If the members of the Alliance would stick a little
to truth and common-sense they would, double their influence in a year. Mr. Dawson Burns will have it that the British people spend £60,000,000 on drink, which, if they saved, would make them comfortable. Quite true ; _ and what is that to the purpose ? They like drink. Suppose they saved all they spend on tobacco, tea, and horse-racing, all of them more or less injurious indul- gences, how rich they all would be then? What the Alliance has to show is, not that drink costs money, which nobody denies, though beer is now 30 per cent. cheaper than milk, but why they should not spend their money as they like. The real ease is not the expense, but the moral evil of drink- ing too much, and any large body of evidence showing that
teetotallers were the least criminal class in the country would be worth all their trashy averages, which, after all, only show that each household of three drinks &d. a day, the price of a quart of milk. When that is. done,. they have, only, to prove that a Rajpoot (teetotaller) can beat a Sikh (furious drinker), and the logical victory will be all theirs. Franklin had ten times their sense, for his first "point" was that he could carry heavier weights without drink than a rival equally strong with it.
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