be drunk on the
premises, facilitated the spread of intemperance by bringing a beerhouse,
so to say, to everybody's door. In nearly every street there are several
such beerhouses, and among two or three neighbouring houses in the
country one is sure to be a jerry shop. Besides these, there are hush-
shops in multitudes, _i.e_., secret drinking-places which are not
licensed, and quite as many secret distilleries which produce great
quantities of spirits in retired spots, rarely visited by the police, in
the great cities. Gaskell estimates these secret distilleries in
Manchester alone at more than a hundred, and their product at 156,000
gallons at the least. In Manchester there are, besides, more than a
thousand public-houses selling all sorts of alcoholic drinks, or quite as
many in proportion to the number of inhabitants as in Glasgow. In all
other great towns, the state of things is the same. And when one
considers, apart from the usual consequences of intemperance, that men
and women, even children, often mothers with babies in their arms, come
into contact in these places with the most degraded victims of the
bourgeois regime, with thieves, swindlers, and prostitutes; when one
reflects that many a mother gives the baby on her arm gin to drink, the
demoralising effects of frequenting such places cannot be denied.

On Saturday evenings, especially when wages are paid and work stops
somewhat earlier than usual, when the whole working-class pours from its
own poor quarters into the main thoroughfares, intemperance may be seen
in all its brutality. I have rarely come out of Manchester on such an
evening without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others
lying in the gutter. On Sunday evening the same scene is usually
repeated, only less noisily. And when their money is spent, the
drunkards go to the nearest pawnshop, of which there are plenty in every
city--over sixty in Manchester, and ten or twelve in a single street of
Salford, Chapel Street--and pawn whatever they possess. Furniture,
Sunday clothes where such exist, kitchen utensils in masses are fetched
from the pawnbrokers on Saturday night only to wander back, almost
without fail, before the next Wednesday, until at last some accident
makes the final redemption impossible, and one article after another
falls into the clutches of the usurer, or until he refuses to give a
single farthing more upon the battered, used-up pledge. When one has
seen