OUR GRANDFATHERS DIED TOO YOUNG. 175 



Another great source of the lengthening of life is found in the 

 steady advance in temperance. The ardent advocates of total 

 abstinence may imagine this an unfounded claim, but there is not 

 only a lessened consumption of intoxicants, but public sentiment 

 has experienced a complete revolution since the first commission 

 to inquire into the possibilities of improvement was appointed. 

 The " six-bottle " and even the " one-bottle " man have gone out 

 of fashion, and wise Christian philanthropists have learned that 

 some bright, attractive coffee-room, or some other thing that 

 meets the longing for social cheer, must take the place of " Joe's 

 cozy corner/' or the gin-palace. Education is beginning to tell 

 in the same direction, and anon, there will be found interesting 

 and elevating employment for men's idle hours to complete the 

 cure. In England the opening of the museums and galleries and 

 other places of intellectual culture on Sundays has been found to 

 greatly wean men and women from the gin-palace and " public." 



The sanitation of schools and the wiser care of infancy and 

 childhood save annually thousands of " innocents." Irf the city 

 of New York a man who has long been on the summer corps of 

 extra doctors for the poor says that the very poor are becoming 

 " educated up " by the distribution of leaflets and oral instruction 

 till they really give more intelligent care to their children than 

 the artisan class who hire their own doctors, and, being thought 

 to know all they need to, are often left in dense ignorance. 



Pew reflect on the saving of life through well-lighted streets 

 and a well-organized police. In Queen Elizabeth's time, John 

 Graunt, who studied the records of crime, boasts that not more 

 than one in two thousand was murdered annually, because the 

 guard of the city (London) was taken in turn by the citizens. 

 At that rate the number of murders for the whole of the me- 

 tropolis would be twenty-five hundred now, "while the actual an- 

 nual average is no more than twelve in the five million people 

 guarded by the London police a population almost equal to the 

 whole of England and Wales in Elizabeth's time. No wonder 

 that Hobbes wrote at that time of the life of man as " poor, nasty, 

 brutish, and short " ; and, although not all the reasons have been 

 marshaled, it is equally no wonder that the thoughtful are begin- 

 ning to protest against the literal meaning of " the days of our 

 years are threescore years and ten." 



Nature takes notice of a quaint custom, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, 

 known as payment of " wrath silver," which was observed last year at Knightlow 

 Hill, a tumulus between Rugby and Coventry, England. It consists of tribute 

 payable by certain parishes in Warwickshire to the Duke of Buccleugh. The sil- 

 ver has to be deposited at daybreak in a hollow stone by representatives of the 

 parishes, under penalty of the forfeiture of a white bull with a red nose and ears. 

 The representatives afterward dined together at the duke's expense. 



