849,
aur, 45.

526

Ye

IT OOGDEN,

{om xX

Corn Exchange dinner. . . , Bure am I that when the
election day comes, the teetotallers will be found the best
workers in the ranks of the Liberals, whilst the drinkers
will be the only hope of the Tories.”
“I remember that one year (1843),” Cobden once wrote t0
Combe, by way of illustrating this matter, Bright, Colonel
Thompson, and I, invaded Scotland and made s tour of pe
kingdom, separating as we entered and reuniting at Stirling
on the completion of our work. There, after a large publi¢
meeting, we adjourned to our hotel, where we wero joined
by a number of baillies and other leading men, who sab
with us, to our great discomfort (for we needed our beds),
till one o’clock in the morning, drinking whisky-toddy out
of glasses which they filled from tumblers with little ladles;
and I remember that a certain sleight of hand in this opers”
tion, acquired, I suppose, by long practice, amused 0°
Southrons a good deal. As we three Englishmen ook
nothing but tea, it drew sttention to our total abstinence
principles, which were then more rare than at present. We
compared notes with ome another in the hearing of the
baillies, and found that in our tour in Scotland not a shilling
had been paid by us for spirits, beer, or wine,” Their com”
panions were at first disposed to eye them rather contempttously,
 but after hearing them reconut the work they had gore
through, the number of meetings they had attended, very
often two in one day, the baillies were constrained to admits
as they placed their ladles finally in the emptied tumblers
that water-drinking was not incompatible with indomitable
pnergy and long perseverance in exhausting labour,