The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions | Page 4

get at him, not by means of a policeman, or a municipal officer of any kind, but by bringing my soul and sympathy close to him. 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. The Chancellors of the Exchequer gaily repeat the significant figures which give the revenue from alcohol; the optimist says that times are mending; the comfortable gentry who mount the pulpits do not generally care to ruffle the fine dames by talking about unpleasant things--and all the while the curse is gaining, and the betting, scoffing, degraded crew of drinkers are sliding merrily to destruction. Some are able to keep on the slide longer than others, but I have seen scores--hundreds--stop miserably, and the very faces of the condemned men, with the last embruted look on them, are before me. My subject has so many thousands of facets that I am compelled to select a few of the most striking. Take one scene through which I sat not very long ago, and then you may understand how far the coming regenerator will have to go. A great room was filled by about 350 men and lads, all of the middle class; a concert was going on, and I was a little curious to know the kind of entertainment which the well-dressed company liked. Of course there was drink in plenty, and the staff of waiters had a busy time; a loud crash of talk went on between the songs, and, as the drink gathered power on excited brains, this crash grew more and more discordant. Nice lads, with smooth, pleasant faces, grew flushed and excited, and I am afraid that I occupied myself in marking out possible careers for a good many of them as I studied their faces. There was not much fun of the healthy kind; fat, comfortable, middle-aged men laughed so heartily at the faintest indecent allusion that the singers grew broader and broader, and the hateful music-hall songs grew more and more risky as the night grew onward. By the way, can anything be more loathsomely idiotic than the average music-hall ditty, with its refrain and its quaint stringing together of casual filthiness? If I had not wanted to fix a new picture on my mind I should have liked better to be in a tap-room among honestly brutal costers and scavengers than with that sniggering, winking gang. The drink got hold, glasses began to be broken here and there, the time was beaten with glass crushers, spoons, pipes, and walking-sticks; and then the bolder spirits felt that the time for good, rank, unblushing blackguardism had come. A being stepped up and faced a roaring audience of enthusiasts who knew the quality of his dirtiness; he launched out into an unclean stave, and he reduced his admirers to mere convulsions. He was encored, and he went a trifle further, until he reached a depth of bestiality below which a gaff in Shoreditch could net descend. Ah! Those bonny lads, how they roared with laughter, and how they exchanged winks with grinning elders! Not a single obscure allusion to filth was lost upon them, and they took more and more drink under pressure of the secret excitement until many of them were unsteady and incoherent. I think I should shoot a boy of mine if I found him enjoying such a foul entertainment. It was léze-Humanity. The orgie rattled on, to the joy of all the steaming, soddened company, and I am not able to guess where some of the