AH this drink, this terrible drink, which still goes on slaying its thousands and tens of thousands! No wonder that indignation has been so roused against it, that many have banished it from their tables, and even from their houses! Our poor Potteries have endured a full share of the misery and destruction that ever follow it. During the summer the brickmaker, with the assistance of the elder members of his family, sometimes earns between £2 and £3 per week. One man informed me that he and his family had earned £2, 18s. nearly every week through the season; and yet that man’s wife and three children were shivering at my door, one bitterly cold morning in December, and begging for food and clothing. The effects of the hard work and hard drinking had been to bring on a terrible illness, and not a sixpence was left of all the money which they had earned “when the sun was shining.” After enduring privation and suffering too terrible to contemplate, the man and one of the children died, and the poor widow with the remaining children went to the workhouse. Were it not for this inveterate habit of drinking, few places would be more independent of help from without than the Potteries; but long habits of intemperance have so impoverished the people, that few can now afford to _buy_ the pigs for themselves; they therefore fatten them “upon commission,” and in this way can gain only a miserable livelihood. Considerable sums of money, however, may be still earned by those who are careful and prudent, both by pig-feeding and brick-making. The latter work is not constant, but can be procured at only one particular time of the year. Hence in the course of the same year may be seen, in the same family, the extreme of prodigality and destitution. The effect of an increased income, generally, is that more money goes to the public-house, and the future is still unprovided for. I have often told these labourers that their memories seemed much shorter than the bees’, birds’, and ants’. These little creatures never forget that winter will return, and make the most ample provision for it. But any stranger would think that the present was the first winter which these human beings had ever known; that it had come upon them unexpectedly, and found them unprepared for it.