A LANCASHIRE. CENTENARY.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20619, 8 August 1932, Page 9

A LANCASHIRE. CENTENARY.

TO THIS EDITOR OT THB tMSBS Sir,—On the first day of September, 1932, millions of English people will review in the Jight of a social faith a hundred years of English progress in eraperanee—not the nibbles at organised sobriety which gave England its first license law in mid-Tudor times, nor the qualified attempts to lessen drinking by cheapened, thinner drinking some three centuries after that, whon thinking Anglo-Saxons began to wake to the great moral and economic problems of their country. Something was wanted; something came. Alike from Westminster Abbey and from Manchester Cathedral, the centenary of a greater reform, will soon be praised, the smaller shrines of England taking up the paan. For on September lßt, 1832, Joseph Livesey with six other Lancashire men founded at Prestos the first total ab-

atinience-society south of the Tweed. It was a black time for England, drained 'of money, health, and hope by the I aftermath'of Napoleon's wars. Against [ the miseries of those years the tradi- ■ tional evil of drunkenness, a growing menace down the centuries, stood out I more luridly than ever. The rich valued no pleasure more; the poor, illfed, untaught, unhelped, had no other pleasure. John Bright, speaking in 1841, went'to the root of the matter when, looking on a land on which the mark of the seventeenth-century Puritans and the eighteenth-century Methodists appeared to be effaced, he declared that "scarcely any working man would lift a finger in defence of those institutions which Englishmen were wont to be proud of." The hour brings the man. Joseph Livesey had done much thinking before the earlier movement in Scotland had sent a forlorn hope over the border. He was both a leader born and a knight-errant who never owned defeat. With tongue and pen he fought ignorance, apathy, greed, and despair. He worked to found mechanics' institutes, to win the people education, to end the long misery of the Corn Laws. But none of his battles "brought a victory so ultimately farreaching as the day he induced six men of Preston to sign with him the first total abstinence pledge taken in England. Seven men to turn the world upside down! They were jeered at, gaped at, persecuted. The millhands of Lancashire would not work , with total abstainers. Livesey's disciples found other work, and slowly truth spread. The man's clear brain worked on forthright educational lines. To this day, when "racial poison" has become a slogan, his famous Malt Liquor Lecture remains a scholarly indictment of the "Beer is bread" fallacy then current, and an exposure of tha radical change effected by fermentation. In that hive of human industry, Lancashire, he stood out in meeting after meeting, declaring: "No regulation, no effort, no authority under Heaven can raise the condition of the working classes as long as they drink." .The lesson went home. . Thousands of pledges were taken and kept. Three years after the signing of the historic "Seven Men of Preston," which the whole English-speaking temperance world celebrates this year, the British Temperance Association (now League) was founded: a centenary to be kept in all British lands in 1935. This association was respectable. Two members of Parliament, Joseph Brotherton and James Silk Buckingham, stalwarts of the cause, were its first vice-presi-dents. Its first president crossed the sea to see it inaugurated, being no less a person than Eobert Guest White, High Sheriff of Dublin. And thereby hangs a talc. Livesey was in gallant company now. The Scottish total abstinence movement, an earlier growth than in Lancashire, was winning great victories north of the Tweed; but Ireland was fairly set on fire by Father Mathew, who had been won for the work by a Cork Quaker, William Martin. If Ireland had previously forgotten her sorrows in drink, Father Mathew taught her doubly to forget them in her new sobriety. Crime disappeared; selfrespect and prosperity went hand in hand. A witty versifier of the time hit off the happy change thus:— The judgeß travel through the laud lilte newly-married ladies; A enow-white glove on either hand, » einecuro their trade is: Since Father- Mathew's special orders expelled the liquors from our borders. Nothing, perhaps, healed old warwounds quicker than the friendly give-and-take on liquor reform between Great Britain and America in the nineteenth century. English Bechabites clasped hands with Amorican Good Templars when the Dry Law was won for Maine in 1851.. But what of LiveBey, the protagonist of English temperance? He died at ninety in 1884, mourned and acclaimed from Solway to the English Channel. He saw th<s jubilee of his tiny Preston Society, and in two fruitful years more,.the,seed he sowed had become a nobly-branching tree. —Yours, etc., • JESSIE MACKAT. : August 6th, 1932. .