all Englishmen as
beef-eaters, but three-fourths of the people in this town look hungry
and discouraged, and they never seem to know whether they are going to
have any supper.

I went down to a market this morning where the middle class and the very
poor people buy their supplies, and it would make you sick to see them.
They buy small loaves of bread and a penny's worth of tea, and that is
breakfast, and if a man is working he takes some of the bread to work
for lunch, and the wife or mother buys a carrot or a quarter of a
cabbage, and maybe a bone with a piece of meat about as big as a fish
bait, and that makes supper, with a growler of beer.

Say, the chunk of meat with a bone that an American butcher would throw
at a dog that he had never been introduced to would be a banquet for a
large family over here.

I have been down into the White Chapel district, which is the Five
Points of London, and of the thousands of tough people I saw there
was not a man but looked as though he would cut your liver out for a
shilling, and every woman was drunk on gin. What there is about gin that
makes it the national beverage for bad people beats me, for it looks
like water, tastes like medicine and smells like cold storage eggs. At
home when a person takes a drink of beer or whisky he at least looks
happy for a minute, and maybe he laughs, but here nobody laughs unless
somebody gets hurt, and that seems to tickle everybody in the White
Chapel district.

The people look mad and savage when they are not drinking, as though
they were only looking for an opportunity to commit murder, and then
when they take a drink of gin, instead of smiling and smacking their
lips as though it was good and braced them up, they look as though
they had been stabbed with a dirk and they put on a look of revenge,
as though they would like to wring a child's neck or cut holes in the
people they meet.

Two drinks of gin makes a man or woman look as though they had swallowed
a buzz saw. I always thought drinking liquor made people think they were
enjoying themselves, or that they took it to drive away care and make
them forget their sorrows, but when these people drink gin they seem
to do it the way an American drinks carbolic acid, to end the whole
business quick.

At home the drinker drinks to make him feel like he was at a picnic.
Here every drinker acts like a suicide, who only hopes that he may
commit a murder before the gin ends his career. And t