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.
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