address John, and Tom, and Mary. I am sure that dead-lift individual
effort will eventually reduce the ills arising from alcohol to a
minimum, and I am equally sure that the blind groping of half-informed
men who chatter at St. Stephen's will never do more good than the
chatter of the same number of jackdaws. It is impossible to help
admiring Sir Wilfrid Lawson's smiling courage, but I really do not
believe that he sees more than the faint shadows of the evils against
which he struggles; he does not know the true nature of the task which
he has attacked, and he fancies that securing temperance is an affair of
bolts, and bars, and police, and cackling local councils. I wish he had
lived with me for a year.

If you talk with strong emotion about the dark horror of drink you
always earn plenty of jibes, and it is true that you do give your hand
away, as the fighting men say. It is easy to turn off a light paragraph
like this: "Because A chooses to make a beast of himself, is that any
reason why B, and C, and D should be deprived of a wholesome article of
liquid food?"--and so on. Now, I do not want to trouble B, and C, and D
at all; A is my man, and I want to get at him, not by means of a
policeman, or a municipal officer of any kind, but by bringing my soul
and sympathy close to him. Moreover, I believe that if everybody had
definite knowledge of the wide ruin which is being wrought by drink
there would be a general movement which would end in the gradual
disappearance of drinking habits. At this present, however, our state is
truly awful, and I see a bad end to it all, and a very bad end to
England herself, unless a great emotional impulse travels over the
country. The same middle class which is envenomed by the gambling
madness is also the heir of all the more vile habits which the
aristocrats have abandoned. Drinking--conviviality I think they call
it--is not merely an excrescence on the life of the middle class--it
_is_ the life; and work, thought, study, seemly conduct, are now the
excrescences. Drink first, gambling second, lubricity third--those are
the chief interests of the young men, and I cannot say that the
interests of mature and elderly men differ very much from those of the
fledglings. Ladies and gentlemen who dwell in quiet refinement can
hardly know the scenes amid which our middle-class lad passes the span
of his most impressionable days. I have watched the men at all times and
in all kinds of places; ev