vicariously such heavy drinking as may be required by custom or exacted by forfeit.”[52] We will not pursue the description further, adding only that amongst the dishes provided at this particular dinner-party were sharks’ fins with crab sauce, pigeon’s eggs stewed with mushrooms, sliced sea-slugs in chicken-broth with ham, stewed lily roots, and lumps of parboiled mutton fried in pork fat. The same author’s observations concerning the moral condition of the lower classes are equally interesting. He seems disposed to make light of opium-smoking, and does not consider it nearly such a pernicious custom as gin-drinking in England. He considers the working classes remarkably sober, a drunken husband being the exception; and during eight years’ residence in China, he says he never saw a drunken man in the streets. “Opium-smokers we have seen in all stages of intoxication, but no drunken brawls, no bruised and bleeding wives.” One thing is, however, certain; the inability to procure intoxicating liquor has as much to do with the sobriety of the poor Chinaman as the absence of a taste for drink; for, as Mr. Giles says, it is as much as he can do to feed his family, which consists not only of his wife and children but his parents also; and he has besides to provide a supply of rice for uncles, cousins, &c.; hence it follows that every cash earned either by the man or woman goes towards procuring food and clothing instead of enriching the keepers of grog-shops.[53] This is an important consideration, and one that should not be lost sight of, when we look at the relations between the earnings of working people and their expenditure on drink. China, like many other countries in which wealth is unequally distributed, may at some future time, when her working classes are more prosperous, have to contend again with the national vice which was so prevalent during her early civilisation. CHAPTER III. THE DRINKING HABITS OF THE ARYAN RACES OF INDIA—THE VEDAS AND BRAHMINICAL LITERATURE—MODERN INDIA. We are now about to consider the drinking propensities of our own remote ancestry—of those from whom most of the inhabitants of modern Europe and the Transatlantic continents are descended; and should there exist in the mind of any of our readers a doubt as to the enormous advances that have been made in civilisation since the earliest historic period, we think that doubt will be dispelled for ever.