deadly precision by
it.

It is not easy to be bad-tempered over this saddening business; one has
to be pitiful. As my memory travels over England, and follows the tracks
that I trod, I seem to see a line of dead faces, that start into life if
I linger by them, and mop and mow at me in bitterness because I put out
no saving hand. So many and many I saw tramping over the path of
Destruction, and I do not think that ever I gave one of them a manly
word of caution. It was not my place, I thought, and thus their bones
are bleaching, and the memory of their names has flown away like a
mephitic vapour that was better dispersed. Are there many like me, I
wonder, who have not only done nothing to battle with the mightiest
modern evil, but have half encouraged it through cynical recklessness
and pessimism? We entrap the poor and the base and the wretched to their
deaths, and then we cry out about their vicious tendencies, and their
improvidence, and all the rest. Heaven knows I have no right to
sermonize; but, at least, I never shammed anything. When I saw some
spectacle of piercing misery caused by Drink (as nearly all English
misery is) I simply choked down the tendency to groan, and grimly
resolved to see all I could and remember it. But now that I have had
time to reflect instead of gazing and moaning, I have a sharp conception
of the thing that is biting at England's vitals. People fish out all
sorts of wondrous and obscure causes for crime. As far as England is
concerned I should lump the influences provocative of crime and
productive of misery into one--I say Drink is the root of almost all
evil. It is heartbreaking to know what is going on at our own doors,
for, however we may shuffle and blink, we cannot disguise the fact that
many millions of human beings who might be saved pass their lives in an
obscene hell--and they live so in merry England. Durst any one describe
a lane in Sandgate, Newcastle-on-Tyne, a court off Orange Street or
Lancaster Street, London, an alley in Manchester, a four-storey tenement
in the Irish quarter of Liverpool? I think not, and it is perhaps best
that no description should be done; for, if it were well done it would
make harmless people unhappy, and if it were ill done it would drive
away sympathy. I only say that all the horrors of those places are due
to alcohol alone. Do not say that idleness is answerable for the
gruesome state of things; that would be putting cause for effect. A man
f