every other case.  Yet, in this metropolis, it is the general custom for tradesmen, journeymen, and even labourers, to have regularly on their tables the big brewers’ poison, twice in every day, and at the rate of not less than a pot to a person, women, as well as men, as the allowance for the day.  A pot of poison a day, at fivepence the pot, amounts to seven pounds and two shillings in the year!  Man and wife suck down, in this way, fourteen pounds four shillings a year!  Is it any wonder that they are clad in rags, that they are skin and bone, and that their children are covered with filth?

92.  But by the word SOBRIETY, in a young woman, I mean a great deal more than even a rigid abstinence from that love of drink, which I am not to suppose, and which I do not believe, to exist any thing like generally amongst the young women of this country.  I mean a great deal more than this; I mean sobriety of conduct.  The word sober, and its derivatives, do not confine themselves to matters of drink:  they express steadiness, seriousness, carefulness, scrupulous propriety of conduct; and they are thus used amongst country people in many parts of England.  When a Somersetshire fellow makes too free with a girl, she reproves him with, ‘Come! be sober!’ And when we wish a team, or any thing, to be moved on steadily and with great care, we cry out to the carter, or other operator, ‘Soberly, soberly.’  Now, this species of sobriety is a great qualification in the person you mean to make your wife.  Skipping, capering, romping, rattling girls are very amusing where all costs and other consequences are out of the question; and they may become sober in the Somersetshire sense of the word.  But while you have no certainty of this, you have a presumptive argument on the other side.  To be sure, when girls are mere children, they are to play and romp like children.  But, when they arrive at that age which turns their thoughts towards that sort of connexion which is to be theirs for life; when they begin to think of having the command of a house, however small or poor, it is time for them to cast away the levity of the child.  It is natural, nor is it very wrong, that I know of, for children to like to gad about and to see all sorts of strange sights, though I do not approve of this even in children:  but, if I could not have found a young woman (and I am sure I never should have married an old one) who I was not sure possessed all the qualities expressed by the word sobriety, I should have remained a bachelor to the end of that life, which, in that case, would, I am satisfied, have terminated without my having performed a thousandth part of those labours which have been, and are, in spite of all political prejudice, the wonder of all who have seen, or heard of, them.  Scores of gentlemen have, at different times, expressed to me their surprise, that