in face of the fact that five men can produce bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300, and boots and shoes for 1000.  It would seem that 40,000,000 people are keeping a big house, and that they are keeping it badly.  The income is all right, but there is something criminally wrong with the management.  And who dares to say that it is not criminally mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce bread for a thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?

CHAPTER XXVI—­DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT

The English working classes may be said to be soaked in beer.  They are made dull and sodden by it.  Their efficiency is sadly impaired, and they lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be theirs by right of race.  It may hardly be called an acquired habit, for they are accustomed to it from their earliest infancy.  Children are begotten in drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw their first breath, born to the smell and taste of it, and brought up in the midst of it.

The public-house is ubiquitous.  It flourishes on every corner and between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by men.  Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their fathers and mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their elders, listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation, catching the contagion of it, familiarising themselves with licentiousness and debauchery.

Mrs. Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does not frown upon is the public-house.  No disgrace or shame attaches to it, nor to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of entering it.

I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, “I never drink spirits when in a public-’ouse.”  She was a young and pretty waitress, and she was laying down to another waitress her pre-eminent respectability and discretion.  Mrs. Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that it was quite proper for a clean young girl to drink beer, and to go into a public-house to drink it.

Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often the men and women are unfit to drink it.  On the other hand, it is their very unfitness that drives them to drink it.  Ill-fed, suffering from innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the sickly stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory operative hankers after excessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods.  Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires.  Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and fed as a pig is housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.