For the young people of the poor are just as fond of a spree as those of the rich, and quite as ready to be charitable to the extent of their means after the same fashion. There is an excellent letter of Charles Kingsley's written to the "Christian Socialist" some sixty years ago that might well be circulated among licensing benches by the Home Office--though I believe it is considered officially to be bad economy to address printed common sense to the unpaid magistracy. Naturally, autocrats resent or scoff at advice that has no sanction behind it. The teetotal attitude of mind and the quarrels it aroused very properly disgusted Kingsley. He took no pleasure in hearing the water drinkers calling the beer drinkers "flabby, pot-bellied, muddle-headed, disgusting old brutes," and the beer drinkers retorting on the water drinkers that they were "conceited puritans and manichees and ascetics." He saw that the quarrel would not do any good to the cause of temperance, and in his honest enthusiasm blurted out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about his teetotal friends, like the good old Christian warrior that he was. "On my honour," he writes, "unless the teetotallers show a more humble, gentle and tolerant spirit than is common among them I shall advise beer drinkers like myself and Mr. Hughes (Tom Brown of the Schooldays) either to flee the country, or if their cloth allows them, which mine does not, prove by self-defence that a man can value his beer, and thank God for it with a good conscience, as tens of thousands do daily and yet feel as tight about the loin and as wiry in the arm as any teetotaller in England. Honestly, I am jesting in earnest. I regard this teetotal movement with extreme dread. I deeply sympathise with the horror of our English drunkenness that produced it. I honour every teetotaller as I honour every man who proves by his action that he possesses high principle and manful self-restraint.... That a man should be a teetotaller rather than a drunkard needs no proof. Also that a man should go about in a sack rather than be a fop and waste time and money on dress. But I think temperance in beer, like temperance in clothes, is at once a more rational and a higher virtue either than sackcloth or water." This was true doctrine then and is true doctrine to-day, and the sad fact that it fell on deaf ears and is still but half understood is the reason of our backwardness in licensing reform and the presence of the degrading public house which the law cherishes and protects.