LIQUOR LAWS SUPERSEDED.
Mouthing, spouting, declamatory, meddlesome agitation for the compulsory enforcement of total abstinence from invigorating, comforting, cheering, and restorative drinks on people to whom it would be intolerable, is the very staff of life to the United Kingdom Alliance. Therefore it is taking the bread out of their mouths to enter into combination for any purpose like that described by the Post in a paragraph announcing:—
"Another Social Movement.—The working-men of the West End have set on foot a new social movement, the main object of which is to enable them to hold meetings with their trade and friendly societies away from public-houses. A body of earnest working-men have been exerting themselves for some months past to raise funds for the purpose of building a central hall, in which the trade and friendly societies of Chelsea, Brompton, and Kensington may meet, instead of at public-houses. There are upwards of seventy such societies in the districts named."
If working-men generally take to courses like these, they will very soon vindicate their order from the accusation of drunkenness which Liquor Lawson, Dawson Burns, and their followers, put forward as a pretext for soliciting the whole people to let themselves be placed under restraint, like idiots or babies. The sober and earnest working-men, drinking their beer in moderation, will show themselves to be really the same flesh and blood with the gentlemen who sip their claret soberly, and are so kind as to interest themselves in the promotion of schemes for withholding their poorer kind from indulgence in "intoxicating liquors." But then the occupation of the United Kingdom Alliance will be gone. That is to say, they will be deprived of all excuse for vociferating, plotting, and conspiring to have the pleasure of regulating the habits of others.