"To secure sufficient responsibility, no Board should be numerous: _five_ or _seven_ persons may be a full maximum, and no Board should have a vast constituency. Therefore our greatest towns ought to be divided into areas with suitable numbers, and have Boards separately independent. With a few such precautions, the system of elective Licensing Boards, which can impose despotically their own conditions on the licences, but without power to bind their successors in the next year, appears to be a complete solution of the problem...." He adds, that to Sir Wilfrid Lawson "is due more largely than to any other public man the arousing of the nation" in the matter of the Drink Traffic, "To him our thanks and our honour will be equally paid, though the name of another mover be on the victorious Bill"--whatever it may be. "Noble efforts for a good cause are never thrown away, are never ineffectual, even when the success does not come in the exact form for which its champion was contending. It may hereafter be said: 'Other men sowed--we reap the fruit of their labours.'" I quote now from the letter to Anna Swanwick, in which he refers to this question in 1887:-- "Unless at a very early day the causes of Un-Employ be removed, we must calculate on frightful disorder. Evidently two measures are indispensable. "1. To stop our land from going out of cultivation. "2. To stop the demoralizing waste of 135 millions per annum on pernicious drink. "Only a most stringent change of law, perhaps very difficult to pass, can effect the _former_ and when passed, the good effect cannot be instantaneous. The _second_ topic has been before the nation for thirty- four years; could be passed, if there were a _will_ in _either_ ministry, in a single fortnight, and when passed, the benefit would be sensible in a single year. Yet these topics are indefinitely postponed. The Tories do not even talk of them. _Some_ 'Liberals' round Mr. Gladstone are eager for the stopping of Drink Bars, but the eloquent leader _talks_ (in general) rightly, but never _acts_. "Alas! He showed his heart in bringing a Bill to enact that every Railway Train should have (at least?) one travelling carriage with a Drink Bar. When it is told, people will not believe it." The final letter from Francis Newman to Anna Swanwick, from the collection so kindly lent me by Miss Bruce, is dated 17th April, 1897, "15 Arundel Crescent, Weston-super-Mare."