234 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



where dwell the wage-receiving classes, are found 

 thousands of families living in conditions of incon- 

 ceivable squalor, of hunger and nakedness, where the 

 fathers, earning sufficient wages to maintain their 

 families in a decent comfort, spend their earnings 

 in drink. In these streets are to be found thousands 

 of men who were once secure of a place in the labour 

 market, but who have been cast out from it in 

 consequence of their having become drunkards. They, 

 by their misconduct, have thrust themselves out of the 

 labour market, as men who cannot be trusted to 

 continue for a day or an hour at their work, and their 

 wretched wives and children suffer starvation in the 

 single rooms which are their homes. I need not 

 speak of the dwellings made desolate by drunken 

 mothers. It is enough that I press home the truth 

 that by far the larger part of the misery of our great 

 towns is due neither to a defective and corrupt social 

 organisation, nor to the hardheartedness of the rich, nor 

 to the want of a sufficient labour market, but to 

 individual vice and self-indulgence, and we can only 

 deplore the fact that, from the nature of the case, the 

 innocent wives and helpless children, who suffer the 

 most acutely, are more numerous than the trans- 

 gressors. 



If we add to the host of vagrants, thieves, and 

 prostitutes, the victims of drink and their hapless 

 dependants, and compute the aggregate of these classes 

 at seven hundred thousand for the United Kingdom, 

 this estimate, I incline to believe, will err rather 



