London (England) -- Social conditions; Poor -- England -- London
Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often the
men and women are unfit to drink it. On the other hand, it is their
very unfitness that drives them to drink it. Ill-fed, suffering from
innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their
constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the
sickly stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory operative hankers
after excessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods.
Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires.
Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and
fed as a pig is housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and
wholesome ideals and aspirations.
As home-life vanishes, the public-house appears. Not only do men and
women abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted, suffering
from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by the ugliness
and monotony of existence, but the gregarious men and women who have no
home-life flee to the bright and clattering public-house in a vain
attempt to express their gregariousness. And when a family is housed in
one small room, home-life is impossible.
A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light one
important cause of drunkenness. Here the family arises in the morning,
dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and daughters, and
in the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room is small), the
wife and mother cooks the breakfast. And in the same room, heavy and
sickening with the exhalations of their packed bodies throughout the
night, that breakfast is eaten. The father goes to work, the elder
children go to school or into the street, and the mother remains with
her crawling, toddling youngsters to do her housework—still in the same
room. Here she washes the clothes, filling the pent space with soapsuds
and the smell of dirty clothes, and overhead she hangs the wet linen to
dry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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