like to see the boys form a tent for themselves, as they had in Blenheim. Other societies gave great assistance, but they went to the lowest depths and held out tbe hand of brotherhood. They not only made men sober steady men j their being steady men made them ornaments of society. Mr Russell recited “ The Bridge of Sigliß” with considerable pathos, one of tbe ladies of the clioir following with a musical piece, which was one of the best of tbe evening. Mr Ward said there was no vice be hated so much as intemperance, because it had wronged so many of his friends, who had given great promise in tbe legal profession, but had been killed by tbe frightful curse of drink. He related an instance of another young man, a member of the Armed Constabulary, who had been burnt to death through being too drunk to escape from the flames of a burning house. The principle of total abstinence bad been much maligned, for what cause knew not. No one could estimate the good it produced, and he could not understand why so much contumely should be heaped upon it, as it was one of the best helps a man could have in life. He dwelt upon the lukewarmness of ministers of religion, who did not come forward to aid the cause as they should do. If a ship was wrecked the rock was marked and carefully avoided in the future, and they should do so in their lives, and lie appealed to them to avoid the rock on which many men lost their lives. Ho besought them to take warning and flee from the danger to which they were exposed. Ho invited them to board their little temperance ship,which had just come £rom a prosperous year’s voyage. (Applause). A little girl sang “ Father Come Home,” which was followed by a companion song sung by Mr Hichens, “ Father’s Come Home.” The Chairman said they had now arrived at that part of the programme where he saw himself put down for “ the Chairman’s speech,” but really lie thought it not an occasion on which lie would feel at all justified in making a long oration. They had come there with the object of endeavoring to show that total abstainers could enjoy themselves in a rational manner, and to avail themselves of the opportunity afforded by their annual meeting to convey to those outside, who were not of tlieir number, a few wholesome facts or principles. There was one difficulty that always met him on these occasions, and that was that on the subject of total abstinence he found himself in the position of Pickwick ; he had so many ideas in his head that they jostled each other, and sometimes he became altogether unintelligible. The fact was ho knew so much about total abstinence that ho did not know where to begin, and he was afraid that some of them would not kaow when lie was going to leave off. However, he would commence on the present occasion by telling them that the manner in which he first became interested in the question originated in this way : When he was a member of a licensing bench of justices it struck him as a remarkable thing one day, when sitting on the bench with the ordinary magistrates, that people were brought up to be punished by him for, breaking windows in the very house for which he, as a licensing magistrate, only a week before had granted a license. That was tlie first thing that brought the matter up strongly before him as a social question, and he could not help feeling absolutely shocked at his own ignorance in not having perceived the effects of the drinking system before. Since he had become a Rechabite he looked upon a drunken man as a different being. He looked upon him as a fellow-man to be pitied, to be commiserated, and one to whom be was bound to hold out the hand of brotherhood ; to rescue him from the horrors and miseries in which lie knew bis whole life must be spent. His experience, however, also told him this :thafc the difficulties of grappling with the drinking question were not to be found among the drunkards. The object of the society was not to reclaim druukards but to make sober men —to keep sober men who are sober already : to begin with children, and to train them up to habits of sobriety. But to accomplish this the greatest obstacle they had to overcome was the moderate drinker. It was nob the great drunkard. The great drunkard would come to them shedding tears, and they rescued him if the passion for drink was not too strongly implanted in him ; but the moderate drinker was an insurmountable barrier; the man who introduced the drink into his domestic circle; the respectable man that sits in the bar-parlour of the publichouse. It was with that kind of man with whom they had the greatest difficulty in inducing him to lend his aid in the cause of sobriety. A very common charge made against the total abstainer was one he had seen stated recently in an English paper, the “ Morning Post;” a charge which was often thrown in their teeth, and very likely often behind their backs. They were told that it was unworthy of a man to pledge himself; that he must be a poor weak fellow that required discipline of such a kind to enable him to control himself; that he could not be good for much if he could not keep sober unless be wrote his name in a book and. made a solemn declaration that he would for 1 ever abstain from partaking of spirituous i liquors. He bad overheard the remark that that kind of thing was all very good for old men, and that there were very few heroes ever found amongst them. He did not kno tr what was meant by “ heroes.” Did it mean a person who vs as prepared, without any thought, to throw himself into the cannon’s mouth, or a person who exhibited a great amount of Dutch courage; for that was | the common idea of what a hero was ? Whether teetotallers had among them many ' of that class he did not know. At any rate they did not wish to have

