instant duty, as the guardian of the public peace, to seize them both
and hale them away to prison. But it was not till many years afterwards
that I read in his well-remembered effigy the allegory of civilization
which lets the man-made suffering of men come to the worst before it
touches it, and acts upon the axiom that a pound of prevention is worth
less than an ounce of cure.

I would very willingly have seen something of this kind again, but, as I
say, I happened not to see it. I think that I did not see or hear even
so much simple drunkenness in London as formerly, but again this may
have been merely chance. I fancied that formerly I had passed more gin-
palaces, flaring through their hell-litten windows into the night; but
this may have been because I had become hardened to gin-palaces and did
not notice them. Women seemed to be going in and coming out of such
places in draggle-tailed processions in those wicked days; but now I
only once saw women drinking in a public house. It was a Saturday night,
when, if ever, it may be excusable to anticipate the thirst of the
morrow, for all through the Sunday idleness it cannot be slaked enough.
It was a hot night, and the bar-room door stood open, and within,
fronted by a crowd of their loudly talking, deeply drinking men-kind,
those poor silly things stood drooping against the wall with their
beer-pots dangling limply from their hands, and their mouths fallen open
as if to catch the morsels of wit and wisdom that dropped from the
tongues of their admired male companions. They did not look very bad;
bad people never do look as bad as they are, and perhaps they are
sometimes not so bad as they look. Perhaps these were kind, but not very
wise, mothers of families, who were merely relieving in that moment of
liquored leisure the long weariness of the week's work. I may have
passed and repassed in the street some of the families that they were
the mothers of; it was in that fortnight of the great heat, whose