spected by the drunkard, so long as his thirst for intoxicating drink remains unsatiated. We need not wonder, then, at finding that the offspring of the intemperate, are often left to encounter the ills arising from the most abject poverty.

In the evidence given by R. E. Broughton, Esq., a Police Magistrate, and a Barrister, before the parliamentary committee on drunkenness, after declaring that his experience had led him to the conviction, that the tendency of this vice was to demoralize, and impoverish the community, he makes the following affecting statement :

"I will mention a case," he says, "to show the baneful and dreadful effects of drinking upon that class to which allusion is made. It was the case of a discovery being made of a family, in a state, that if it had not been seen, it could not have been believed. I think there were four children; there was no bed, but a few old rags, in a corner, into which they huddled; and, for the common purposes of nature, it is quite clear they never left their room. Upon information being given, they were all taken and brought before me. I found that the woman, two years before, had borne a most respectable character, and the father was a mechanic, and could earn, certainly, two guineas a week. I committed both the husband and wife to prison, for neglecting their family, and adjourned the case for further inquiry, and sent the children to the workhouse. His brother came before me, and with tears in his eyes, stated that he might have lived in comfort;—that from the property derived to himself and his wife he might have been in possession of an income of £200 a-year. By examining the

boy, who was ten years of age, and very intelligent, I found that the woman regularly rose from the rags, on which she slept, and with the father went immediately into the gin-shop, and the same gin-shop. Having described his mother as getting up and going into the gin shop, he stated that the biggest boy then went out into the market, and tried to get a few pence by holding horses; leaving the other children to wander about, and pick up cabbage leaves, and so on,

to eat."

"The man himself shook like an aspen leaf; and the woman was reduced to the greatest state of distress and wretchedness. She had scarcely a rag on, and I believe she had not undressed herself for many months. It was like a dog and whelps, they all lay down together, and they all got up together, and there was not one of the comforts or conveniences of civilized life."

This is, indeed, a revolting picture of social misery; but its fidelity is not to be disputed; neither is the scene which it pourtrays to be viewed as altogether uncommon; on the contrary, it is to be feared that it illustrates the direful effects of intemperance in innumerable cases, although they may not all present, exactly, the same features of disgusting wretchedness.

Mr. Mott, who for some time was contractor for the management of the poor in Lambeth, and several other parishes, is stated to have investigated the cases of 300 paupers who came before him; and that, after having conducted the enquiry for some months, he discovered that in 9 cases out of 10, the main cause of their pauperism was "the ungovernable inclination for fermented liquors."

As the father of a family then, the drunkard, instead of being the nourisher of those whom the Almighty has made dependent upon him, is too often the reckless destroyer of all their comforts. He takes his children's bread, and does far worse than cast it to the dogs. He exchanges it for that which, in his case, is a deadly poison, by which he first disorders his own body, and endeavours to effect the ruin of his own soul, and then attempts to accomplish the destruction of others. Such an individual is declared, by the voice of inspiration, to be worse than an infidel; and yet, while the land, we call our own, is infested by hundreds of thousands of such unhappy beings, so inconsistent has been our piety and christian zeal, that we have been calmly looking on the widespread misery they have already occasioned, without once supposing that any obligation rested upon us, to make a decided, and persevering effort, to arrest them in their desolating career.

O when will the christian church, in Britain, awake to a sense of all her high responsibilities !-True, she has commiserated the far distant heathen. She has wept at the recital of the woes which ignorance and sin have inflicted upon men of other colours, and of other climes. She has sent the gospel to the home of the Hottentot, and has exerted herself to give liberty to the oppressed and deeply injured negro:-but for the hundreds of thousands of infinitely more wretched beings around her, who are themselves the subjects of

* "I have known instances where loaves of bread, which had been given for the supply of starving infants, have been exchanged for gin, as well as beds sold and clothes pawned to obtain it." Poynder's evidence on the Police of the Metropolis.

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the most degrading slavery, and who are inflicting the most distressing evils upon others, she has yet felt no adequate pity or compassion.

But poverty and want are the lightest of the evils, which the family of the drunkard are called to endure.

It devolves upon the parent to aim at forming the character of his children, in accordance with the will of God;--to instruct them in those truths by which alone a right direction can be given to their moral and intellectual character. Now it requires no very extensive acquaintance with human nature to know, that it is in vain to expect from the intemperate, that attention to the intellectual, and religious training of their offspring, which is necessary to both their present and eternal welfare. We might as reasonably expect that the tiger would teach its cubs to imitate the harmlessness of the lamb, or that the vulture would instruct her young to copy the manners of the dove, as expect that such as are themselves addicted to a vice, which lays prostrate all the powers of the mind, and which brutalizes all the affections of the heart, would be solicitous for the mental and moral improvement of others. If the drunkard should not have imparted to his offspring such a physical organization, as will produce in them a powerful inclination for intoxicating liquors, when they have once experienced their stimulating influence, and thus predisposed them to follow his example, there is ample reason, founded in the very constitution of man, for anticipating, that they will grow up in that ignorance, which is itself the parent of immorality and crime. But without reasoning upon the subject, we have before us facts, too numerous, and too impressive, to allow us to imagine,

that the families of drunkards will be otherwise than ignorant and depraved.

In solitary instances, by means which are not of ordinary occurrence, truth has been known to find its way to the minds of the children of demoralized parents, and effectually to counteract the influence of their unwholesome example. Where, however, one individual has thus been rescued from the darkness and misery, which generally result from the neglect of proper domestic instruction, and which the intemperate, in particular, usually entail upon their families, how many have been doomed to pass their lives, among the most degraded, and hopeless of their species, through being brought into existence, and nourished by parents addicted to the vice of intemperance.

The Rev. John Edgar, professor of divinity, in the Royal College of Belfast, in describing the melancholy effects of intemperance which had come under his own observation says, "I knew three widows who kept spirit shops, one of whom had had three husbands, and the others two each, who died of drunkenness. The first of these had a son who killed himself by drinking. A son of the second was transported for stealing while drunk; and of the family of the third, two sons and four daughters became drunkards. We have access, for evidence upon this part of our subject, to two sources of information,—the reports of those who have had the guardianship of the poor, and of those who are familiar with the general character of our public criminals; and from both we are justified in declaring, that drunkenness, on the part of parents, by causing them to neglect the proper educa