ue blather about
confiscating the drink-sellers' property and reducing them to the state
to which they have brought others. Then there is the rant regarding
brewers. Why forget essential business only in order to attack a class
of plutocrats whom we have made, and whom our society worships with
odious grovellings? The brewers and distillers earn their money by
concocting poisons which cause nearly all the crime and misery in broad
Britain; there is not a soul living in these islands who does not know
the effect of the afore-named poisons; there is not a soul living who
does not very well know that there never was a pestilence crawling over
the earth which could match the alcoholic poisons in murderous power.
There is a demand for these poisons; the brewer and distiller supply the
demand and gain thereby large profits; society beholds the profits and
adores the brewer. When a gentleman has sold enough alcoholic poison to
give him the vast regulation fortune which is the drink-maker's
inevitable portion, then the world receives him with welcome and
reverence; the rulers of the nation search out honours and meekly bestow
them upon him, for can he not command seats, and do not seats mean
power, and does not power enable talkative gentry to feed themselves fat
out of the parliamentary trough? No wonder the brewer is a personage.
Honours which used to be reserved for men who did brave deeds, or
thought brave thoughts, are reserved for persons who have done nothing
but sell so many buckets of alcoholized fluid. Observe what happens when
some brewer's wife chooses to spend L5000 on a ball. I remember one
excellent lady carefully boasting (for the benefit of the Press) that
the flowers alone that were in her house on one evening cost in all
L2000. Well, the mob of society folk fairly yearn for invitations to
such a show, and there is no meanness too despicable to be perpetrated
by women who desire admission. So through life the drink-maker and his
family fare in dignity and splendour; adulation surrounds them; powerful
men bow to the superior force of money; wealth accumulates until the
amount in the brewer's possession baffles the mind that tries to
conceive it--and the big majority of our interesting race say that all
this is good. Considering, then, how the English people directly and
indirectly force the man of drink onward until he must of necessity
fancy there is something of the moral demi-god about him; considering
how he