hospitals, a rescue society, orphanages, a tree-planting society, a fund for sea baths for the poor, temperance organisations, and the like. The profits which would otherwise have gone to enrich a few have thus been scattered about doing good to the many. PART IV. ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. THE GROWTH OF THE LICENSING SYSTEM. The English are often said to be the most drunken among civilised nations; but, like many other constantly repeated statements, this is not correct. Denmark, Belgium and Russia certainly take the precedence of us in this matter; and it is an open question if alcoholism is not doing at least as much harm in northern and central France and Switzerland, as in the British Isles. The casual visitor to our lively neighbour sees but little open intoxication, and consequently assumes that France is a sober country. But those who have gone beneath the surface, and examined the results as recorded in the statistics of prisons and asylums, know that intemperance is rapidly becoming a national plague there. While we may not be the worst offenders in this respect, it is yet undoubted that alcoholism is the greatest source of social misery in our land. Theorists may quarrel among themselves as to the exact proportion of poverty and crime produced by intemperance; but no thinking man who is not altogether shut out from association with his fellows can doubt the awful ravages it is producing. We do not require to have it proved to us by figures; we only need to open our eyes and to use such brain power as we may possess to have the proof forced on us. Among the fashionable rich, among the idle women of upper middle-class families, as well as in our slum population, intemperance is doing a work of destruction before which the results of the most fatal diseases seem hardly worth notice.