often drunk on fourpenny, what would they do with "Old Tom," "Irish Whiskey," and Scotch "Mountain Dew?"

You say drunkenness is a disease. I do not find this true in the way you put it. You say "it is just as much a disease as typhus or cholera." If you had said there are cases where it has all the spontaneous force of a disease, through inherited predisposition—cases of dipsomania, in fact, where the unhappy victims are not responsible for their actions-you would have been strictly within the bounds of truth; but you err in writing as if all drunkenness were of this character. Very little of the prevalent drunkenness is of this character. It is almost all the sheer mechanical result of taking drink that the drinkers could leave alone.

The working classes are to be excused for drinking, as you say, but the excuses don't lie exactly where you put them in the opening part of your letter. They partly lie where you place them a little further on. Most of them lead "dull and cheerless lives," as you say, "working too hard and too long," and they naturally find an agreeable diversion in the public-house, with its cosy bar and flaming lights, and jovial company, and refreshing liquor. But this is not the whole explanation. The cause is mostly mental. A man with a well-furnished mind has a resource within himself that would not only make him independent of the stimulus that comes with public-house drinking, but that would lead him to scorn such a resource of exhilaration. If the mind is empty, the spirits are soon depressed. We all know the difference between pleasing thoughts, and the state in which we have no thoughts at all. We all come through these different states at different times. If a man is habitually in the vacant state, he falls an easy prey to external sources of excitement, among which drink and joviality is the most easily accessible to a working man. He keeps his spirits up by pouring spirits down." If he was well fortified mentally, he would not make this suicidal mistake.

66

How is he to attain this state of mental fortification? This touches the root of the whole question. It is here where the chief excuses of the working classes begin to appear. They are not favourably situated for attaining the mental state that would enable them to surmount the difficulties of their position. They do not receive a proper education even if they pass all the popular standards—which very few of them do. Popular education is addressed to the intellect merely-which is only a part of man's

mental being, and not the controlling part. The controlling part of the mental mechanism lies in the desires and sentiments-to which the trained intellect becomes but a servant. Man has low desires, and he is capable of having high desires generated within him by divine truth. As a rule, divine truth is neglected, though theoretically acknowledged. The consequence is, that a man goes into the world without those regulating elements of duty and love and reverence and fear and hope which are the spiritual floating power against the tendency to sink, or the spiritual weapons by which a man successfully fights the terrible battle of life in which so many are slain.

Going out into life in this unfurnished state, what chance has the poor working man? His physical energies are spent in drudgery; his mind supplies no counter force to the mental depression natural to such a state. He craves help against his own feelings. He cannot find it in himself. He cannot find it in his cheerless home. He lacks the means of providing it by change and travel. He finds it ready-made in the public-house; the tobacco pipe, and the beer mug, and the song of companions supply him with an atmosphere in which his senses are soothed and his spirits fortified, and the miseries of his lot alleviated for the time being. He "drinks and forgets his sorrows," little dreaming the terrible price he has to pay for his consolation if he continues, as he probably will, in that line of things. The thing is sweet to a depraved taste, and, under its indulgence, he becomes demoralised to an extent that only becomes apparent when you compare him with the enlightened mechanic who finds his alleviations in the comforts and well-being of a well-kept home. He becomes insensible to the claims of his wife and family. He never has money to spare for their simplest necessities. There is nothing like drink for diddling money away and keeping a man in perpetual poverty. Food imposes its own limit, but drink becomes an endless swill in which a man's wages are spent long before the week is out, with perhaps a long score at the "pub" besides. His house is squalid; his wife meanly clad; his children in rags. They run the streets, and are often without food. He is in a rut from which he cannot lift himself. Rent gets behind, and by-and-bye the man and his wretched family are turned out of doors, to find shelter in some more squalid den for a time. Then, as an unsteady man, he easily gets out of work, and the story ends in darkness.

