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 leze-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 songs and recitations came from.  There are deeps below deeps, and I suppose that there are skilled literary workmen who have sunk so far that they are ready to supply the unspeakable dirt which I heard.