Meanwhile one thing is clear:  that if this present barbarism and anarchy of covetousness, miscalled modern civilisation, were tamed and drilled into something more like a Kingdom of God on earth:  then we should not see the reckless and needless multiplication of liquor shops, which disgraces this country now.

As a single instance:  in one country parish of nine hundred inhabitants, in which the population has increased only one-ninth in the last fifty years, there are now practically eight public-houses, where fifty years ago there were but two.  One, that is, for every hundred and ten—­or rather, omitting children, farmers, shopkeepers, gentlemen, and their households, one for every fifty of the inhabitants.  In the face of the allurements, often of the basest kind, which these dens offer, the clergyman and the schoolmaster struggle in vain to keep up night-schools and young men’s clubs, and to inculcate habits of providence.

The young labourers over a great part of the south and east, at least, of England,—­though never so well off, for several generations, as they are now—­are growing up thriftless, shiftless; inferior, it seems to me, to their grandfathers in everything, save that they can usually read and write, and their grandfathers could not; and that they wear smart cheap cloth clothes, instead of their grandfathers’ smock-frocks.

And if it be so in the country:  how must it be in towns?  There must come a thorough change in the present licensing system, in spite of all the “pressure” which certain powerful vested interests may bring to bear on governments.  And it is the duty of every good citizen, who cares for his countrymen, and for their children after them, to help in bringing about that change as speedily as possible.

Again:  I said just now that a probable cause of increasing drunkenness was the increasing material prosperity of thousands who knew no recreation beyond low animal pleasure.  If I am right—­and I believe that I am right—­I must urge on those who wish drunkenness to decrease, the necessity of providing more, and more refined recreation for the people.

Men drink, and women too, remember, not merely to supply exhaustion; not merely to drive away care:  but often simply to drive away dulness.  They have nothing to do save to think over what they have done in the day, or what they expect to do to-morrow; and they escape from that dreary round of business thought, in liquor or narcotics.  There are still those, by no means of the hand-working class, but absorbed all day by business, who drink heavily at night in their own comfortable homes, simply to recreate their overburdened minds.  Such cases, doubtless, are far less common than they were fifty years ago:  but why?  Is not the decrease of drinking among the richer classes certainly due to the increased refinement and variety of their tastes and occupations?  In cultivating the aesthetic side of man’s nature; in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture, physical science—­in all this lies recreation, in the true and literal sense of that word, namely, the recreating and mending of the exhausted mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now neglect, either for himself, his children, or his work-people.