but sell so many buckets of alcoholized fluid. Observe what happens when
some brewer's wife chooses to spend £5000 on a ball. I remember one
excellent lady carefully boasting (for the benefit of the Press) that
the flowers alone that were in her house on one evening cost in all
£2000. Well, the mob of society folk fairly yearn for invitations to
such a show, and there is no meanness too despicable to be perpetrated
by women who desire admission. So through life the drink-maker and his
family fare in dignity and splendour; adulation surrounds them; powerful
men bow to the superior force of money; wealth accumulates until the
amount in the brewer's possession baffles the mind that tries to
conceive it--and the big majority of our interesting race say that all
this is good. Considering, then, how the English people directly and
indirectly force the man of drink onward until he must of necessity
fancy there is something of the moral demi-god about him; considering
how he is wildly implored to aid in ruling us from Westminster;
considering that his aid at an election may procure him the same honour
which fell to the share of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham--may we not say
that the community makes the brewer, and that if the brewer's stuff mars
the community we have no business to howl at him. We are answerable for
his living, and moving, and having his being--the few impulsive people
who gird at him should rather turn in shame and try to make some
impression on the huge, cringing, slavering crowd who make the
plutocrat's pompous reign possible.

But for myself, I cannot be bothered with bare figures and vague abuse
nowadays; abstractions are nothing, and neat arguments are less than
nothing, because the dullest quack that ever quacked can always clench
an argument in a fashion. Every turn that talk can take on the drink
question brings the image of some man or woman, or company of men and
women, before me, and that image is alive to my mind. If you pelt me