hundred members, a Temperance Society, and a flourishing society of Good Templars as well; and occasionally lecturers come there from the head-quarters in Dublin; but the place itself teaches a lesson better than any of them, inasmuch as Thomas Carlyle writes, “Silent divine action is better than any amount of speech or song,” and in this point of view the example of Bessbrook cannot be too much dwelt upon or too widely proclaimed. As long as the workman drinks it is in vain that you try to elevate him. I am not speaking of drinking to excess. As wages are, the workman who is but a moderate drinker wastes money and time which, if better employed, would enable him to do better for his family and himself. At Bessbrook this is clearly felt; the men and women who come there have no desire to leave it—the mild despotism of a paternal government suits them. From the villages all round, even from as far as Newry, people come to work at the mills. Tuesday is the day when fresh hands are taken on, and great is the joy when an application receives an affirmative reply. The crowd round the door is the best possible test of the popularity of the place: you get a better idea of its magnitude when I tell you that it employs upwards of 4,000 hands, and that it pays away in wages as much as £50,000 a year. I have said there is little of that troublesome discontent which seems chronic in Ireland in and around Bessbrook. I might say more—I might testify to the existence and skill of the Volunteer Brass Band, which performs on public occasions, and whose services are in request even beyond Bessbrook itself. One great characteristic of the place is the sober and moral air of the people. In dense communities outside, you hear of scandals which are rare at Bessbrook; the superior education given, the absence of intoxicating liquor, have of course much to do with this. But other agencies are at work. I refer in the first place to the family system initiated, or at any rate carried out here; the rule is to take on a whole family at a time. Here you have no young girls and lads at the most dangerous periods of their lives freed from parental control, and thrown uncared-for on the world. Where they are, we know too well what follows. Our great towns by night testify to the evils, moral and social, resulting from such a state of things. At Bessbrook the family is placed in one or other of the houses built for the operatives, and work is found for all. If the father cannot work in the mill, he is set to mend the roads, to work on the farm or at the quarries, to be a waggoner, or to make himself generally useful: and the services of such people are in request, as all the repairs of the mill-gear are done by workmen on the spot. There is no occasion to go out of the settlement for artificers of any kind. All the machinery of the place is set in motion by six engines consuming annually 10,000 tons of coal, which has all to be brought from