and makes an annual grant of three thousand dollars to the temperance cause.

SWITZERLAND.

A temperance society aiming at moderation only was organised at Vaud in 1838, and the example was followed in various places. Again in the seventies numerous moderation societies arose, including the Society Against Drunkenness of Geneva. All of these met with indifferent success. Agressive endeavour did not begin till 1887, when Pastor Louis Lucian Rochat put the Blue Cross propaganda in motion at Geneva. This is a religious movement for the reclaiming of drunkards and the propagation of total abstinence. It has spread into all parts of Europe, chiefly among Protestants, but also to some extent among Catholics. The Society Against Alcohol organised in 1890 as a Swiss society, has become the International Society Against the Use of Alcohol. Its most prominent Swiss member is Dr. August Forel, whose work has attracted great attention in Europe and America. In 1892 Pastor Rochat founded the Anti-Alcoholic League for scientific instruction among the educated classes. The Swiss government gives pecuniary aid to the temperance cause.

AUSTRIA.

The temperance reform in Austria has hardly begun. There are two temperance societies: the Austrian Society for Checking Inebriety, directed against the abuse of spirits, founded in 1884 by the Chevalier Max de Proskowetz, F.R.G.S., and a total abstinence society of 170 members, formed in 1899. A

number of young physicians, prominent among whom is Dr. Poech, are well known as opponents of the use of alcohol. It is believed that the International Congress held in Vienna in 1901 will advance the cause in Austria.*

* See Appendix G, Chap. XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

TEMPERANCE IN AUSTRALASIA.

THE first English visitors to Australia were pirates and the first settlers convicts. Besides these inauspicious circumstances, the infant civilisation had to contend with drinking customs of the worst sort. In New South Wales the convicts were driven to fresh crime both by the tyranny of the overseers and by the fact that they were paid in spirits for extra work. Spirits formed the principal part of the cargoes received there, and "it became the interest of every civil and military officer in the colony that the settlers, free and bond, should drink as much spirits as possible." When it was decided to reward convicts for meritorious services, Andrew Thompson, the first beneficiary, was given permission to start a brewery "in consideration of his useful and humane conduct in saving the lives and much of the property of sufferers by repeated floods of the Hakesbury, as well as of his general demeanor." The first brick church was consecrated on Christmas Day, 1806, by the Rev. Samuel Marsden as pastor, and in the first issue of the Sidney Gazette, shortly afterward, the pastor advertised a reward of a gallon of spirits for the hide of every native sheep-dog caught. The first hospital was built by three citizens of the colony in return for a monopoly in rum granted by the Government for a term of years, and the institution passed into history as the Rum Hospital. The first arch

deaconary of the colonial Church was bestowed upon a former wine merchant. In 1837 every ninth house in Hobart Town (the chief town of Van Diemen's Land) and every sixth house in Sydney was a liquor shop. Moreover, for more than twenty years, spirits formed the ordinary currency of New South Wales. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that crime flourished and that two-thirds of the children born in the colonies in the early days were illegiti

mate.

The first organised temperance work of Australasia was begun in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) about 1832 by Mr. George Washington Walker, a Quaker minister, assisted by Mr. James Backhouse. The former, on October 2, 1833, wrote to England on behalf of the temperance society of Van Diemen's Land for £50 worth of temperance literature, stating that temperance societies had been formed in Launcheston, Campbellston, Ross, Bothwell and Hamilton. In the same month the Rev. Mr. Crooks, influenced by some temperance tracts distributed by Mr. George Bell, of Scotland, formed the New South Wales Temperance Society, which soon included a hundred members. This society quickly attained to great influence. Within five years it numbered among its active members the Governor of the province, Sir George Gipps, the Chief Justice, the Attorney-General, and other dig nitaries of the colony. Mr. Walker and Mr. Backhouse, on January 13, 1868, established the Australian Temperance Society at Perth.

The first total abstinence societies were founded in 1838 by the Rev. John Saunders and Mr. Rowe. Another was founded at Adelaide in 1839 by Mr. George Cole. Its members within a year numbered

140.

South Australia thus began its temperance reform with total abstinence, dispensing with the usual preparation of a propaganda for moderation in drinking. In 1844 some Irish Catholic priests conducted a Father Mathews crusade, in which ten thou. sand signed the total abstinence pledge. By that time all the temperance societies of Australia had either adopted total abstinence or ceased to exist, and the reform was practically on a total abstinence basis.

The first important demand for legislation in the interest of temperance was made in New South Wales in 1854, when petitions bearing the names of fourteen thousand citizens were presented to the Legislature asking for the enactment of a Maine law. These petitions were supported by influential men, among them Chief Justice Sir Alfred Stephens, who personally appeared before a committee of the Colonial Parliament to urge compliance with them. In Van Diemen's Land, during the same year, occurred a similar agitation for a Maine law. In 1857 the Victoria Temperance League was formed for the purpose of advocating" abstinence for the individual and prohibition for society," and also the New South Wales Alliance for the Suppression of Intemperance, with the same purpose.

The radical attitude thus assumed by the early Australian reformers was soon relaxed, and, since the fifties, the history of temperance legislation has been the history of restriction or local option of various kinds. The New South Wales Political Association for the Suppression of Intemperance, formed in 1870, tried to secure the passage of a bill modeled after the English Permissive Bill. Its effort was unsuccessful and the association was discouraged. Ten years afterward the agitation for local option