What, then, is to be done? I think if we really want to do good in the matter and can approach it without a desire to make dividends out of brewery shares, or make alliances with teetotallers for political ends, we shall have to look to some extent to foreign examples for guidance in our difficulties. All of us who have had leisure and money to see something of foreign countries know that the squalid ideal of the brewer and the puritan is not the only possible solution of such social difficulty as there is in providing reasonable alehouses. The British public-house is a national disgrace thrust by the rich on the poor by means of law. The working man has no chance of amending things, as he has no say in electing the bosses. Labour leaders short-sightedly favour the puritans' views. Certainly, our public-houses being what they are, it is a choice of evils to keep out of them. But why should public-houses be what they are? I well remember at Mayence entering a beautiful public hall--it was a rainy night, or the entertainment would have been out of doors--where there was a fine string band playing excellent music. Men, women, and children sat at tables and had ham and bread and cake and beer and coffee, and those who wished to do so smoked. There was no swilling at counters, there was no forced teetotalism, there was no drunkenness; merely domestic liberty for rational enjoyment. Why cannot there be sufficient free trade in the beer business of this country to allow an individual or, if you prefer it, an enlightened municipality--where such exists--to copy the sane entertainments of our German neighbours? A working man and his wife and children spend their evening listening to the band in a German beer-garden with as little sense of impropriety as Lord and Lady De Vere and the Hon. Gladys De Vere take their lunch at the Ritz, or Alderman and Mrs. Snooks lunch in the French restaurant at the Midland. But in England these domestic felicities are for the rich alone. The brewers and puritans have given the poor man a mean tippling-house to booze in, and deny him anything better. His wife is looked upon as degraded if she joins him at the only place where he can spend his leisure, and the rich lawgivers put the true stamp on their own invention by enacting that it is an unfit place for little children to enter.