but everything else about their lives is unhealthy,
while this brings the oblivion that nothing else in
their lives can bring. It even exalts them, and
makes them feel that they are finer and better,
though at the same time it drags them down and
makes them more beastly than ever. For the un
fortunate man or woman, it is a race between
miseries that ends with death.

It is of no avail to preach temperance and teeto-
talism to these people. The drink habit may be
the cause of many miseries; but it is, in turn, the
effect of other and prior miseries. The temperance
advocates may preach their hearts out over the
evils of drink, but until the evils that cause people
to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will
remain.

Until the people who try to help, realize this,
their well-intentioned efforts will be futile, and they
will present a spectacle fit only to set Olympus
laughing. I have gone through an exhibition of
Japanese art, got up for the poor of Whitechapel
with the idea of elevating them, of begetting in them
yearnings for the Beautiful and True and Good.
Granting (what is not so) that the poor folk are
thus taught to know and yearn after the Beautiful
and True and Good, the foul facts of their existence
and the social law that dooms one in three to a
public-charity death, demonstrates that this knowl-

[[305]]

p304 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p305w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p306

v?