of the thing that is biting at England's vitals. People fish out all
sorts of wondrous and obscure causes for crime. As far as England is
concerned I should lump the influences provocative of crime and
productive of misery into one--I say Drink is the root of almost all
evil. It is heartbreaking to know what is going on at our own doors,
for, however we may shuffle and blink, we cannot disguise the fact that
many millions of human beings who might be saved pass their lives in an
obscene hell--and they live so in merry England. Durst any one describe
a lane in Sandgate, Newcastle-on-Tyne, a court off Orange Street or
Lancaster Street, London, an alley in Manchester, a four-storey tenement
in the Irish quarter of Liverpool? I think not, and it is perhaps best
that no description should be done; for, if it were well done it would
make harmless people unhappy, and if it were ill done it would drive
away sympathy. I only say that all the horrors of those places are due
to alcohol alone. Do not say that idleness is answerable for the
gruesome state of things; that would be putting cause for effect. A man
finds the pains of the world too much for him; he takes alcohol to bring
on forgetfulness; he forgets, and he pays for his pleasure by losing
alike the desire and capacity for work. The man of the slums fares
exactly like the gentleman: both sacrifice their moral sense, both
become idle; the bad in both is ripened into rankness, and makes itself
villainously manifest at all seasons; the good is atrophied, and finally
dies. Goodness may take an unconscionable time a-dying, but it is
sentenced to death by the fates from the moment when alcoholism sets in,
and the execution is only a matter of time.

England, then, is a country of grief. I never yet knew one family which
had not lost a cherished member through the national curse; and thus at
all times we are like the wailing nation whereof the first-born in every
house was stricken. It is an awful sight, and as I sit here alone I can