bad occupations, which weaken the muscles, cramp the chest,
disorder the digestion. Let any rational man, fresh from the
country--in which I presume God, having made it, meant all men,
more or less, to live--go through the back streets of any city, or
through whole districts of the "black countries" of England; and
then ask himself: Is it the will of God that His human children
should live and toil in such dens, such deserts, such dark places
of the earth? Lot him ask himself: Can they live and toil there
without contracting a probably diseased habit of body; without
contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which
craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to escape from its own
stupidity and emptiness? When I run through, by rail, certain
parts of the iron-producing country--streets of furnaces,
collieries, slag heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt--
and that is all; and when I am told, whether truly or falsely,
that the main thing which the well-paid and well-fed men of those
abominable wastes care for is--good fighting-dogs: I can only
answer, that I am not surprised.

I say--as I have said elsewhere, and shall do my best to say it
again--that the craving for drink and narcotics, especially that
engendered in our great cities, is not a disease, but a symptom of
disease; of a far deeper disease than any which drunkenness can
produce; namely, of the growing degeneracy of a population
striving in vain by stimulants and narcotics to fight against
those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism, miscalled
civilisation, has surrounded them from the cradle to the grave. I
may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily.
I know it: but why did they drink, save for the same reason that
the fenman drank, and his wife took opium, at least till the fens