another opinion. We differ here and leave the question to the
earnest reader. I have the utmost respect for all Teetotalers,
Prohibitionists, and Haters and Persecutors of Innkeepers, their
energy of reform awakens responsive notes in me, and to their
species I look for a large part of the urgent repair of our earth;
yet for all that----

There is Burgundy, for example, a bottle of soft and kindly
Burgundy, taken to make a sunshine on one's lunch when four
strenuous hours of toil have left one on the further side of
appetite. Or ale, a foaming tankard of ale, ten miles of sturdy
tramping in the sleet and slush as a prelude, and then good bread
and good butter and a ripe hollow Stilton and celery and ale--ale
with a certain quantitative freedom. Or, again, where is the sin in
a glass of tawny port three or four times, or it may be five, a
year, when the walnuts come round in their season? If you drink no
port, then what are walnuts for? Such things I hold for the reward
of vast intervals of abstinence; they justify your wide, immaculate
margin, which is else a mere unmeaning blankness on the page of
palate God has given you! I write of these things as a fleshly man,
confessedly and knowingly fleshly, and more than usually aware of my
liability to err; I know myself for a gross creature more given to
sedentary world-mending than to brisk activities, and not one-tenth
as active as the dullest newspaper boy in London. Yet still I have
my uses, uses that vanish in monotony, and still I must ask why
should we bury the talent of these bright sensations altogether?
Under no circumstances can I think of my Utopians maintaining their
fine order of life on ginger ale and lemonade and the ale that is
Kops'. Those terrible Temperance Drinks, solutions of qualified
sugar mixed with vast volumes of gas, as, for example, soda,