der whether _our_ seamen, let alone our bishops and
deacons, ever stand out upon points of silvered-paper and tin-foil and
joss-sticks. To be sure Christianity is not Chin-Teeism, and that I
suppose is why we never lose sight of the end in contemptible and
insignificant quarrels about the means. There is enough matter for
reflection aboard the Keying at any rate to last one's voyage home to
England again."

Other letters of the summer from Broadstairs will complete what he wrote
from the same place last year on Mr. Cruikshank's efforts in the cause
of temperance, and will enable me to say, what I know he wished to be
remembered in his story, that there was no subject on which through his
whole life he felt more strongly than this. No man advocated temperance,
even as far as possible its legislative enforcement, with greater
earnestness; but he made important reservations. Not thinking
drunkenness to be a vice inborn, or incident to the poor more than to
other people, he never would agree that the existence of a gin-shop was
the alpha and omega of it. Believing it to be, _the_ "national horror,"
he also believed that many operative causes had to do with having made
it so; and his objection to the temperance agitation was that these were
left out of account altogether. He thought the gin-shop not fairly to be
rendered the exclusive object of attack, until, in connection with the
classes who mostly made it their resort, the temptations that led to it,
physical and moral, should have been more bravely dealt with. Among the
former he counted foul smells, disgusting habitations, bad workshops and
workshop-customs, scarcity of light, air, and water, in short the
absence of all easy means of decency and health; and among the latter,
the mental weariness and languor so induced, the desire of wholesome
relaxation, the craving for _some_ stimulus and excitement, not less
needful than the sun itself to lives so passed, and last, and inclusive
of all the rest, ignorance, and the want of rational mental training,
generally applied. This was consistently Dickens's "platform" throughout
the years he was known to me; and holding it to be within the reach as
well as the scope of legislation, which even our political magnates have
been discovering lately, he thought intemperance to be but the one
result that, out of all those arising from the absence of legislation,
was the most wretched. For him, drunkenness had a teeming and
reproachful