into this world as damned into it." The bastard of a harlot, born in a
brothel, suckled on gin, and familiar from earliest infancy with all
the bestialities of debauch, violated before she is twelve, and driven
out into the streets by her mother a year or two later, what chance is
there for such a girl in this world--I say nothing about the next?
Yet such a case is not exceptional. There are many such differing in
detail, but in essentials the same. And with boys it is almost as bad.
There are thousands who were begotten when both parents were besotted
with drink, whose mothers saturated themselves with alcohol every day
of their pregnancy, who may be said to have sucked in a taste for
strong drink with their mothers' milk, and who were surrounded from
childhood with opportunities and incitements to drink. How can we
marvel that the constitution thus disposed to intemperance finds the
stimulus of drink indispensable? Even if they make a stand against it,
the increasing pressure of exhaustion and of scanty food drives them
back to the cup. Of these poor wretches, born slaves of the bottle,
predestined to drunkenness from their mother's womb, there are--who
can say how many? Yet they are all men; all with what the Russian
peasants call "a spark of God" in them, which can never be wholly
obscured and destroyed while life exists, and if any social scheme is
to be comprehensive and practical it must deal with these men. It must
provide for the drunkard and the harlot as it provides for the
improvident and the out-of-work. But who is sufficient for these
things?

I will take the question of the drunkard, for the drink difficulty lies
at the root of everything. Nine-tenths of our poverty, squalor, vice,
and crime spring from this poisonous tap-root. Many of our social
evils, which overshadow the land like so many upas trees, would dwindle
away and die if they were not constantly watered with strong drink.