6 THE OPEN AIR 



which is necessary to make beer, but the kind that 

 unmakes and spoils beer. It is beer rotting and 

 decomposing in the stomach. Violent diarrhoea 

 often follows, and then the exhaustion thus caused 

 induces the men to drink more in order to regain 

 the strength necessary to do their work. The great 

 lieat of the sun and the heat of hard labour, the 

 strain and perspiration, of course try the body and 

 weaken the digestion. To distend the stomach with 

 half a gallon of this liquor, expressly compounded 

 to ferment, is about the most murderous thing a 

 man could do murderous because it exposes him 

 to the risk of sunstroke. So vile a drink there is 

 not elsewhere in the world ; arrack, and potato-spirit, 

 and all the other killing extracts of the distiller are 

 not equal to it. Upon this abominable mess the 

 golden harvest of English fields is gathered in. 



Some people have in consequence endeavoured to 

 induce the harvesters to accept a money payment 

 in place of beer, and to a certain extent successfully. 

 Even then, however, they must drink something. 

 Many manage on weak tea after a fashion, but not 

 so well as the abstainers would have us think. 

 Others have brewed for their men a miserable 

 stuff in buckets, an infusion of oatmeal, and got a 

 few to drink it; but English labourers will never 

 drink oatmeal-water unless they are paid to do it. 

 If they are paid extra beer-money and oatmeal- 

 water is made for them gratis, some will, of course, 

 imbibe it, especially if they see that thereby they 

 may obtain little favours from their employer by 

 yielding to his fad By drinking the crotchet perhaps 



