nement
between malt liquor and champagne which causes Mr. Greg's undefined
sensation of moral delinquency and economical error in the one case, and
of none in the other; if that be all, I can relieve him from his
embarrassment by putting the cases in more parallel form. A clergyman
writes to me, in distress of mind, because the able-bodied laborers who
come begging to him in winter, drink port wine out of buckets in summer.
Of course Mr. Greg's logical mind will at once admit (as a consequence
of his own very just _argumentum ad hominem_ in a previous page[119])
that the consumption of port wine out of buckets must be as much a
benefit to society in general as the consumption of champagne out of
bottles; and yet, curiously enough, I am certain he will feel my
question, "Where does the drinker get the means for his drinking?" more
relevant in the case of the imbibers of port than in that of the
imbibers of champagne. And although Mr. Greg proceeds, with that lofty
contempt for the dictates of nature and Christianity which radical
economists cannot but feel, to observe that "while the natural man and
the Christian would have the champagne drinker forego his bottle, and
give the value of it to the famishing wretch beside him, the radical
economist would condemn such behavior as distinctly criminal and
pernicious," he would scarcely, I think, carry out with the same
triumphant confidence the conclusions of the unnatural man and the
anti-christian, with respect to the laborer as well as the idler; and
declare that while the extremely simple persons who still believe in the
laws of nature, and the mercy of God, would have the port-drinker forego
his bucket, and give the value of it to the famishing wife and child
beside him, "the radical economist would condemn such behavior as
distinctly criminal and pernicious."

Mr. Greg has it indeed in his power to reply that it is proper to
economize for the sake of one's own wife and children, but not for the
sake of anybody else's. But since, according to another exponent of the
principles of Radical Economy, in the _Cornhill Magazine_,[120] a
well-conducted agricultural laborer must not marry till he is
forty-five, his economies, if any, in early life, must be as offensive
to Mr. Greg on the score of their abstract humanity, as those of the
richest bachelor about town.

139. There is another short sentence in this same page, of which it is
difficult to overrate the accidental signi