THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
freedom actually come only through freedom from ignorance—you get a higher standard. People who live under good conditions have larger ideals.
I sometimes think our teetotal friends are a little narrow. They talk about preventing people going into public-houses. Well, I do not wonder. Public-houses ought to be very much improved, and there is a good deal of idealism which could be usefully put into practice in connection with public-houses. The root of the matter is, however, that when you find a lot of spots on a fever patient, you don't try to paint them out, but you try to find the cause; and the cause of drunkenness, and half-a-dozen social evils, is ignorance, bad housing, and poverty. And if you address yourselves in the first place to these things, it will be better from every point of view. Temperance will follow. Our aristocracy used to drink heavily, but it is only a few of them who do so to-day; our middle-classes used to be pretty great drinkers, but to-day their standards have greatly risen in this respect.
It is the rise in general standards of value that has killed that vice, and has kept down, to a great extent, other vices; and so it will be with the working classes, too. If you could have the three minima—wages, decent homes, sufficient knowledge—you would get rid of half the things about which people bother themselves in regard to temperance and other defects which arise because the standards have not been worked up to by the State, and people have not attained to them.
Let us see what is the next step we come to.
We cannot all do intellectual work. Some will have to work with the brain, but most with the hand; and therefore it is declared that you will never get rid of the monotony of work. I think, probably, what makes the working classes more unrestful than anything else is the monotony of their work and the very little share they have in directing it. They
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