The Bishop of Gloucester and the Rev. Basil Wilberforce on the relation of the Church to the temperance question.

Date:
[between 1800 and 1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Bishop of Gloucester and the Rev. Basil Wilberforce on the relation of the Church to the temperance question. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    not take into account those who are trying it privately without saying anything about it, even to their wives. ( Laughter. ) What is the great object of these total abstinence societies P The object of them is to wake up the nation. The nation is asleep, from the throne down to the working man, on this temperance matter, We want to wake the nation up to see what a really terrible question this is; that we are being degraded in the sight of continental nations, and are falling from our position as one of the first nations of the world. We want the people to get rid of the idea that they cannot get on without alcoholic drinks. “ Take away my beer, and I’m done for—you are going to rob a poor man of his beer.” I say we want to prevent the poor man being robbed through his beer. (Applause.) A simple Hindoo who prided himself on never taking life was shown by means of a microscope the life he destroyed in drinking water, and he said, “ Take the infernal thing away; you have ruined the whole religion of my life.” So we wish to ruin people’s religion in drink, by showing them what drink is —to analyse a pint of beer, and show them that it is really a pint of dirty water and nothing else. I didn’t say it was not very nice ; it is rather nice; but I say it is absolutely worthless as nourishment, and it is your duty to teach the nation these things. George the Eourtb, who was very fond of wine, had in his cellar a very fine kind, which the courtiers found out and drank. On a grand occasion the King ordered some of this to be produced, and the courtiers were in a flutter, but they went to an eminent wTine merchant, who asked if there was any left, and was told only two bottles, and on tasting it said he made that wine in his back cellar, and could make as much as they wanted, for he had kept the receipt! I want to bring facts like these before the people, and to show them that these alcoholic drinks which the people say are so strengthening and so valuable, are as a rule the merest rubbish, made in the back cellar of some wine merchant. The Bishop said we could not wait for legislation—of course we cannot; we do not mean to wait for it. But at the same time it is well you should notice that we do not know how to use the legislation we have got. Do you know that there are 200 Acts of Parliament regulating the traffic, and every one will be broken to-night before you go to bed ? We cannot put the law into operation, because we have not the courage to do it. With regard to the Permissive Bill, I exhort you from the bottom of my heart to go in for it. (Applause.) People talk about it as if it were coercion and tyranny; it is nothing of the kind. Besides, a free country likes coercion. Is not the Education Act coercion—interfering with the liberty of the subject in the case of a man who does not wish to send his boy to school P But the Permissive Bill is not coercive, it is permissive. What has the Parliament to do with it ? It is the people who have the real control. If I had a member of Parliament who would not vote for the Permissive Bill, I would never give him another vote. (Applause.) As soon as the people of England are sufficiently alive to see which way their own interest lies they will have a Permissive Bill. There is no public- house on the Shaftesbury Park Estate, but a landlord succeeded in