the extent of intemperance among the workers in England, one readily
believes Lord Ashley's statement that this class annually expends
something like twenty-five million pounds sterling upon intoxicating
liquor: and the deterioration in external conditions, the frightful
shattering of mental and physical health, the ruin of all domestic
relations which follow may readily be imagined. True, the temperance
societies have done much, but what are a few thousand teetotallers among
the millions of workers? When Father Matthew, the Irish apostle of
temperance, passes through the English cities, from thirty to sixty
thousand workers take the pledge; but most of them break it again within
a month. If one counts up the immense numbers who have taken the pledge
in the last three or four years in Manchester, the total is greater than
the whole population of the town--and still it is by no means evident
that intemperance is diminishing.

Next to intemperance in the enjoyment of intoxicating liquors, one of the
principal faults of English working-men is sexual licence. But this,
too, follows with relentless logic, with inevitable necessity out of the
position of a class left to itself, with no means of making fitting use
of its freedom. The bourgeoisie has left the working-class only these
two pleasures, while imposing upon it a multitude of labours and
hardships, and the consequence is that the working-men, in order to get
something from life, concentrate their whole energy upon these two
enjoyments, carry them to excess, surrender to them in the most unbridled
manner. When people are placed under conditions which appeal to the
brute only, what remains to them but to rebel or to succumb to utter
brutality? And when, moreover, the bourgeoisie does its full share in
maintaining prostitution--and how many of the 40,000 prostitutes who fill
the streets of London every evening live upon the virtuous bourgeoisie!
How many of them owe it to the seduction of a bourgeois, that they must
offer their bodies to the passers-by in order to live?--surely it has
least of all a right to reproach the workers with their sexual brutality.

The failings of the workers in general may be traced to an unbridled
thirst for pleasure, to want of providence, and of flexibility in fitting
into the social order, to the general inability to sacrifice the pleasure
of the moment to a remoter advantage. But is that to be wondered at?
When a class can purcha