3-078-284 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Father Mathew Centenary: Father Mathew speaking at a temperance meeting in Ireland, 1840s, (1890). 'On April 10, 1838, at a meeting of the Cork Temperance Society in his schoolroom, the "Apostle of Temperance" signed the pledge, exclaiming as he did so, "Here goes, in the name of God!"...the poor so crowded to his meetings that it was necessary to take the Horse Bazaar, where there was standing room for 4000 people. In three months 25,000 took the pledge, in five months the register reached 131,000, in less than nine months it had risen to 156,000. These numbers indicate that the people were already stirred far beyond Cork...The work now proceeded with the most astonishing rapidity. Waterford, Lismore, Ennis, Clonmel, Thurles, Cashel, and several other places were visited by the Apostle of Temperance, and a quarter of a million of fresh adherents was the result... By the summer of 1840...the number of its pledged adherents had swollen to two millions; four years later, Mr. Mathew reckoned that seven millions had taken the pledge...The temperance cause thus early had societies in nearly every town in Ireland'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.