Among the slaves of the Scotch kirk-tyrants the long-continued suppression of all healthier pastimes contributed its share to the increase of intemperance. On the day when the laboring classes found their only chance of leisure, outdoor sports were strictly prohibited. Dancing was considered a heinous, and on the Sabbath almost an unpardonable, sin. The tennis-halls were closed from Saturday night to Monday morning. Bathing was sinful. Mountain excursions, strolls along the beach, or in the open fields, were not permitted on the day of the Lord. Dietetic excesses, however, escaped control, and thus became the general outlet for the cruelly suppressed craving for a diversion from the deadly monotony of drudgery and church-penance. For “Nature will have her revenge, and when the most ordinary and harmless recreations are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences which no moralist would be willing to condone, ... and the strictest observance of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations was found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not cheer” (Saturday Review, July 19, 1879). “Everyone,” says Lecky, “who considers the world as it really exists, must have convinced himself that in great towns public amusements of an exciting order are absolutely necessary, and that to suppress them is simply to plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest depths of vice.” Clerical despotism is still a potent ally of intemperance. In hundreds of British and North American cities the dearth of better pastimes drives our workingmen to the pot-house. They drink to get drunk, as the only available means of escaping tedium and the consciousness of their misery. Nature craves recreation, and the suppression of that instinct has avenged itself by its perversion. D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.