The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions | Page 9

when I went into the base and sordid homes of ruin during years,
and I want to know how any justification not fitted for the libretto of an
extravaganza can be given by certain parliamentary gentlemen in order
that we may be satisfied with their conduct. My wanderings and freaks
do not count; I was a Bohemian, with the tastes of a Romany and the
curiosity of a philosopher; I went into the most abominable company
because it amused me and I had only myself to please, and I saw what a
fearfully tense grip the monster, Drink, has taken of this nation; and let
me say that you cannot understand that one little bit, if you are content
to knock about with a policeman and squint at signboards. Well, I want
to know how these legislators can go to church and repeat certain
prayers, while they continue to make profit by retailing Death at so
much a gallon; and I want to know how some scores of other godly
men go out of their way to back up a traffic which is very well able to
take care of itself. A wild, night-roaming gipsy like me is not expected

to be a model, but one might certainly expect better things from folks
who are so insultingly, aggressively righteous. One sombre and
thoughtful Romany of my acquaintance said, "My brother, there are
many things that I try to fight, and they knock me out of time in the
first round." That is my own case exactly when I observe comfortable
personages who deplore vice, and fill their pockets to bursting by
shoving the vice right in the way of the folks most likely to be stricken
with deadly precision by it.
It is not easy to be bad-tempered over this saddening business; one has
to be pitiful. As my memory travels over England, and follows the
tracks that I trod, I seem to see a line of dead faces, that start into life if
I linger by them, and mop and mow at me in bitterness because I put
out no saving hand. So many and many I saw tramping over the path of
Destruction, and I do not think that ever I gave one of them a manly
word of caution. It was not my place, I thought, and thus their bones
are bleaching, and the memory of their names has flown away like a
mephitic vapour that was better dispersed. Are there many like me, I
wonder, who have not only done nothing to battle with the mightiest
modern evil, but have half encouraged it through cynical recklessness
and pessimism? We entrap the poor and the base and the wretched to
their deaths, and then we cry out about their vicious tendencies, and
their improvidence, and all the rest. Heaven knows I have no right to
sermonize; but, at least, I never shammed anything. When I saw some
spectacle of piercing misery caused by Drink (as nearly all English
misery is) I simply choked down the tendency to groan, and grimly
resolved to see all I could and remember it. But now that I have had
time to reflect instead of gazing and moaning, I have a sharp
conception of the thing that is biting at England's vitals. People fish out
all sorts of wondrous and obscure causes for crime. As far as England
is concerned I should lump the influences provocative of crime and
productive of misery into one--I say Drink is the root of almost all evil.
It is heartbreaking to know what is going on at our own doors, for,
however we may shuffle and blink, we cannot disguise the fact that
many millions of human beings who might be saved pass their lives in
an obscene hell--and they live so in merry England. 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