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Bessbrook and Its Linen Mills: A Short Narrative of a Model Temperance Town — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Bessbrook and Its Linen Mills: A Short Narrative of a Model Temperance Town

John Stuart Mill · en
Transcribed from the 1876 William Tweedie edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                                BESSBROOK
                                   AND
                             ITS LINEN MILLS.


                                    A
                             SHORT NARRATIVE
                                    OF
                         A MODEL TEMPERANCE TOWN.

                                * * * * *

                                    BY
                            J. EWING RITCHIE.

         AUTHOR OF “THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF LONDON;” “NIGHT SIDE OF
                           LONDON,” ETC.  ETC.

                                * * * * *

                                 London:
               WILLIAM TWEEDIE & CO., LIMITED, 337, STRAND.

                                  1876.

                                * * * * *

  [Picture: Decorative graphic of The Gresham Press, London & Chilworth]

                             UNWIN BROTHERS,
                                PRINTERS.

                                * * * * *

                 [Picture: Bessbrook and its Linen Mills]




BESSBROOK AND ITS LINEN MILLS.


THAT the times in which we live are out of joint is a truism too obvious
to require comment.  As much now as in old days the cry is, “Who will
show us any good?”  We hear much of modern progress; but there are many
who, like Mr. Froude, intimate that what we call progress is in reality
merely change, and that change is not necessarily always for the better.
When such men as Mr. Ruskin leave the domain of the beautiful fiercely to
arraign what in our wisdom, or want of it, we term Political Economy and
its pitiless laws, we may be sure that all the social problems of the age
have not been satisfactorily solved.  If it be true that our rich men are
becoming richer every day, it is equally true that our poor are becoming
poorer.  Might has taken from the peasant his strip of land, and has
driven him into the towns, where he dies of bad air, bad water, bad food,
bad lodging, bad pay; where his sons learn crime, and his daughters how
much better rewarded is vice than virtue.  Underneath the whited
sepulchres of our boasted civilisation there lie rottenness and dead
men’s bones.  Of talk we have somewhat more than enough, as must
necessarily be the case now that woman claims to appear on the platform
on an equality with man.  Associations of all kinds exist partly for the
bettering and partly for the bewildering of the public.  Money is freely
subscribed for them; for Dives has a dim idea that he owes much to
Lazarus, and would at all times rather discharge the debt by letting a
few crumbs fall from the table, than by personally clothing his naked
form and binding up his loathsome sores.  It is not clear that we have
improved on that very much.  It is clear that for lack of it we have a
great deal—especially in our crowded manufacturing districts—of social