Thus the linen trade flourished and became more important every year; of this importance Belfast may be considered as the outward and visible sign; every one knows that, in consequence of its being the seat of the linen trade, it has become the most prosperous town in Ireland. Its mills, factories, and docks, combine the commercial and mercantile features both of Liverpool and Manchester. Its situation is most picturesque—its streets are broad and uniform. Some of the linen-warehouses are palaces, and nowhere in the world are there finer buildings, more attractive shops, and greater symptoms of prosperity and wealth. It is not merely the seat of shipping, of commerce, of manufacture, but its intellectual claims are of no common character. It calls itself the Irish Athens, and its colleges, and libraries, and newspapers, and general intelligence, bear out in some degree that claim. The linen trade of Ulster now represents a capital of several millions, and employs men, women, and children. What has developed it to its enormous extent has been the application of steam. No longer the weaver sits in his isolated cottage. He is a hand in a mill, and weaving is a complex affair, requiring, to make it pay, gigantic operations and many hands. The factory system has many disadvantages, which tend to the mental, moral, and physical deterioration of the hands engaged in it. I write of one of the most successful efforts that has yet been made to free the factory of them, and to carry it on in a way advantageous, not only to the employer, but the employed. For these purposes it is necessary that the factory be an isolated one; that it should be a community by itself, an _imperium in imperio_, governed by its own laws, with its own special educational, religious, and philanthropic establishments; and that, above all things, it should be conducted on the principle, or rather practice, of total abstinence from all intoxicating drinks. I heard the Rev. Kegan Paul say at a temperance meeting, held in Exeter Hall this year, that in some parts of Dorsetshire, the county in which he resided, there were parishes with no public-houses in them, that in these parishes there were no paupers, that no cases came from them to the Petty-Sessions, and that the answer given by policeman, when asked by the magistrates whether he had ever taken a teetotaller into custody, was “No.” From many other districts in England, Scotland, and Ireland, a similar testimony reaches us. From all the judges of the land, from all our clergy, from all our prisons and penitentiaries—affirmation, mournful in its monotony, reminds us that drink is the bane of the working-man. This is confessed by all, whether they be temperance reformers or not. In many cases it is found that the higher the wages earned by the operative, the more drunken and dissipated are his habits. No fact has been more conclusively established. Where you shut up the public-house, the gin-palace and the