amflngst them heroes in that sense of the word; bub that they bad among them persons who on every day of their lives exhibited heroic characteristics was a position that he was prepared to affirm and uphold.. -The man who, remembering that he has a wite and children at, home, and if he yields to temptation in the way of drinking he is neglecting them; the man who rejects that temptation is a hero. (Loud appliuse.) He would give them a few facta and figures on the subject. Very few people who drink at all drink less than sixpence a day. That man would call himself an exceedingly moderate drinker who spent even twice that amount. Now, if that man were to determine upon insuring his life, that sixpence a day, which would amount to £9 2s 6d per annum, would be nearly enough to pay the premium on a policy for £4OO, and if, in order to do that, that person denies himself of a glass of beer and passes the public-houso where he used to spend his money, he considered that man performed a heroic action every time he did so. He considered that man a far greater hero than the man who once in his life faced the mouth of a cannon. Because in many cases it happened that the man who faced the cannon was induced in the course of the next few hours to enter the public-house and make a beast of himself. He would ask them which was the most heroic, the man who benefited his family in the way he had described, or the man who in the course of his life performs one a‘ct which endangers his life and yet may be sufficient of a coward not to face the jeers of public house frequenters because he is afraid they will say, “ Oh, you are one of those old women teetotalers.” Ho spoke to-night under great feelings of sadness, for the telegrams recently brought to this country had announced that the noblest heart that ever beat in the cause of temperance was still, and that the noblest voice that ever pleaded its cause was now silent. It was impossible nob to have a feeling of oppression on his mind when he announced the fact that J. B. Gough, the great teetotal advocate of the United States was now no more. A great blow might be said to have befallen the cause of temperance, for that voice had done more to propagate the principles of temperance and to arrest the drinking habits of that country than any other of all the whole rank and file of those engaged in the temperance movement. He was the son of a private soldier, a moral man, whose breast was dignified with the medal of the great war. J. B. Gough, at twelve years of age, having had little schooling, having been brought up by a pious mother, crossed the Atlantic with a family with whom he was apprenticed. He lived with them some time, and then was apprenticed to a bookbinder, At tbe ago of twenty he became what is called a moderate drinker, got into habits of dissipation, and although he was implored by bis relatives and friends to desist, his proud and determined spirit carried him on deeper and deeper. In the meantime he got married, but his wife died; her death, perhaps, being brought on by the misery he had brought on her by his dissipated habits. He became a confirmed drunkard, was brought down to destitution, had not bread to eat, no one would employ him, and after seven years grappling—seven years of fallen intemperance —he was rescued by the touch of a hand laid lightly on his Bhoulder by a person whom he had never seen before in his life. [Mr Fox read the incident from a work of Mr Gough.] And J. B. Gough, after thirty years exertion in the cause of intemperance, had passed from among them. He was a man who bore in his own person invaluable testimony in this world to the advantages of abstinence ; and if the first two years of his abstinence work may bo taken as a test, he laid the foundation of happiness in hundreds of thousands of families, by converting them to his way of thinking and living. And yet people pointed to them and said they had no heroes. He should say boldly that there was no hero on the face of the earth who had faced the cannon’s mouth who would bear comparison with J. B. Gough. Mr Carson and Mr Fraser delivered interesting addresses; after which Mr Janson proposed a vote of thanks to the Chairman, which was seconded and carried unanimously. The Chairman, in reply, said he could only return his sincere thanks for being allowed to preside over the meeting. He considered it the greatest honor they could confer upon him. Considering the numbers who had assembled in the Hall that evening, and the numbers who had petitioned the Assembly, they had evidence of a very great change. Three years ago there was no such feeling in the community, and he hoped those in the Hall would live to see a different state of afFairs in the whole of the AngloSaxon race. As John Bright had said, if they eould only remove the vice, the crime, the ignorance, and the destitution caused by the use of intoxicating liquors, Great Britain would bo so utterly changed from top to bottom that they would not know their own country again. Ho hoped this was the beginning of a brighter dawning which many of them would see carried to a successful termination, and that Great Britain and all her colonies would arrive at such a state that such a thing as intemperance would be unknown. That such a state of things was coming upon the world he himself had not any doubt, and he hoped they would live to see that time when, as John Bright said, they would not know the country in which they had lived. He hoped that next year they would see the space within the four walls of that hall crowded by members of the Bechabite Order only. The glee, “ Swiftly o’er the Mountain Brow,” was then sung by the choir. This was the best piece of singing of the evening, and did great credit to all concerned. A hearty vote of thanks was then passed to the choirs, and tho Temperance National Anthem haying been sung, the meeting broke up*