The mistake many good people make is looking on drinking as a failing, and not as a crime. It must be a sin for any one to make himself eligible for doing all sorts of mischief and wrong, as men do who take, as they say, "a sup of drink." It is this sup of drink that gives them the impetus towards cruelty and lust, and we must insist upon it that for a man to prepare himself for wickedness is a sin against himself and his God. If this be so, the social element in drinking makes it all the more dangerous. Men and women drink often because it is considered a kind and hospitable thing to offer it, and an ungenerous and churlish thing to refuse it. What is this but calling a thorn a vine? While we were in the court, several cases came before the Magistrates--"Drunk and Disorderly," varied by obscenity and quarrelling. One woman told the Bench that she had been teetotal for five and a half years, till she came into the town to pay a debt, and then she had a glass, "and it will be twenty years before I have any more." "Ah!" said "His Worship," "LISTEN TO NO FRIEND THAT WANTS YOU TO TAKE DRINK." Another poor wretch was "Drunk and Incapable." She told the Magistrates that she had come to get a situation, that her box was at the station. She had evidently seen better days. The Chairman said how sorry he was to see a woman like her, evidently a superior person, in such a case, and she gladly promised to be a better woman, but she had been more than once to the thorn for grapes, and we fear will go again. There was a young fellow brought up for drunkenness and obscenity, whose fine was paid by his mother. She looked a decent but poor woman, and one could not but wonder what she had parted with to raise the money, to keep what one of the Magistrates called a blackguard, out of prison. But what will not a mother's love do! These are a few of the cases which made us wonder that in our town we have so many places, licensed by the same Magistrates, to sell that which fits men and women to appear in the court to be punished. We wonder how long it will take to make the English people see that so long as we allow drinking shops to abound, there will be a necessity for police and lock-ups, and that it is as easy to gather grapes of thorns as to expect peace and quietness and facilities for drinking to exist together? GOD'S ANGER IS A FIRE THAT IS AS DIFFICULT TO STOP AS TO START. XXXIX. NO BALLOT-BOX.