The talk which is chuckled over by men who have
daughters of their own is something to make an inexperienced individual
redden. Reverence, nobility, high chivalry, common cleanliness, cannot
flourish in the precincts of the bar, and there is not an honest man who
has studied with adequate opportunities who will deny that the social
glass is too often taken to an accompaniment of sheer uncleanness. Why
have not our moral novelists spoken the plain truth about these things?
We have many hideous pictures of the East-end drinking-bars, and much
reproachful pity is expended on the "residuum;" but the evil that is
eating at the very heart of the nation, the evil that is destroying our
once noble middle-class, finds no assailant and no chronicler. Were it
not for the athletic sports which happily engage the energies of
thousands of young men, our middle-class would degenerate with appalling
rapidity. But, in spite of athletics, the bar claims its holocaust of
manhood year by year, and the professional moralists keep silence on the
matter. Some of them say that they cannot risk hurting the sensibilities
of innocent maidens. What nonsense! Those maidens all have a chance of
becoming the wives of men who have suffered deterioration in the reek
and glare of the bar.
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