Moreover, I believe that if everybody had
definite knowledge of the wide ruin which is being wrought by drink
there would be a general movement which would end in the gradual
disappearance of drinking habits. At this present, however, our state is
truly awful, and I see a bad end to it all, and a very bad end to
England herself, unless a great emotional impulse travels over the
country. The same middle class which is envenomed by the gambling
madness is also the heir of all the more vile habits which the
aristocrats have abandoned. Drinking--conviviality I think they call
it--is not merely an excrescence on the life of the middle class--it
_is_ the life; and work, thought, study, seemly conduct, are now the
excrescences. Drink first, gambling second, lubricity third--those are
the chief interests of the young men, and I cannot say that the
interests of mature and elderly men differ very much from those of the
fledglings. Ladies and gentlemen who dwell in quiet refinement can
hardly know the scenes amid which our middle-class lad passes the span
of his most impressionable days. I have watched the men at all times and
in all kinds of places; every town of importance is very well known to
me, and the same abomination is steadily destroying the higher life in
all.
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