and bear the gnawing hunger company while the two dire agencies inflict torture on the little ones.  Were it not for Drink the sufferers might be clad and nourished; but then Drink is the support of the State, and a few thousand of raw-skinned, hunger-bitten children perhaps do not matter.  Then I can see all the ruined gentlemen, and all the fine fellows whose glittering promise was so easily tarnished; they have crossed my track, and I remember every one of them, but I never could haul back one from the fate toward which he shambled so blindly; what could I do when Drink was driving him?  If I could not shake off the memories of squalor, hunger, poverty—­well-deserved poverty—­despair, crime, abject wretchedness, then life could not be borne.  I can always call to mind the wrung hands and drawn faces of well-nurtured and sweet ladies who saw the dull mask of loathsome degradation sliding downward over their loved one’s face.  Of all the mental trials that are cruel, that must be the worst—­to see the light of a beloved soul guttering gradually down into stench and uncleanness.  The woman sees the decadence day by day, while the blinded and lulled man who causes all the indescribable trouble thinks that everything is as it should be.  The Drink mask is a very scaring thing; once you watch it being slowly fitted on to a beautiful and spiritual face you do not care over-much about the revenue.

And now the famous Russian’s question comes up:  What shall we do?  Well, so far as the wastrel poor are concerned, I should say, “Catch them when young, and send them out of England so long as there is any place abroad where their labour is sought.”  I should say so, because there is not a shadow of a chance for them in this country:  they will go in their turn to drink as surely as they go to death.  As to the vagabond poor whom we have with us now I have no hope for them; we must wait until death weeds them out, for we can do nothing with them nor for them.

Among the classes who are better off from the worldly point of view, we shall have sacrifices offered to the fiend from time to time.  Drink has wound like some ubiquitous fungus round and round the tissues of the national body, and we are sure to have a nasty growth striking out at intervals.  It tears the heart-strings when we see the brave, the brilliant, the merry, the wise, sinking under the evil clement in our appalling dual nature, and we feel, with something like despair, that we cannot be altogether delivered from the scourge yet awhile.  I have stabs of conscience when I call to mind all I have seen and remember how little I have done, and I can only hope, in a shame-faced way, that the use of intoxicants may be quietly dropped, just as the practice of gambling, and the habit of drinking heavy, sweet wines, have passed away from the exclusive society in which cards used to form the main diversion.  Frankly speaking, I have seen the degradation, the abomination, and the measureless force of Drink so near at hand that