Beneath the Banner Part 3

He was three weeks accomplis.h.i.+ng the journey; and when he arrived in London spent the first day in search of work, which he failed to obtain.

In the evening, seeing that a temperance meeting was to be held in a hall off the Westminster Road, he went to it; and asked to be allowed to speak. Some of those on the platform viewed with distrust the gaunt, shabby, travel-stained applicant. But he would take no denial, and soon won cheers from the audience. When he stopped short, after a brief address, someone shouted "Go on". "How can a chap go on when he has nothing to say?" came the ready reply. That night he had no money in his pocket to pay for a bed; so he walked the streets of London through the weary hours till dawn of day.

Other temperance meetings he addressed; for his heart and mind were full of that subject. After one of the meetings a gentleman questioned him as to his means; and, finding the straits he was in, asked if he were not disheartened.

"No," replied John; "it is true I carry all my wealth in my little wallet, and have only a few pence in my pocket; but I have faith in G.o.d I shall yet succeed."

Struck by his manifest sincerity, the gentleman introduced him next day to a friend who took a warm interest in the temperance cause.

"Which wouldst thou prefer, carpentering or trying to persuade thy fellow-men to give up drinking, and to become teetotalers?" he asked.

Without hesitation John Ca.s.sell replied:--

"The work of teetotalism."

"Then thou shalt have an opportunity, and I will stand thy friend."

John Ca.s.sell now went forth as a disciple of the temperance cause.

Remembering his experiences on the way to London he furnished himself with a watchman's rattle, with which he used to call together the people of the villages he visited.

A temperance paper thus speaks of him in 1837:--

"John Ca.s.sell, the Manchester carpenter, has been labouring, amidst many privations, with great success in the county of Norfolk. He is pa.s.sing through Ess.e.x--(where he addressed the people, among other places, from the steps leading up to the pulpit of the Baptist chapel, with his carpenter's ap.r.o.n twisted round his waist)--on his way to London. He carries his watchman's rattle--an excellent accompaniment of temperance labour."

Ca.s.sell had a great regard for Thomas Whittaker. It was an address given by this gentleman which had first made him wish to become a public man.

When he called on Mr. Whittaker in Nottingham, as already related, after some conversation had taken place, he remarked:--

"I should like to hear thee again, Tom".

"Well," remarked Whittaker as a joke, "you can if you go with me to Derby."

John accepted the invitation forthwith, much to his friend's chagrin, who was bothered to know what to do with him; for he was under the impression that some members of the family where he expected to lodge would not give a very hearty welcome to this rough fellow.

This is Mr. Whittaker's narrative of the sequel:--

"We walked together to Derby that day. At the meeting he spoke a little, and pleased the people. When the meeting was over, he said:--

"'Can't I sleep with you?'

"'Well,' I said, 'I have no objection; but, you know, _I_ am only a lodger.'

"However, go with me he _would_, and _did_. That was the man. When John made up his mind to do a thing he did it; and to that feature in his character, no doubt, much of his future success may be attributed.

The gentleman at whose house he met me at Nottingham, and who was ashamed of him, subsequently became his servant, and touched his hat to him; and John has pulled up at my own door in his carriage, with a liveried servant, when I lived near to him in London."

John Ca.s.sell was now in the thick of the fight. In those days the opposition to the Gospel of Temperance was keen and bitter. Sometimes there were great disturbances at the meetings, sometimes he was pelted with rubbish, at times he did not know where to turn for a night's lodging. It was, on the whole, a fierce conflict; but John was nothing daunted.

It is, of course, impossible to sum up the amount of a man's influence. John Ca.s.sell scattered the seed of temperance liberally.

Here is a case showing how one of the grains took root, and grew up to bear important fruit.

The Rev. Charles Garrett, the celebrated teetotal President of the Wesleyan Conference, writing several years after John Ca.s.sell's death, says:--

"I signed the pledge of total abstinence in 1840, after hearing a lecture on the subject by the late John Ca.s.sell. I have therefore tried it for more than thirty years. It has been a blessing to me, and has made me a blessing to others."

How to cure the curse of drink, what to give in its place when the pleasures of the gla.s.s were taken away--that was the problem which many have tried to solve. None more successfully than John Ca.s.sell.

At a meeting in Exeter Hall he suddenly put a new view before his audience. "I have it!" he exclaimed.

"The remedy is education. Educate the working men and women, and you have a remedy for the crying evil of the country. Give the people mental food, and they will not thirst after the abominable drink which is poisoning them."

He had hitherto been doing something to a.s.sist the temperance cause by the sale of tea and coffee, and he now turned his attention to the issue of publications calculated to benefit the cause.

Having, at the age of twenty-four, married Mary Abbott, he became possessed of additional means for carrying out his publis.h.i.+ng schemes.

Cheap ill.u.s.trated periodicals began to issue from the press under his superintendence, and copies were multiplied by the hundred thousand.

He never forgot that he had been a working man, and one of the first publications he started was called _The Working Man's Friend_.

It is not necessary to say more. Though John Ca.s.sell died comparatively young--he was only forty-eight when his death took place in 1865--he had done a grand life's work; and the soundness of his judgment is shown by the fact that works which he planned retain their hold upon the people to this day.

John Ca.s.sell had his ambitions, but they were of a very simple kind.

"I started in life with one ambition," he said, "and that was to have a clean s.h.i.+rt every day of my life; this I have accomplished now for some years; but I have a second ambition, and that is to be an MAP., and represent the people's cause; then I shall be public property, and you may do what you like with me." This latter desire he would doubtless have realised but for his early decease.

"A BRAVE, FEARLESS SORT OF La.s.s."

THE STORY OF GRACE DARLING.

She was not much of a scholar, she could not spell as well as a girl in the third standard, she lived a quiet life quite out of the busy world; and yet Grace Darling's name is now a household word.

Let us see how that has come about.

William Darling, Grace's father, was keeper of the Longstone Lighthouse on the Farne Islands, off the coast of Northumberland.

Longstone is a desolate rock, swept by the northern gales; and woe betide the s.h.i.+p driven on its pitiless sh.o.r.es!

Mr. Darling and his family had saved the lives of many persons who had been s.h.i.+pwrecked ere that memorable day of which I will tell you.

On the night of the 5th September, 1838, the steamer _Forfars.h.i.+re_, bound from Hull to Dundee, was caught in a terrific storm off the Farne Islands. Her machinery became damaged and all but useless, and the vessel drifted till the sound of the breakers told sixty-three persons composing the pa.s.sengers and crew that death was near at hand.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Longstone Lighthouse.]

The captain made every effort to run the s.h.i.+p in between the Islands and the mainland, but in vain; and about three o'clock on the morning of the 6th September the vessel struck on the rock with a sickening crash.

A boat was lowered, into which nine of the pa.s.sengers got safely, whilst others lost their lives in attempting to do so. These nine were saved during the day by a pa.s.sing vessel.