which drown men in destruction and perdition.”  How we shall stop that, I say, I know not.  The old prophet may have been right when he said, “Surely it is not of the Lord that the people shall labour in the very fire, and weary themselves for very vanity;” and in some juster, wiser, more sober system of society—­somewhat more like the Kingdom of The Father come on earth—­it may be that poor human beings will not need to toil so hard, and to keep themselves up to their work by stimulants, but will have time to sit down, and look around them, and think of God, and of God’s quiet universe, with something of quiet in themselves; something of rational leisure, and manful sobriety of mind, as well as of body.

But it seems to me also, that in such a state of society, when—­as it was once well put—­“every one has stopped running about like rats:”—­that those who work hard, whether with muscle or with brain, would not be surrounded, as now, with every circumstance which tempts toward drink; by every circumstance which depresses the vital energies, and leaves them an easy prey to pestilence itself; by bad light, bad air, bad food, bad water, bad smells, bad occupations, which weaken the muscles, cramp the chest, disorder the digestion.  Let any rational man, fresh from the country—­in which I presume God, having made it, meant all men, more or less, to live—­go through the back streets of any city, or through whole districts of the “black countries” of England:  and then ask himself—­Is it the will of God that His human children should live and toil in such dens, such deserts, such dark places of the earth?  Let him ask himself—­Can they live and toil there without contracting a probably diseased habit of body; without contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to escape from its own stupidity and emptiness?  When I run through, by rail, certain parts of the iron-producing country—­streets of furnaces, collieries, slag heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt—­and that is all; and when I am told, whether truly or falsely, that the main thing which the well-paid and well-fed men of those abominable wastes care for is—­good fighting-dogs:  I can only answer, that I am not surprised.

I say—­as I have said elsewhere, and shall do my best to say again—­that the craving for drink and narcotics, especially that engendered in our great cities, is not a disease, but a symptom of disease; of a far deeper disease than any which drunkenness can produce; namely, of the growing degeneracy of a population striving in vain by stimulants and narcotics to fight against those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism, miscalled civilisation, has surrounded them from the cradle to the grave.  I may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily.  I know it:  but why did they drink, save for the same reason that the fenman drank, and his wife took opium, at least till the fens were