My friend, there is one thing in which we of the Thirties do greatly excel you of the Eighties. We can eat like ploughboys, and we can drink like draymen. As for your nonsense about Apollinaris Water, we do not know what it means; and as for your not being able to take a simple glass of port, we do not in the least understand it. Not take a pint of port? Man alive! we can take two bottles, and never turn a hair. CHAPTER V. WITH THE PEOPLE. When the real history of the people comes to be written--which will be the History, not of the Higher, but of the Lower Forms of Civilisation--it will be found that, as regards the people of these islands, they sank to their lowest point of degradation and corruption in the middle of the eighteenth century--a period when they had no religion, no morality, no education, and no knowledge, and when they were devoured by two dreadful diseases, and were prematurely killed by their excessive drinking of gin. No virtue at all seems to have survived among all the many virtues attributed to our race except a bulldog courage and tenacity. There are glimpses here and there, when some essayist or novelist lifts the veil, which show conditions of existence so shocking that one asks in amazement how there could have been any cheerfulness in the civilised part of the community for thinking of the terrible creatures in the ranks below. They did not think of them; they did not know of them; to us it seems as if the roaring of that volcano must have been always in their ears, and the smoke of it always choking their throats. But our people saw and heard nothing. Across the Channel, where men’s eyes were quicker to see, the danger was clearly discerned, and the eruption foretold. Here, no one saw anything, or feared anything. How this country got through without a revolution, how it escaped the dangers of that mob, are questions more difficult to answer than the one which continually occupies historians--How Great Britain, single-handed, fought against the conqueror of the world. Both victories were mainly achieved, I believe, by the might and majesty of Father Stick. He is dead now, and will rule no more in this country. But all through the last century, and well into this, he was more than a king--he was a despot, relentless, terrible. He stripped women to the waist and whipped them at Bridewell; he caught the ’prentices and flogged them soundly; he lashed the criminal at the cart-tail; he lashed the slaves in the plantations, the soldiers in the army, the sailors on board the ships, and the boys at school. He kept everybody in order, and, truly, if the old violence were to return, we might have to call in Father Stick again.