before a magistrate. Unless molestation of others can be charged, the drunkard is very seldom made to feel the hand of the law. Hereby many persons seem to believe (as apparently does one bishop) that, as a part of English _liberty_, every one has a _right_ to be drunk. While we complain that authorities are negligent and connive at vice, after accepting and assuming the duty to prevent it; the _sellers_ of the drink are open to a severer charge. A man too poor to keep a servant is glad to get a wife to serve him. She is to him housemaid and cook and nurse of his children. For all these functions she has a clear right to full wages, besides careful nurture during motherly weakness. The husband manifestly is bound to supply to his wife _more_ than all she might have earned in serving others, before he spends a sixpence on his own needless indulgences: and the publican knows it; knows, sometimes in definite certainty, always in broad suspicion, that he is receiving money which does not in right belong to his customer. Of course he cannot be convicted by law; but in a moral estimate he is comparable to a lottery-keeper who accepts from shopmen money which he suspects is taken from their master's till, or to a receiver of goods which he ought to suspect to be stolen. Such is the immoral aspect of traders, who now claim "compensation," if the twelve- month licences granted to them as privilege, for no merit of their own, be, _in the interest of public morality_, terminated at the end of the twelve months. _In the interest and at the will of landlord magistrates_ such traders have borne extinction meekly, over a very wide rural area. What made them _then_ so meek and unpretending? Apparently because against powerful Peers and Squires impudence was not elicited in them by the encouragement of a John Bright and a Gladstone.