but let any man be seen often in the condition which led to Mr. Pickwick’s little accident, and see what becomes of him.  He is soon shunned like a scabbed sheep.  One had better incur penal servitude than fall into that vice from which the Government derives a huge revenue—­the vice which is ironically associated with friendliness, good temper, merriment, and all goodly things.  There are times when one is minded to laugh for very bitterness.

And this sin, which begins in kindness and ends always in utter selfishness—­this sin, which pours accursed money into the Exchequer—­this sin, which consigns him who is guilty of it to a doom worse than servitude or death—­this sin is to be fought by Act of Parliament!  On the one hand, there are gentry who say, “Drink is a dreadful curse, but look at the revenue.”  On the other hand, there are those who say, “Drink is a dreadful thing; let us stamp it out by means of foolscap and printers’ ink.”  Then the neutrals say, “Bother both your parties.  Drink is a capital thing in its place.  Why don’t you leave it alone?” Meantime the flower of the earth are being bitterly blighted.  It is the special examples that I like to bring out, so that the jolly lads who are tempted into such places as the concert-room which I described may perhaps receive a timely check.  It is no use talking to me about culture, and refinement, and learning, and serious pursuits saving a man from the devouring fiend; for it happens that the fiend nearly always clutches the best and brightest and most promising.  Intellect alone is not worth anything as a defensive means against alcohol, and I can convince anybody of that if he will go with me to a common lodging-house which we can choose at random.  Yes, it is the bright and powerful intellects that catch the rot first in too many cases, and that is why I smile at the notion of mere book-learning making us any better.  If I were to make out a list of the scholars whom I have met starving and in rags, I should make people gape.  I once shared a pot of fourpenny ale with a man who used to earn L2000 a year by coaching at Oxford.  He was in a low house near the Waterloo Road, and he died of cold and hunger there.  He had been the friend and counsellor of statesmen, but the vice from which statesmen squeeze revenue had him by the throat before he knew where he was, and he drifted toward death in a kind of constant dream from which no one ever saw him wake.  These once bright and splendid intellectual beings swarm in the houses of poverty:  if you pick up with a peculiarly degraded one you may always be sure that he was one of the best men of his time, and it seems as if the very rich quality of his intelligence had enabled corruption to rankle through him so much the more quickly.  I have seen a tramp on the road—­a queer, long-nosed, short-sighted animal—­who would read Greek with the book upside-down.  He was a very fine Latin scholar, and we tried him with Virgil; he could go off at score when he had a single line