-and I believe that I am right--I must urge on those who wish
drunkenness to decrease, the necessity of providing more, and more
refined, recreation for the people.

Men drink, and women too, remember, not merely to supply
exhaustion, not merely to drive away care; but often simply to
drive away dulness. They have nothing to do save to think over
what they have done in the day, or what they expect to do to-
morrow; and they escape from that dreary round of business thought
in liquor or narcotics. There are still those, by no means of the
hand-working class, but absorbed all day by business, who drink
heavily at night in their own comfortable homes, simply to
recreate their over-burdened minds. Such cases, doubtless, are
far less common than they were fifty years ago: but why? Is not
the decrease of drinking among the richer classes certainly due to
the increased refinement and variety of their tastes and
occupations? In cultivating the aesthetic side of man's nature;
in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the
truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture,
physical science--in all this lies recreation, in the true and
literal sense of that word, namely, the re-creating and mending of
the exhausted mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now
neglect, either for himself, his children, or his workpeople.

But how little of all this is open to the masses, all should know
but too well. How little opportunity the average hand-worker, or
his wife, has of eating of any tree of knowledge, save of the very
basest kind, is but too palpable. We are mending, thank God, in
this respect. Free libraries and museums have sprung up of late
in other cities beside London. God's blessing rest upon them all.