never doubted, but which their own
experience seems to them to confirm. The day-labourer really knows
nothing to take the place of beer. A man who has been shovelling in a
gravel-pit, or carrying bricks up a ladder, or hoeing in the fields, or
carting coal, for ten hours in the day, and has, perhaps, walked six or
seven miles to do it, acquires a form of thirst which no other drink he
can buy will touch so coolly. Of alternatives, milk fails utterly;
"minerals" are worse than unsatisfactory; tea, to serve the purpose at
all, must be taken very hot, and then it produces uncomfortable sweat,
besides involving the expense of a fire for its preparation. There
remains cold water. But cold water in copious draughts has its
drawbacks, even if it can be obtained, and that is assuming too much. In
this parish, at any rate, good water was, until quite lately, a scarce
commodity, and nobody cared to drink the stagnant stuff out of the tanks
or water-butts which supplied most of the cottages. In short, prudence
itself has seemed to recommend beer as the one drink for tired men. In
their view it is the safest, and the most easily obtained, and, when
obtained, it affords the most refreshment. Thus much their own
experience has taught the villagers.

And they have the tradition of long generations to support them in their
taste. As far back as they can remember, the strongest and ablest men,
whose virtues they still recall and admire, renewed their strength with
beer daily. Not labourers alone, but farmers and other employers too,
whose health and prosperity were a sufficient justification of their
habits, were wont to begin their morning with a glass of beer, which
they took, not as a stimulant, but as a food; and the belief in it as a
food was so convinced that a man denied his beer by doctor's orders was
hardly to be persuaded that he was not being starved of due nourishment.
Such was the esteem in which beer was held twenty years ago, nor has the
belief been uprooted yet. Indeed, an opinion so sanctioned to a man, by
the approval of his own father and grandfather and all the worthies he
can remember, does not immediately become false to him just because it
is condemned by strangers who do not know him, and who, with all their
temperance, seem to him a delicate and feeble folk. He prefers his own
standard of good and evil, and in sitting down to his glass he has no
doubt that he is following a sensible old fashion, modestly trying t