three farthings a gill."

Mr. Caine goes on to say that in the city of Lucknow, with a population
of some 300,000 inhabitants, there were in 1889 thirty distilleries of
native spirits and 200 liquor-shops. The Government exchequer receipts
from spirits in the North-West Provinces amount to nearly L600,000,
having doubled themselves during the last seven years. This means that
in round numbers L1,000,000 worth of native spirits is sold in these
provinces per annum.

Now consider first that as a rule with rare exceptions a native of
India who uses the fiery country liquors drinks for no other purpose
than to become intoxicated. They are manufactured with a view to this,
and not as in Europe to provide a thirst-quenching potation. Mr. Caine
says: "The people of India, unlike other people, only drink for the
purpose of getting drunk, and if we make them drunken we destroy them
more rapidly than by war, pestilence and famine."

Nothing is clearer than that a rapidly increasing multitude in this
country, once remarkable for its sobriety and thrift, are rushing
headlong into the disastrous vice of intemperance and its attendant
horrors, almost without check. Something must be done. We cannot
cold-bloodedly abandon them to a gospel of despair.

_(b) The Opium Slaves._

Darker still perhaps is the dreadful night, and more sickening the
miasma, which lies around the opium creeks, multiplying and increasing
and slowly sucking down into their slimy depths thousands upon thousands
of those who dare to seek momentary relief from sorrow in its lethal
stream. Mr. Caine thus describes an opium den in Lucknow:--

"Enter one of the side rooms. It has no windows and is very dark,
but in the centre is a small charcoal fire whose lurid glow lights
up the faces of nine or ten human beings, men and women, lying on
the floor. A young girl some fifteen years of age has charge of each
room, fans the fire, lights the opium pipe, and holds it in the
mouth of the last comer, till the head falls heavily on the body of
his or her predecessor. In no East-end gin palace, in no lunatic or
idiot asylum, will you see such horrible destruction of God's image
in the face of man, as appears in the countenances of those in the
preliminary stage of opium drunkenness! Here you, may see some
handsome young married woman, nineteen or twenty years of age,
sprawling, on the ground, her fine brown eyes flattened