Again: I said just now that a probable cause of increasing drunkenness
was the increasing material prosperity of thousands who knew no
recreation beyond low animal pleasure. If I am right--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 overburdened 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 recreating and mending of the exhausted
mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now neglect, either for
himself, his children, or his work-people.

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