No more suicidal policy, no course more fatal to the promotion of temperance in our land, could possibly have been taken. At a time when every publican and every brewer was seeking the destruction of the Government on account of its attitude to the drink question, the Alliance was content to be "friendly neutral"! By their almost inexplicable conduct, the leaders of that body helped to delay temperance legislation for a quarter of a century, and created a deep distrust of teetotalers in the minds of most politicians. If they had actively thrown themselves into the breach, had used all their forces to support the Ministry, had been content to drop for a few months the plan of bringing forward a measure which they knew Parliament would certainly reject,--then Mr. Bruce and his colleagues might have been encouraged to proceed, and the liquor traffic in England would by this time have been cut down to a fraction of its old proportions. Mr. Caine recently claimed that the temperance party rather supported than opposed the Government at this crisis; and that, in fact, "practically, their only friends and supporters in the constituencies were the teetotalers". No one denies that many individual abstainers, as, for instance, Mr. Caine himself, were active in helping on the measure; but the temperance party as a whole was not. The month after the Bill was abandoned, Mr. Bruce publicly charged Sir Wilfrid Lawson, in the House of Commons, with having hindered and greatly diminished its chance of success by the course he had taken. While the Bill was still before the country, and while its fate was trembling in the balance, many prominent abstainers opposed it bitterly, and spoke and wrote against it. Professor Newman, in answer to a request from Mr. S. Morley, that he and his friends of the Alliance would not refuse an instalment because they did not get all they wanted, replied: "The United Kingdom Alliance cannot postpone its action for ten years.... Its (the Bill's) good points will not help us; they are not things which we asked; its evil points will damage us extremely. Hence if we fail to induce Mr. Bruce to withdraw his astonishing innovations of principle, I certainly do not guarantee that our friends will refrain from total opposition." Mr. Raper, a leading temperance speaker, at a meeting in the Manchester Town Hall, held under the auspices of the United Kingdom Alliance, said: "It is strange that a man of such a powerful intellect as the Home Secretary should be so remarkably defective in observation of a logical kind. I have not seen a greater wonder this quarter of a century than I did when I saw this able man standing for two hours and ten minutes giving forth grand principles and then cutting them to pieces--making statements which he followed up with nothing."