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 into rankness, and makes itself villainously manifest at all seasons; the good is atrophied, and finally dies.  Goodness may take an unconscionable time a-dying, but it is sentenced to death by the fates from the moment when alcoholism sets in, and the execution is only a matter of time.

England, then, is a country of grief.  I never yet knew one family which had not lost a cherished member through the national curse; and thus at all times we are like the wailing nation whereof the first-born in every house was stricken.  It is an awful sight, and as I sit here alone I can send my mind over the sad England which I know, and see the army of the mourners.  They say that the calling of the wounded on the field of Borodino was like the roar of the sea:  on my battle-field, where drink has been the only slayer, there are many dead; and I can imagine that I hear the full volume of cries from those who are stricken but still living.  The vision would unsettle my reason if I had not a trifle of Hope remaining.  The philosophic individual who talks in correctly frigid phrases about the evils of the Liquor Trade may keep his reason balanced daintily and his nerve unhurt.  But I have images for company—­images of wild fearsomeness.  There is the puffy and tawdry woman who rolls along the street goggling at the passengers with boiled eye.  The little pretty child says, “Oh! mother, what a strange woman.  I didn’t understand what she said.”  My pretty, that was Drink, and you may be like that one of these days, for as little as your mother thinks it, if you ever let yourself touch the Curse carelessly.  Bless you, I know scores who were once as sweet as you who can now drink any costermonger of them all under the stools in the Haymarket bar.  The young men grin and wink as that staggering portent lurches past:  I do not smile; my heart is too sad for even a show of sadness.  Then there are the children—­the children of Drink they should be called, for they suck it from the breast, and the venomous molecules become one with their flesh and blood, and they soon learn to like the poison as if it were pure mother’s milk.  How they hunger—­those little children!  What obscure complications of agony they endure and how very dark their odd convulsive species of existence is made, only that one man may buy forgetfulness by the glass.  If I let my imagination loose, I can hear the immense army of the young crying to the dumb and impotent sky, and they all cry for bread.  Mercy! how the little children suffer!  And I have seen them by the hundred—­by the thousand—­and only helped from caprice; I could do no other.  The iron winter is nearing us, and soon the dull agony of cold will swoop down