6

the former is much larger. A catechism for Bands of Hope, by J. P. Parker, is ably drawn up, but would be better for the removal of some obvious blemishes. Foremost among the literature originated by the United Kingdom Alliance, is included the prize essay of Dr. Lees, the Argument for Prohibition' (1856), the sale of which reached 40,000 copies; also, a' Sequel' to the Essay and Supplement to the Sequel,' by the same author. Within the last six months, the 'Condensed Argument-both a condensation and expansion of the orginal Argument '-has been published as a sixpenny volume, or at half that price per hundred copies for free circulation among electors. Two editions, of 20,000 copies each, have been required to supply the demand for this compendium of the whole case for permissive prohibition. The papers read before the first meeting of the General Council, and Dr. Burns's sermon on the 'Lawlessness of the Liquor Traffic (1853), the Report of the Ministerial Conference' (1857), The Politics of Temperance' (a series of six papers, 1857), 'A Vindication of the Principles and Policy of the Alliance (1862), a pamphlet of the late Washington Wilks, and his two last speeches in defence of the Permissive Bill, and 'A Review of the Speeches in the House of Commons, on the Second Reading of Mr. Lawson's Bill '-these, with numberless leaflets and reprints, have proceeded from the Alliance press, and have carried conviction to the minds of ten thousands. Of equal or greater value to the cause of the Alliance have been its additions to the periodical literature of which we must briefly speak. Dr. Lees's Teetotal Topic' (1846) was the first quarterly periodical of a temperance tenor, sixteen pages quarto. The Scottish Review' was issued by the Scottish Temperance League as a shilling quarterly, from Jan., 1853, to Jan., 1862, inclusive; and usually gave two articles per number, one of them a story, bearing on the temperance theme. These, and the general literary articles, were in most cases of superior merit. Meliora,' commenced April, 1858, as a quarterly journal of social science, has never proved unmindful of the task of exhibiting the harmony of true science with every phase of temperance reform.

Of weekly and monthly publications abandoned or merged into others, the number may be estimated at from fifty to. sixty. The London Journal and Intelligencer were for some years the only weeklies, with the curious exception of the Teetotaller, conducted by Mr. G. W. M. Reynolds for above a year. Steel engravings were presented with many of the numbers, but the sale fell off, and Mr. Reynolds brought out the Anti-Teetotaler as a successor-very short-lived, as it

proved

proved-to the previous speculation. In July, 1861, the Temperance Advocate, the organ of the British Temperance League, appeared as a weekly journal, and so remained till the close of 1862, when the effect of the cotton crisis seemed to compel a temporary return to the monthly issue. This backward step might have been prevented by a display of timely generosity, and the committee will consult the interests of their society by reverting as speedily as possible to the abandoned track. The Weekly Record, started April 5th, 1856, by Mr. Tweedie, of London, has taken a double price and size since the beginning of 1864, as the organ of the National Temperance League; and both the original and selected articles render it well adapted for family reading. The Scottish Temperance League publishes the League Journal (1d.), which has various attractive features; and Mr. Caudwell's halfpenny Temperance Star helps to brighten hearts which intemperance had made dark. The Christian News, of Glasgow, though a religious organ, has been from its first number an unfaultering defender of the most advanced principles and lines of action. Of the Alliance News, which has twice enlarged its dimensions without adding to its price (1d.), we may not speak without reserve; but by general consent it would not be easy to exaggerate its importance to the movement by its action on public opinion, and by its enlightening and encouraging influence on the friends of prohibition. Its forty columns, weekly, of general news, special information, and interchange of thought, delight its regular readers, and ought to command for it a welcome in every temperance homestead. Among the extinct monthlies of leading mark were the Recorder, Chronicle, Gazette, Teetotal Times and Essayist, and Abstainer's Journal. The last-named succeeded the Scottish Temperance Review, on which many talented pens were engaged. Another monthly, the National Temperance Magazine (1844), conducted by Mr. Thos. Cook, of Leicester, set up a high standard, and ran a short but commendable career. Mr. Rewcastle, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, has made honourable efforts, extending over a quarter of a century, to establish a periodical temperance literature in the north of England. The existing monthlies are the British Temperance Advocate (1d.), the Western Temperance Herald (1d., begun in 1837 by Mr. Joseph Eaton, and long continued as the Bristol Temperance Herald), the Temperance Spectator (2d.), founded Jan., 1859, as a critical journal, and has made its standing good; the Church of England Temperance Magazine (3d.), commenced Nov., 1862, edited by Rev. Robert Maguire, and made the vehicle of many admirable papers by abstaining Vol. 7.-No. 28. clergymen ;

X

clergymen; the Irish Temperance League Journal (2d.), the only Temperance periodical in Ireland; the British Workman (1d.), with a circulation of a quarter of a million; the British Workwoman (1d.), and other periodicals more or less devoted to the temperance system.

A single sentence is all that we can spare in recognition of the many literary aids to temperance afforded by Mr. John Cassell, the eminent publisher, in his Standard of Freedom (a weekly newspaper long since given up), his Teetotal Times (monthly), and prizes for essays on special topics (1846-7), his cheap re-issue of Beecher's Sermons, Baker's Idolatry, &c., and the frequent favourable articles in his Family Newspaper and Quiver, weekly periodicals of myriad-fold circulation.

