But we must not content ourselves with the negative proposition that intemperance is not the necessary outcome of civilisation, nor even with the general statement that the latter brings with it self-restraint and sobriety. The most potent check upon immorality, especially in recent and modern times, has been enlightened public opinion, which is the expression of advancing civilisation; and it is upon the conduct of those who have moulded public opinion that the morality of every age has been largely dependent. Evil examples in high places and a disregard of public propriety have done as much to encourage the vice of intemperance as the passion from which it springs. Whilst the priests of the ancient faiths intoxicated themselves at the altar, and portrayed the deities whom they served with tastes similar to their own, it was not likely that the crowd of worshippers would practise sobriety. In those days the priesthood to a large extent represented public opinion, and, as we have seen, they not only countenanced drunkenness, but hallowed its exercise. When the military heroes of ancient Rome gave away a hundred thousand congiaria of wine to the mob, or kept cellars of 10,000 casks, or devoted whole days and nights to drinking bouts, it is no wonder that the ragged plebeians, without shoes or a mantle, spent the hours of the night in obscene taverns and brothels in the indulgence of gross and vulgar sensuality; for it was the great military leaders of that age who moulded public opinion. And so, coming nearer to our time, when, in our own country, the installation of a shepherd in the fold of Christ was commemorated by a feast at which 300 tuns of ale and 100 tuns of wine were swallowed down, and when the ladies of the court of Charles the dissolute “rolled about in a state of intoxication,” it was only a necessary sequence that the lower orders should get drunk upon gin at a penny a head, and whilst in that condition they should herd together upon straw in dark cellars which would have been unfit receptacles for the brutes, below whose state they had fallen. And although in our day the public feeling is expressed rather than created by those who occupy high places, still the utterances of ministers of state such as those we have quoted, and the open countenance and encouragement which is given by influential party-leaders to persons who profit by the intemperance of the ignorant and depraved, cannot fail to produce a very pernicious effect upon public sentiment, and to militate against the exercise of its due influence upon the national morals.