of attracting them. The persons who screech and abuse the drink sellers
are even less effective than the men of figures; their opponents laugh
at them, and their friends grow deaf and apathetic in the storm of
whirling words, while cool outsiders think that we should be better
employed if we found fault with ourselves and sat in sackcloth and ashes
instead of gnashing teeth at tradesmen who obey a human instinct. The
publican is considered, among platform folk in the temperance body, as
even worse than a criminal, if we take all things seriously that they
choose to say, and I have over and over again heard vague blather about
confiscating the drink-sellers' property and reducing them to the state
to which they have brought others. Then there is the rant regarding
brewers. Why forget essential business only in order to attack a class
of plutocrats whom we have made, and whom our society worships with
odious grovellings? The brewers and distillers earn their money by
concocting poisons which cause nearly all the crime and misery in broad
Britain; there is not a soul living in these islands who does not know
the effect of the afore-named poisons; there is not a soul living who
does not very well know that there never was a pestilence crawling over
the earth which could match the alcoholic poisons in murderous power.
There is a demand for these poisons; the brewer and distiller supply the
demand and gain thereby large profits; society beholds the profits and
adores the brewer. When a gentleman has sold enough alcoholic poison to
give him the vast regulation fortune which is the drink-maker's
inevitable portion, then the world receives him with welcome and
reverence; the rulers of the nation search out honours and meekly bestow
them upon him, for can he not command seats, and do not seats mean
power, and does not power enable talkative gentry to feed themselves fat
out of the parliamentary trough? No wonder the brewer is a personage.
Honours which used to be reserved for men who did brave deeds, or
thought brave thoughts, are reserved for persons who have done nothing