province and expect to be heard to any purpose; you must address John, and Tom, and Mary.  I am sure that dead-lift individual effort will eventually reduce the ills arising from alcohol to a minimum, and I am equally sure that the blind groping of half-informed men who chatter at St. Stephen’s will never do more good than the chatter of the same number of jackdaws.  It is impossible to help admiring Sir Wilfrid Lawson’s smiling courage, but I really do not believe that he sees more than the faint shadows of the evils against which he struggles; he does not know the true nature of the task which he has attacked, and he fancies that securing temperance is an affair of bolts, and bars, and police, and cackling local councils.  I wish he had lived with me for a year.

If you talk with strong emotion about the dark horror of drink you always earn plenty of jibes, and it is true that you do give your hand away, as the fighting men say.  It is easy to turn off a light paragraph like this:  “Because A chooses to make a beast of himself, is that any reason why B, and C, and D should be deprived of a wholesome article of liquid food?”—­and so on.  Now, I do not want to trouble B, and C, and D at all; A is my man, and I want to get at him, not by means of a policeman, or a municipal officer of any kind, but by bringing my soul and sympathy close to him.  Moreover, I believe that if everybody had definite knowledge of the wide ruin which is being wrought by drink there would be a general movement which would end in the gradual disappearance of drinking habits.  At this present, however, our state is truly awful, and I see a bad end to it all, and a very bad end to England herself, unless a great emotional impulse travels over the country.  The same middle class which is envenomed by the gambling madness is also the heir of all the more vile habits which the aristocrats have abandoned.  Drinking—­conviviality I think they call it—­is not merely an excrescence on the life of the middle class—­it is the life; and work, thought, study, seemly conduct, are now the excrescences.  Drink first, gambling second, lubricity third—­those are the chief interests of the young men, and I cannot say that the interests of mature and elderly men differ very much from those of the fledglings.  Ladies and gentlemen who dwell in quiet refinement can hardly know the scenes amid which our middle-class lad passes the span of his most impressionable days.  I have watched the men at all times and in all kinds of places; every town of importance is very well known to me, and the same abomination is steadily destroying the higher life in all.  The Chancellors of the Exchequer gaily repeat the significant figures which give the revenue from alcohol; the optimist says that times are mending; the comfortable gentry who mount the pulpits do not generally care to ruffle the fine dames by talking about unpleasant things—­and all the while the curse is gaining, and the betting, scoffing,