every London ground-rent; and until this fact is understood no valid diminution of the drinking habits of the people can be hoped for. Yet no session passes without some endeavour to enact prohibitory laws against the liquor traffic; the promoters overlooking the important fact that those who drink are masters of the situation, and that they alone, by a reform of social habits, possible on freehold tenure, can restrict, and even stop, the trade. If their ordained, legitimate enjoyments are denied to men, they will of course obtain some vicious substitute. In milder climates men can live in public in the open air, and consequently suffer little from small pièces or appartements; but in London such extensive freedom is impossible. For ten months in the year all social meetings must be under cover, and as people cannot make their little cupboards serve as 'rooms,' they meet elsewhere. The crowds that gather round the gin-shop doors towards one o'clock on Sunday show the natural result: as long as London houses are not made for men, men will avoid them, and will go where they have space and light and company and welcome, and they then must drink. The custom does not lessen with increased intelligence; it constantly advances. The more highly strung the nervous system of a man, the greater his imaginative power, and the more his mind is cultivated, the intenser is his sensibility to his misfortune: he can see no prospect of relief, and so he gets a temporary change. Hence the increase of drinking, as distinct from grovelling drunkenness; and thus the lower middle and the working classes, as they rise in income and intelligence, spend more and more in liquor. We are furnished with the trade statistics of a public-house frequented by these people, and it seems that in the last fifteen years the trade profits have increased five-fold, without a single new house in the district.
There have been many efforts to establish reading-rooms for working men; but reading-rooms are palliatives only:
