send my mind over the sad England which I know, and see the army of the
mourners. They say that the calling of the wounded on the field of
Boródino was like the roar of the sea: on my battle-field, where drink
has been the only slayer, there are many dead; and I can imagine that I
hear the full volume of cries from those who are stricken but still
living. The vision would unsettle my reason if I had not a trifle of
Hope remaining. The philosophic individual who talks in correctly frigid
phrases about the evils of the Liquor Trade may keep his reason balanced
daintily and his nerve unhurt. But I have images for company--images of
wild fearsomeness. There is the puffy and tawdry woman who rolls along
the street goggling at the passengers with boiled eye. The little pretty
child says, "Oh! mother, what a strange woman. I didn't understand what
she said." My pretty, that was Drink, and you may be like that one of
these days, for as little as your mother thinks it, if you ever let
yourself touch the Curse carelessly. Bless you, I know scores who were
once as sweet as you who can now drink any costermonger of them all
under the stools in the Haymarket bar. The young men grin and wink as
that staggering portent lurches past: I do not smile; my heart is too
sad for even a show of sadness. Then there are the children--the
children of Drink they should be called, for they suck it from the
breast, and the venomous molecules become one with their flesh and
blood, and they soon learn to like the poison as if it were pure
mother's milk. How they hunger--those little children! What obscure
complications of agony they endure and how very dark their odd
convulsive species of existence is made, only that one man may buy
forgetfulness by the glass. If I let my imagination loose, I can hear
the immense army of the young crying to the dumb and impotent sky, and
they all cry for bread. Mercy! how the little children suffer! And I
have seen them by the hundred--by the thousand--and only helped from
caprice; I could do no other. The iron winter is nearing us, and soon