look upon his house as a place for the convenience
and general entertainment of the public,
that he will sometimes take more interest in a
game of dominoes or piquet than in the vending
of his goods. Madame will have to shriek
to him to come and attend to his business. In
Paris, even the lowest classes take their wine like
gentlemen; in London, they swill their liquors
like pigs. A London public-house is a trough.

It is strange that the philanthropists who
are so zealous in the cause of temperance, and
so anxious to promote sobriety among the
people, have never sought to further their laudable
object in the only way that is possible;
namely, by attacking the licensing system. They
can never hope to obtain a Maine Liquor Law;
they can never hope to make the great body of
the lower classes, teetotallers. The public-house
will exist in spite of them. This being granted,
it simply remains for the friends of the people
to take as much of the sting out of the
public-house as possible, and to reduce its evils to the
lowest. This, I have no hesitation in saying, is
only to be done by breaking up the existing
monopoly, so elaborately built up, and so firmly
maintained by the manufacturers and sellers of
drink, and throwing the trade open. The tyranny
of the British drink interest is something
positively monstrous; and its power is complete.
It dictates to the people what they shall drink,
and what they shall not drink. It has been
able almost entirely to defeat Mr. Gladstone's
measure for the reduction of the wine duties.
The measure is law, but to all intents and
purposes the law is a dead letter at public-houses.
Good sound drinkable claret and Chablis can be
sold in London for less money than in Paris,
because the duty and the carriage together do not
amount to so much as the octroi charged at the
barriers of the latter city. But the London
publicans have combined to resist the introduction of
these cheap and harmless wines; and hitherto
with perfect success. Very few of them keep
light French or German wines; and those who
do, charge four shillings a bottle for a wine
which may be obtained from some of the new
wine companies at twelve shillings a dozen.
There are a few French and Italian restaurants
in the neighbourhood of Leicester-square, where
light French and German wines may be obtained
at prices varying from one to three shillings a
bottle. If I desire a substantial dinner off the
joint, with the agreeable accompaniment of light
wine, both cheap and good, I know of only one
house, and that is in the Strand, close by Dane's
Inn. There you may wash down the roast beef of
old England with excellent Burgundy at two
shillings a bottle, or you may be supplied with
half a bottle for a shilling. Generally, however,
at hotels and dining-rooms, four, five, six, and
even seven, shillings a bottle are still charged for
ordinaire, dignified with the names of claret and
Burgundy. The price is a prohibitive one, put on
in the interests of British beer and spirits, and
British port and sherry: which latter, in spite
of the reduction of the duty, are still maintained
at the old standard price of five shillings a bottle.

The publicans, while in this matter they tyrannise
over the people, are themselves the slaves of
those arch tyrants, the brewers and distillers.
They must not allow any liquors—not even good
strong alcoholic port and sherry—to compete
with native beer and gin. The only remedy for
this state of things is the measure of which
the teetotallers are most afraid—the throwing
open of the trade. If those purblind
philanthropists did not aim at a great Teetotal Utopia,
they could not fail to be convinced by the simple
logic of facts. Do away with an artificial and
tyrannical monopoly, and you introduce a
competition which must appeal to the suffrages and
favour of the public. You make the public the
masters instead of the slaves of those who serve
them; and you make demand regulate supply
instead of giving supply the power to control
demand. A measure of this kind cannot fail to
call into existence a new and improved class of
refreshment-houses, and anything that tends to
render these places fit resorts for the respectable
classes of society of both sexes, must necessarily
promote temperance and good manners. The
laws of free trade are too well ascertained, to
leave any apprehension, even in the mind of a
Chancellor of the Exchequer, of loss to the
revenue in consequence of such a change. The
same, if not a greater, quantity of drink will be
consumed; but it will be shared more equally.
It will no longer be dispensed by a monopoly
of hands, nor swallowed by a monopoly of
throats.

THE ENTOMOLOGIST GONE SOUTH.

IT is all very well to talk of the " Sunny
South," of its fruits and its flowers, and its
gaudy winged creatures, of its orange and
magnolia groves, and of its balmy breezes. All is
not poetry and song, even in the land of the
cypress and myrtle. But then what might very
much try the patience of one traveller, would
gratify another. For instance, mosquitoes!

One can imagine an entomologist, on his first
visit to a southern clime, hailing the sight even
of a mosquito, or of the " cloud of white
ephemerae fluttering in the dusk like a summer
snow," with something of that " thrill of
emotion not unmixed with awe," that "among the
happy memories of a month's eventful tour," will,
according to Professor Kingsley's testimony,
"stand out as beacon points." The man who
is no entomologist deserves only to know a
mosquito by his bite. For obvious reasons—
philosophical, tangible, and opportune, entomology
is among the requisites for all who travel South.

The entomologist gone South will rejoice in
those pointed attentions which Hymenoptera,
Neuroptera, and their zealous cousins, after the
example of all Southern-born creatures, are used
to show to their visitors. What common mortals
call abominable plagues, will be for him
transformed into magnificent opportunities.

Let his visit be to one of the Gulf States of
America, say the neighbourhood of New Orleans