while there are 900,000 who are illegally housed
according to the Public Health Act of 1891--a respectable
recruiting-ground for the drink traffic.

Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness of
existence, the well-founded fear of the future--potent factors in driving
people to drink. Wretchedness squirms for alleviation, and in the public-
house its pain is eased and forgetfulness is obtained. It is unhealthy.
Certainly it is, but everything else about their lives is unhealthy,
while this brings the oblivion that nothing else in their lives can
bring. It even exalts them, and makes them feel that they are finer and
better, though at the same time it drags them down and makes them more
beastly than ever. For the unfortunate man or woman, it is a race
between miseries that ends with death.

It is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these people.
The drink habit may be the cause of many miseries; but it is, in turn,
the effect of other and prior miseries. The temperance advocates may
preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but until the evils that
cause people to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will remain.

Until the people who try to help realise this, their well-intentioned
efforts will be futile, and they will present a spectacle fit only to set
Olympus laughing. I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese art, got
up for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating them, of
begetting in them yearnings for the Beautiful and True and Good. Granting
(what is not so) that the poor folk are thus taught to know and yearn
after the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul facts of their existence
and the social law that dooms one in three to a public-charity death,
demonstrate that this knowledge and yearning will be only so much of an
added curse to them. They will have so much more to forget than if they
had never known and yearned. Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the life
of an East End slave for the rest of my years, and did Destiny grant me
but one wish, I should ask that I might forget all about the Beautiful
and True and Good; that I might forget all I had learned from the open
books, and forget the people I had known, the things I had heard, and the
lands I had seen. And if Destiny didn't grant it, I am pretty confident
that I should get drunk and forget it as often as possible.

These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missi