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