The Life of Sir William Hartley

There was from the first a very strong temperance sentiment among the Primitive Methodists. Hugh Bourne, one of the founders, was a teetotaller before the seven men of Preston and in the benighted period when total abstinence was generally regarded as a displeasing and unsocial eccentricity. It was natural that a Church which had grown out of an evangelistic movement should more and more range itself on the side of total abstinence, for its converts were often reclaimed drunkards, and drink was preeminently the enemy which it was constantly compelled to fight. And this favoured a rapid spread of total abstinence principles. Arm-chair moralists are inclined to handle the question in the abstract, and fail to understand the forces which necessitate a practice that they regard as extreme. But those who are devoting their lives to the grim struggle with vice soon learn that they are immeasurably weakened in their appeals for sobriety if they are not themselves total abstainers.

It was natural that Mr. Hartley, as a Primitive Methodist of the third generation and born into a family steeped in its Puritan tradition, should be firm in his adherence to the more rigid standard. He was personally a life-long abstainer. At the profit-sharing in January, 1910, urging his workpeople to use the money distributed to the very best advantage, he said that he and his wife were life-long teetotallers; he believed that he was within the truth when he said that they had never tasted beer or spirits in their lives. The man or woman who indulged in either liquor or gambling was only courting poverty and sorrow. Accordingly when he entreated his people, as at the distribution of profits he constantly did, to spend none of the money in intoxicants, his exhortation had behind it the weight of his settled conviction and his personal example. On these occasions he would express his willingness to help any of his people who were in trouble; but he limited this by the proviso that they should not have brought their misfortunes on themselves by intemperance. "I have no sympathy," he affirmed, "with drink in any shape or form."