Why should
we not stand up now and then and eat a tart to somebody's success?

To me, I confess the constant necessity of drinking under which the
majority of men labor is quite unaccountable. I can understand people
drinking to drown care or to drive away maddening thoughts well enough.
I can understand the ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in
drink--oh, yes, it's very shocking that they should, of course--very
shocking to us who live in cozy homes, with all the graces and pleasures
of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics
should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the
public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their
dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin.

But think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living,
what "life" for these wretched creatures really means. Picture the
squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from year to year
in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they
welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and
fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where
the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a
bedlam of riot and stench.

Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of life must be to them,
devoid of mind and soul. The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay and
munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch-dog in his kennel blinks at
the grateful sun, dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields,
and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a caressing hand. But the
clod-like life of these human logs never knows one ray of light. From
the hour when they crawl from their comfortless bed to the hour when
they lounge back into it again they never live one moment of real life.
Recreation, amusement, companionship, they know not the meaning of. Joy,
sorrow, laughter, tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle
words to them. From the day when their baby eyes first look out upon
their sordid world to the day when, with an oath, they close them
forever and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they never warm to
one touch of human sympathy, never thrill to a single thought, never
start to a single hope. In the name of the God of mercy; let them pour
the maddening liquor down their throats and feel for one brief moment
that they live!

Ah! we may talk sentiment as much as we like, but th