For example, most of us, I suppose, have seen in print and heard
in debating clubs an endless discussion that goes on between Socialists
and total abstainers. The latter say that drink leads to poverty;
the former say that poverty leads to drink. I can only wonder at their
either of them being content with such simple physical explanations.
Surely it is obvious that the thing which among the English proletariat
leads to poverty is the same as the thing which leads to drink;
the absence of strong civic dignity, the absence of an instinct
that resists degradation.

When you have discovered why enormous English estates were not long
ago cut up into small holdings like the land of France, you will have
discovered why the Englishman is more drunken than the Frenchman.
The Englishman, among his million delightful virtues, really has
this quality, which may strictly be called "hand to mouth," because under
its influence a man's hand automatically seeks his own mouth,
instead of seeking (as it sometimes should do) his oppressor's nose.
And a man who says that the English inequality in land is due only
to economic causes, or that the drunkenness of England is due only
to economic causes, is saying something so absurd that he cannot
really have thought what he was saying.

Yet things quite as preposterous as this are said and written under
the influence of that great spectacle of babyish helplessness, the
economic theory of history. We have people who represent that all
great historic motives were economic, and then have to howl at the
top of their voices in order to induce the modern democracy to act
on economic motives. The extreme Marxian politicians in England
exhibit themselves as a small, heroic minority, trying vainly to