God help all such! for who else can understand them, who else can help them? Moral force is of no avail; human sympathy, kindly interest, and earnest solicitations are of no avail with them. Sufferings and remorse, burning shame and hopeless poverty, teach this kind nothing. Though they know that the prison or workhouse waits for them, though they know that the grave is yawning for them--yea, though hell itself stood open for them--into it they would go for the chance of satisfying their all-compelling craving. And it comes upon them like a thief in the night, when it is least expected. To-day they are clean, circumspect, gentlemanly, even religious; to-morrow they are bestial and wallow in the mud. Education is powerless, culture is powerless, refinement is powerless, good desires are powerless, self-respect is powerless, before this omnipotent craving. As I sit writing, all of these men whom I have ever met seem to crowd round me, and they are all educated men--University men and business men, clergymen and ministers of religion, artists and literary men, men of historic family and doctors of repute--I see them all again in their hopeless misery. I listen to their appeals for help, and I feel again the dint of pity as I look into their faces. I know only too well that I cannot and have not helped them. I have but pitied them, and given them such assistance as lay in my power. And but too frequently their own friends show no pity towards them--nothing but stern and implacable resentment. Doubtless they have suffered much because of them, but what can justify a father in speaking of his son as ‘the accursed wretch that bears my name’? for in these words a wealthy gentleman living in Kennington replied to me when I wrote to him concerning his son, who was a clergyman and a dipsomaniac. In the depth of winter, with his toes peeping out through his old boots, this man had sought me out. I had given him food and a new pair of boots, and out of pity had appealed to his father. I might as well have appealed to an iceberg. ‘You may be able to work miracles,’ he had sneeringly added, and not even a cast-off coat would he give to his son.