“What,” says the _Times_, when commenting on Sir Wilfred Lawson’s argument, “would it matter to Sir Wilfred Lawson, or to any of the gentlemen who figure on the temperance platform, if all the public-houses of their districts were closed to-morrow? Their own personal comfort would be in no way affected; not one of them probably enters a public-house, except at canvassing times, from one year’s end to another. But it would matter a great deal to those humbler and poorer classes of the population who make daily use of the public-house. If it were closed, their comfort would be most materially affected. A large proportion of them use strong liquor without abusing it, and have therefore as much right to it, both legal and moral, as they have to their meat or clothes. Many of them could not get through the work by which they gain their own and their children’s bread without it; and their only means of procuring it is provided by the present public-house system. They have not usually capital enough to lay in for themselves a stock of liquor; and even if they had, this plan would be not only wasteful and inconvenient, but would tempt them to commit the very crime which it was employed to avoid. They find it both cheaper and more comfortable to get their liquor in small quantities as they want it, and they can only do this at a public-house. Besides, it should not be forgotten—though well-to-do reformers are very apt, from their inexperience, to forget it—that to many of these poor people living in overcrowded, ill-ventilated, ill-lighted rooms, the public-house is the only place in which they can enjoy a quiet evening in pleasant, and perhaps instructive, intercourse with their neighbours after a hard day’s work. To drive them from this genial place of resort would be in some cases almost as great a hardship as it would be to the rich man to turn him out of both private house and club. We shall perhaps be told that all this may be true, but that the question reduces itself to a choice of evils, and that, on the whole, much more misery results to the poorer classes from the use of the public-house than would result if they were deprived of it. But, even if we grant this for the sake of argument, it seems to us strangely unjust to debar one man forcibly from a privilege at once pleasant and profitable to him, simply because another abuses it. The injustice, too, is greatly heightened by the fact that those who take the most prominent and influential part in debarring him feel nothing of the suffering they inflict.”