CHAPTER XXVI--DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT

The English working classes may be said to be soaked in beer. They are
made dull and sodden by it. Their efficiency is sadly impaired, and they
lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be theirs by
right of race. It may hardly be called an acquired habit, for they are
accustomed to it from their earliest infancy. Children are begotten in
drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw their first breath, born
to the smell and taste of it, and brought up in the midst of it.

The public-house is ubiquitous. It flourishes on every corner and
between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by men.
Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their fathers and
mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their elders,
listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation, catching the
contagion of it, familiarising themselves with licentiousness and
debauchery.

Mrs. Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the
bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does not
frown upon is the public-house. No disgrace or shame attaches to it, nor
to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of entering it.

I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, "I never drink spirits when
in a public-'ouse." She was a young and pretty waitress, and she was
laying down to another waitress her pre-eminent respectability and
discretion. Mrs. Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that it
was quite proper for a clean young girl to drink beer, and to go into a
public-house to drink it.

Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often the
men and women are unfit to drink it. On the other hand, it is their very
unfitness that drives them to drink it. Ill-fed, suffering from
innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their
constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the sickly
stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory operative hankers after
excessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods. Unhealthy
working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires. Man cannot
be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and fed as a pig is
housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and
aspirations.

As home-life vanishes, the public-house appears. Not only do men and
women abnormally c