We should be entering on a separate field of inquiry were we to discuss the literature on the temperance question scattered through the newspapers and magazines of the last thirty years. The most elaborate of these papers may be simply named: one in Tait's Magazine (Nov., 1845), by the distinguished Thomas De Quincey; in the British and Foreign Medical Review (Oct., 1847), afterwards republished in a pamphlet, by Dr. Carpenter, and containing the nucleus of his subsequent prize essay; in the Edinburgh Review (July, 1854), by the late Rev. J. W. Conybeare; in the North British Review (Feb. 1855), by Mr. Charles Buxton; in the Westminster Review (July, 1855), by Mr. G. H. Lewes, virtually cancelled by an article in the same review (Jan., 1861), by Dr. Carpenter. All these, except Mr. Lewes's, are papers distinctly commendatory of the temperance movement. Some of the monthly magazines and newspapers have from time to time raised cavils and objections; but the tone in literary circles is sensibly softening; and from the most hostile portion of the press it would not be hard to extract admissions of every important position claimed by the temperance advocates. Some recent articles in the Times have really amounted to this -Do as much good as you can and please, but don't worry us into giving up what we mean to cling to as an indulgence.' Among the short treatises composed against the temperance movement, few have reached above mediocrity in any branch of literary handicraft.

Much temperance literature has irretrievably perished for want of some effort to preserve it as it has appeared. Societies

and men of means should make collections of past and current publications; and it may not yet be too late to rescue from oblivion many relics of intellectual activity that we should regret to lose. Of equal urgency is the adoption of more methodical and more persevering endeavours to disseminate

the

The Epidemic of Fear.

343

the literature of every species-books, pamphlets, tracts, and periodicals-that is coming forth ever and anon. The press must be worked more powerfully if the millions who never enter a temperance meeting are to be informed and convinced. It would be worth all the expense of a convention of leading men to consider how the circulation of our best publications can be extended in a measure commensurate with the vastness of the change of opinion and practice that has yet to be effected. The soundest knowledge and ripest intellect can do but little, when the printed page on which they are impressed has a limited diffusion. Circulation to a publication is what calibre is to a cannon. Temperance literature, with all its drawbacks, is capable of great things, if it can be brought into contact with men's minds. It has about it the imperfections that are never absent from all things of earthly origin; but neither is it without a resemblance (to borrow from Massinger an image applied by Macaulay to the works of Milton) to those flowers and fruits of celestial origin which invigorate and heal-which are powerful not only to elevate but to purify.'

ART. IV. THE EPIDEMIC OF FEAR.

in

THE THE qualities which in combination destroy or prevent the sensation of fear are of two kinds, each being twofold in nature. There is valour and there is courage, of which it may be remarked that the one is commonly, but by no means exclusively, masculine, and the other often, but not solely, feminine. Physical valour is evinced by a readiness to attack or repel any danger, whether sudden and sharp or expected and foreseen; the danger arising from some living, active being, with whom there may be struggles, and over whom there may be even conquest. Soldiers, sailors, or hunters would be worth little who did not possess at least a moderate amount of valour. Courage only would hardly make them, in their respective callings, successful men. There is likewise moral valour, which consists in a prompt willingness to attack or defend matters in the abstract, such as unpopular laws or opinions, grievances, salient wrongs, oppression, arising from the undue exercise of authority or straining of power, whether by Government or the Church, or by society; and the tyranny of the last is perhaps not the least or the easiest to bear. And this kind of warfare is carried on only by moral and

abstract

abstract means, by writing, by speech, by demand, and fearless expression of sentiment. Sir James Macintosh particularly notes the difference between valour and courage. Valour, according to him, can only be displayed against present danger from a living, if not a human, adversary. There was a little

tale published many years ago, called the 'Chelsea Pensioners,' in which this distinction is very happily preserved. The hero is especially courageous with respect to inanimate dangers; but, being deficient in valour, he fails ingloriously on the field of battle, and dies afterwards of grief and mortification. Courage properly signifies that mental quality which neutralizes or extinguishes any fear arising from inanimate or impersonal dangers. There is only courage, for instance, in scaling a precipice, unless it be to battle perhaps with a sea eagle, in which case valour would be called into play; there is the courage which confronts without fear the approach or the menace of certain death, as by runaway horses, by the falling of an avalanche, by railway collision, by drowning, by the rising of the tide, and in general by all the vast, irresistible, inanimate, and impersonal forms of danger. Without this quality there can never be shown that presence of mind by which such perils are often baffled and turned away, for very valiant spirits frequently lose their heads' entirely when exposed to this class of calamity. There is one form of courage which does not blench even before the surgeon's knife, and which in days of old endured, and rejoiced to endure, martyrdom at the stake, and quailed not at the cry Christianos ad leones; but this kind is partly physical and partly moral, for though patiently defying suspense, and pain, and suffering, there is in it neither intention of resistance nor hope of victory. Moral courage is that faculty or frame of mind which enables us to bear menace, scorn, and censure, with equanimity and indifference; to face poverty, neglect, and disgrace, with calm and composure, and undauntedly to express our sentiments, and follow the conclusions of our own judgment in the teeth of opposition, difficulty, and danger. That courage which is steadfast before death is an amalgamation of the physical and psychical-the first is undismayed by the bodily pangs of dissolution, the second does not shrink from that which is to follow. It is common enough for men of their own free choice to run the risk of death by violence, especially if it be of a description not likely to be entirely solitary and uncheered by applause; but, according to the experience of all medical men, it is the other sex who receive with the most composure the fiat which condemns them to die in their own beds by a lingering and painful disease.