Nor is this deficiency observable only in those unaccustomed persons who mount the platform to make verbal statements, and with whom the handling of large and complicated numbers might be found inconvenient. Practised writers on teetotalism exhibit the same carelessness. I have before me at the present moment a goodly number of total-abstinence volumes, but not one furnishes the desired information. Among my books I find, first, John Gough’s _Orations_; but that able and fervent man, although he quotes by the score instances and examples that are enough to freeze the blood and make the hair stand on end of the horrors that arise from indulgence in alcoholic drinks, deals not in statistics. Dr. James Miller writes an excellent treatise on alcohol and its power; but he deals in generalities, and not in facts that figures authenticate. Here is a volume containing a _Thousand Temperance Facts and Anecdotes_; but in the whole thousand, not one of either tells us of how many customers, on a certain evening, visited a single and well-used public-house, went in sober, and came out palpably drunk. It would be coming to the point, if such information—quite easy to obtain—was set before us. Lastly, I have the _Temperance Cyclopædia_. Now, I thought, I am sure, in some shape or another, to find here what I seek; but I searched in vain. The volume in question is a bulky volume, and contains about seven hundred pages, in small close type. In it you may read all about the physical nature of intemperance, and the intellectual nature of intemperance, and of the diseases produced by the use of alcohol, and of the progress of intemperance amongst the ancient Greeks and Romans, together with the history and origin of the teetotal cause in America; but as to the number of drunkards brought before the magistrates and fined, or of the number of crimes shown at the time of trial to have been committed through drunkenness, the _Cyclopædia_ is dumb. This last is an oversight the more to be deplored because we very well know that if the said numbers were exhibited, they would make a very startling display. It may be urged that, since we already have the testimony of magistrates, and jail-governors, and judges, of the enormous amount of crime that is attributable to strong drinks, it is unreasonable to ask for more; but this objection may be fairly met by the answer, that magistrates themselves, even when discussing the temperance question, occasionally make unreasonable remarks; as did a metropolitan magistrate the other day, who in open court declared, that “if publicans were compelled to shut up their shops, there would be no further use for his.” He must have known better. If it were as the worthy magistrate stated, it was equivalent to saying that teetotalers never appeared at his bar; but I think that he would hardly have ventured to that length.