and practical address on Wednesday, March 4th, and was listened with the greatest attention by a very large audience.
. Mr. Beagley occupied the chair and opened the meeting with a telling speech, urging upon the members the advisability of combining with the Society all the advantages of a Working-men's Institute, since it would be instrumental in securing their chief object, Temperance, and would be a grand step in bringing about the amelioration of the working classes.That in the opinion of this meeting it is expedient to extend the basis of the St. Leonards Temperance Society, so as to combine with the object hitherto promoted, the principal features of Working Men's Institutes, viz., lectures, essays, &c
More Exertions and Successes. It must be confessed that the St. Leonards Temperance Society laboured assiduously to engage the spare time of the working population, the object being, doubtless, to make the non-working hours subservient to the moral and intellectual improvement of such as might otherwise be disposed to spend their leisure in profitless pursuits. Within the fortnight preceding the 21st of March, there were several occasions on which the Hall was filled by an eager public, and on each of which the company evinced a satisfaction of the bill of fare placed before them. In addition to the very able address by Mr. de Fraine, there were the usual concerts, a tea-meeting, and a special social gathering. Of the weekly concerts it might be truly said that the experiment had eventuated in a decided success, the numbers attending them appearing to increase with each successive week from the commencement. Notwithstanding the Committee's original intention to limit the series to a dozen, there was a clamour to extend the number until fourteen had been given, and still the demand was for more. Some objection was made to this kind of amusement by the most staid of the teetotallers on the ground of it being, as they supposed, not in keeping with the design of the Temperance movement, whilst some of the most intelligent tempreance advocaes who moved about the country and saw life in all its phases, contended that one great cause of non-success in reforming drunkards had been the too perpetual sermonising upon the besetting sin, without offering to the man who had been accustomed to his pipe and his glass with cheerful company, an equivalent for that which he was abjured to forsake; in a word, "the man and the woman with only a moderate share of intelligence and possessing no means of amusement within themselves, had been left to fall back on their old associations for recreation which the teetoallers denied them. Objections were also made by persons opposed to the temperance movement that the committee had been obliged to accept the aid of non-teetotallers. But the writer - himself a non-abstainer - opined that the objections thus made were the result of a too restricted mode of reasoning. This opinion was based upon what he conceived to be the fact that people would seek relaxation after a day of toil, whether it was provided for -
