DRUNKENNESS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 173, 21 July 1876, Page 12

DRUNKENNESS.

At a meeting held in the Leeds Town Hall, recently, Cardinal Manning spoke at length on the subject of intemperance. Alluding to theincrease of drunkenness, he observed that the press a few years ago used all kinds of arguments in contradiction of an assertion that drunkenness in its grossest form was on the increase ; but they never heard a contradiction when that was said now. The police reports of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and other large towns, distinctly declared that there had been a deplorable increase. His Eminence quoted from the report of the Chief Constable of Leeds, which stated that in the year 1875 the charges of drunkenness had increased forty per cent. He then referred at length to the books written on thesubject, by Mr. W. Hoyle, who stated that one hundred and forty millions of money were spent every year in the drink trade. All that capital was as unprofitably spent as if it were cast into the sea. Theharvest reaped from that immense outlay was crime, misery, pauperism, disease, insanity, and death. Referring to the social and. domesticaspects of the question, his Eminence said there was no more certain ruin of homes than drunkenness, and if that vice sapped the foundation of domestic life, what solid foundation was there for social and political order to rest upon ? He knew no more fatal feature in any country than when an appreciable proportion of its population should have grown up without the sanctities and order of domestic life. (Applause.) They never should have needed school boards if fathers and mothers had done their duty to their children. (Applause.) They paid the penalty, and that penalty might be the Christianity of England. A national system of education for a people irreconcilably divided on religion could only be in the nature, if it ever were uni versal, of secular education. (Cheers). Let them look at it in Germany and America. What was the language of statesmen and presidents who were talking of the perils to the civil state through the action of the Catholic Church ? What was the education they preached and promoted, and desired to force by legislation upon an unwilling people ? — an education without Christianity. (Cheers). Heasked what had brought them in Christian England to that pass ? Their religious divisions were bad enough ; nevertheless, a wise and temperate legislation has so far mitigated the evil that it was possible for all men to find religious freedom in their schools, but they had come to such a pass J| that the hundreds of thousands of outcast and: abandoned children, the greater part of them the offspring of drunkenparents, had forced upon the public conscience and opinion of England th 9 absolute necessity of setting up a system of education, at all costs, religious or without religion, by which those children should at least be civilized. (Applause). He asked why was it that danger was not ( checked? The Government of England was a sleeping partner in the^ drink trade. (Cheers). Ha did not mean the Government of Mr.. Disraoli, but any government. (Laughter). The Government for the last half century had raised every year £28,000,000 of money by taxes upon the drink trade, and if he were to say that it weighed that taxalion in the scale so as to be quite sure that it should rather promotethan diminish the trade he should do no wrong to any Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever existed. (Laughter and applause).