This is the rock on which the home life of working men is wrecked; yet it is not a hidden rock, for examples abound all around them, but the love of drink casts out the love of child, and the idea that present self-denial will bring them future good and lasting joy has no weight with them. The moral worth, business capacity and intellect that is lost to the country because of this one evil cannot be measured. Born into homes of one or two rooms, born even of parents stupidly neglectful, are boys that are keen as the razor’s edge, whose talents fit them for useful lives, but whose talents getting no training at home, and finding no outlet for good, very soon get trained for evil, for an outlet in that direction is always to hand. Recently a small boy, not twelve, applied at the North London Police Court for a summons. The magistrate asked him why he required a summons. ‘For wages, sir.’ ‘But surely you go to school?’ the magistrate said. Yes, he did go to school, but he was errand-boy at nights and all day on Saturdays, and earned two shillings a week. It was Saturday morning, and he had gone to his work, but found another boy, a whole-timer, in his place. His master had not given him notice, so he claimed a week’s pay in lieu of it. The magistrate gravely told him that he was not ‘a workman within the meaning of the Act,’ and that he would have to take out a summons at the County Court, and off to the County Court the little fellow trudged. Now, a boy of that sort is worth looking after, and is worth a good many pots of beer; but it is dangerous to neglect such a boy; yet these boys, when about fifteen, leave our working men’s homes wholesale; ‘there is no room for them.’ Nor will there ever be room for them until working men are prepared to sacrifice the public-house on the altar of home life. Great politicians, public orators, and even wise and learned deans, may boast that they ‘never robbed a man of a pot of beer.’ I would like to rob some men of a good many pots of beer, for I contend that any man who prevents home decency by pots of beer, any father who is content that his boys should leave home while still children because ‘there is no room for them,’ while he can find money for the public-house, is a traitor and a criminal; patriotism has no place in his heart, for the love of country comes from the love of home. What do such men do for the good of their country? They simply take upon themselves duties with regard to children which they scandalously and wickedly evade. But the effects are far-reaching, and the country pays the penalty in minus good but plus evil. If parents would but understand, if they would but realize and know, that child-life in their homes brings responsibility and duty, and that the fulfilment of that responsibility and the performance of that duty--though they may cost anxious thought and much worry for a time, and though self-denial may have to be practised and the public-house dispensed with--will be