" I should say so, because there is not a
shadow of a chance for them in this country: they will go in their turn
to drink as surely as they go to death. As to the vagabond poor whom we
have with us now I have no hope for them; we must wait until death weeds
them out, for we can do nothing with them nor for them.
Among the classes who are better off from the worldly point of view, we
shall have sacrifices offered to the fiend from time to time. Drink has
wound like some ubiquitous fungus round and round the tissues of the
national body, and we are sure to have a nasty growth striking out at
intervals. It tears the heart-strings when we see the brave, the
brilliant, the merry, the wise, sinking under the evil clement in our
appalling dual nature, and we feel, with something like despair, that we
cannot be altogether delivered from the scourge yet awhile. I have stabs
of conscience when I call to mind all I have seen and remember how
little I have done, and I can only hope, in a shame-faced way, that the
use of intoxicants may be quietly dropped, just as the practice of
gambling, and the habit of drinking heavy, sweet wines, have passed away
from the exclusive society in which cards used to form the main
diversion.
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