For all this, Mr. Blatchford, drink is responsible. But then a higher misfortune is responsible for the drink. The difficulty is to suggest a remedy powerful enough to deal with the higher misfortune in such cases. Who shall take hold of the working world to give it the right education, and then secure it the right conditions for turning that education to account? I see no answer except the one I have several times pressed upon your attention. I am certain that Socialism is no answer, for you leave out the principal ingredient of social well-being. You give us the study of microbes for the culture of the religious faculties. Oh, Mr. Blatchford, such a system, even it secured bread and butter for all, would only give us clever devils, and unhappy ones at that. It would not necessarily give us even temperance in the sense of banishing drunkenness. Is it only the poor that drink?

This touches another question, or, rather, the same question in another department. You seem to take it for granted that with a right industrial system the poor, no longer poor, would give over drinking. I don't think you are any more correct here than you are in many other parts of your brilliant but illogical argumentation.

There is a great deal of private intemperance among the upper classes. There is a great improvement, no doubt, as compared with the habits of the last generation; but it is questionable if the tide has not begun to turn again, if we are to trust the testimony of some medical men, who complain especially of the spread of drinking habits among ladies. It is not to be wondered at. The general acceptance of Darwinism, with a corresponding loosening of moral restraints, was certain to leave people a prey to the strongest bent of weakness. Ladies who suffer from lowness of spirits are very likely to avail themselves of the readiest help if there is no particular reason why they should not do so. Once persuade men and women that they are improved monkeys, who will by and bye disappear to give place to (perhaps) higher specimens to come after them, and none of them ever to re-appear again under any possible circumstances, you destroy any motive for any restraints beyond those imposed by public opinion. The crime in every case then consists of being found out. Private drinking was likely to flourish under such a habit of thought.

If, then, good circumstances are no preventive of intemperance under the present system, how slim is the ground for your happy

thought that in your "Merrie England," intemperance will disappear before the prevalence of plenty for all. It is a vain thought. Even if you secured the expected plenty, you could not (with a microbe religion) avert that listlessness of mind that would crave for excitement, and find it in its very easiest and most effective form in the "wassail bowl" that Robbie Burns glorifies in his poetry.

Your whole theory is vitiated by the radical mistake of ignoring inherent tendency in the direction of evil. You look at the surroundings of the people as the cause of their vices. The fact is, there is a reciprocal action. The surroundings have something to do with the production of vice, but the chief cause is inside the people themselves, in those deficiencies and affinities and susceptibilities in which (in the absence of enlightenment) the surroundings find their leverage. If there were no responsive affinity, bad surroundings would be innocuous. Your mistake is the mistake that a person would make who should blame the sea for the sinking of a ship. It is true the sea sinks the ship, but the efficient cause is the hole in the ship's bottom. It is the proclivities of the uninstructed people that give unfavourable surroundings their demoralising power. Without these the "surroundings" could not produce vice, as absolutely proved by the fact that they do not produce it where the mind is fortified against it by the power of enlightenment.

Your dissenting, though respectful friend,

JOHN SMITH.

“How far should Liberty go?”

IT

My Dear Mr. Blatchford,

T is a pleasanter subject than drunkenness that you bring forward in your 22nd letter. Perhaps it is not so interesting to some people. It belongs, as I understand, to what they call "the dismal science," the science of political and social economy. But these dismal science subjects, I find, have a good deal to do with things that are not dismal unless the dismal science is neglected, and then they are liable to become very dismal indeed-like the state of a house with the chimneys and drains out of order.

Everybody is deeply concerned in the right regulation of liberty. England has found this out by bitter experience in past times when particular classes in the nation domineered over other classes. She will find it out again more bitterly than ever, as I believe, if ever the tyranny of the community (as in the proposed system of Socialism) is brought to bear in the extinction of the individual. You would not own to this being the object or even the effect of the system you advocate; but I have shown in former letters that such an effect would be inevitable.

You put the question wrongly in making it an issue between individualism and socialism. This is not the issue; the issue is between society as it now is, and society as you propose it should be. Society as it now is is not a system of individualism.. There is no such thing as absolute individualism in any country that possesses even the germ of civilisation.

All reasonable men will agree with you that the rights of the individual ought not to be exercised to the detriment of the community. You truly say that "every member of a society must give up some fragment of his own will and advantage in return for the advantages which he gains from association with his