Bessbrook and Its Linen Mills: A Short Narrative of a Model Temperance Town

Transcribed from the 1876 William Tweedie edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
A SHORT NARRATIVE OF A MODEL TEMPERANCE TOWN.
BY J. EWING RITCHIE.
AUTHOR OF “THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF LONDON;” “NIGHT SIDE OF LONDON,” ETC. ETC.
London: WILLIAM TWEEDIE & CO., LIMITED, 337, STRAND.
1876.

UNWIN BROTHERS, PRINTERS.
That the times in which we live are out of joint is a truism too obvious to require comment. As much now as in old days the cry is, “Who will show us any good?” We hear much of modern progress; but there are many who, like Mr. Froude, intimate that what we call progress is in reality merely change, and that change is not necessarily always for the better. When such men as Mr. Ruskin leave the domain of the beautiful fiercely to arraign what in our wisdom, or want of it, we term Political Economy and its pitiless laws, we may be sure that all the social problems of the age have not been satisfactorily solved. If it be true that our rich men are becoming richer every day, it is equally true that our poor are becoming poorer. Might has taken from the peasant his strip of land, and has driven him into the towns, where he dies of bad air, bad water, bad food, bad lodging, bad pay; where his sons learn crime, and his daughters how much better rewarded is vice than virtue. Underneath the whited sepulchres of our boasted civilisation there lie rottenness and dead men’s bones. Of talk we have somewhat more than enough, as must necessarily be the case now that woman claims to appear on the platform on an equality with man. Associations of all kinds exist partly for the bettering and partly for the bewildering of the public. Money is freely subscribed for them; for Dives has a dim idea that he owes much to Lazarus, and would at all times rather discharge the debt by letting a few crumbs fall from the table, than by personally clothing his naked form and binding up his loathsome sores. It is not clear that we have improved on that very much. It is clear that for lack of it we have a great deal—especially in our crowded manufacturing districts—of social anarchy—of progress the wrong way—of licence which means licentiousness, of teaching and talking downward rather than upward. The need of silent divine action, as Thomas Carlyle writes, is very great at this time.