Note 48 — Chapter IV

Nine-tenths of the existing Benefit Societies are still held at public houses. This arrangement must always be, so long as it exists, a theme for reprobation. There cannot be many greater anomalies than this of the association of the club and the cup, the bane and the antidote, saving and wasting. Speaking on this point, the Rev. J. B. Owen justly remarks that the strange association together verify the old pagan fable of the tub of Danaus full of holes, whose daughters were condemned to be perpetually filling it, while all that was so laboriously poured in as wastefully and hopelessly ran out. Or, as some one else has put it who has employed the same figure more strikingly:—