Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/86

 abstainer, though I often feel that it would be right I should be so; yet I am Pharisee enough to thank Heaven as often as opportunity offers, that 1 am not like that inhuman "hunter of Cumberland beasts with hounds," Sir Wilfrid Lawson, Bart., the apostle of temperance, whose devotion to the public weal and domestic purity of life I so greatly admire. I would rather get hopelessly drunk every day in the week than even for once

"Blend my pleasure or ray pride

With sorrow of the meanest thing that lives."

Howbeit, had I been born a fox-hunting squire like the baronet of Bray ton, there are ten chances to one that I should have been as arrant a Nimrod as he. "That monster custom, which all sense doth eat of habit's devil," is too much for us all, if not in one particular, then in another.

Like all friends of temperance who aim at possible reforms, I rejoice that Sir Wilfrid, during the session of 1879, saw fit to substitute "Local Option" for the Permissive Bill. The latter had a detestable plebiscitary flavor about it which made it stink in the nostrils of every man who believes that representative institutions afford the safest guaranties at once for liberty of the citizen and efficiency of administration. From this objection Local Option is free, and a flag is now unfurled around which may rally every one who is not the blind partisan of a "trade" which openly boasts of preferring its own small and not over-creditable "interest" to every consideration of national welfare. For years the publicans have openly identified themselves with every re-actionary "cry," and they will