DRINK
Mr. Crosland has very kindly suggested that "under the inspiring
tutelage of the national bard Scotland has become one of the drunkenest
nations in the world." I shall not retaliate as one might do, but shall
content myself by referring the reader to the easily accessible tables
of statistics, which render it quite plain that Scotland's drunkenness
is very considerably exceeded by the drunkenness of England.
In London, at any rate, strong drink flows like a river. There are 5300
licensed houses in the metropolitan area alone. In Kilburn, a suburb
of more or less irreproachable respectability, there are twenty-five
churches and chapels and thirty-five public-houses. During late
years public-house property has begun to be looked upon in the light
of a gilt-edged investment. Turn where one will, one finds the older
inns are being swept away, while on their sites are erected flaring
gin-palaces, with plate-glass fronts, elaborate mahogany fitments,
gorgeous saloon and private bars, painted ceilings, inlaid floors, and
electric light throughout. Behind the bar, instead of mine host of a
former day and his wife and daughter, there are half a dozen perked-up
barmaids with rouged cheeks and Rossetti hair, and a person called
the manager, who for L2 a week runs the place for its proprietors--a
Limited Company, which owns, perhaps, twenty or thirty other houses.
In the conduct of these mammoth drinking-places three great points are
kept in view: namely, that a quick-drinking, stand-up trade pays better
than any amount of slow regular custom; that the English drinker of
the lower class cannot tell the difference between good drink and bad,
often preferring, indeed, the bad to the good; and that, as bad liquor
is cheaper than good, the sound commercial thing to do is to supply bad
liquor.
With these admirable axioms continually before it, the English trade
has prospered amazingly. More drink and worse drink is sold in England
to-day than has ever been sold in England before. Through legislation
intended to ensure sound liquor and the proper conduct of licensed
houses the proprietors have consistently made a point of driving the
usual brewer's dray. "In order to meet the Food and Drugs Adulteration
Act, all spirits sold at this establishment, while of the same
excellent quality as heretofore, are diluted according to strength."
"The same excellent quality as heretofore" is choice, and so is
"diluted according to strength." As for the beer, we dilute also the
beer according to strength. When we are caught at it, it is a mistake
on the part of the cellarman, who has been discharged; and the fine is
so small in proportion to the profit on selling water, that we smile at
the back of our necks and keep on diluting according to strength. Our
whole system, in fact, is designed to make people drink, and to make
them drink the worst that we dare put before them.
Now, the Scot, drunkard or no drunkard, does have something of a taste
in liquor. The best clarets have gone to Scotland (in spite of Mr.
Crosland) since claret became a dinner wine. You cannot put off a Scot
with either bad whisky or bad beer. He knows what whisky should be and
what beer should be, and in Scotland, at any rate, he never has any
difficulty in getting them. But the English, taking them in the mass,
are quite the other way. Any sort of wine, provided it be properly
fortified and sophisticated, passes with them for the real thing.
Their Scotch whisky is about the most wholesome thing they drink; but
large quantities of this are bought by English merchants in a crude
state, and rammed down the public throat without a thought to maturing,
blending, and otherwise rendering the spirit potable. English beer, we
have been told in song and story, is the finest beer in the world. Yet
nobody can visit an English brewery without discovering that English
beer is not English beer at all. Glucose in the place of malt, quassia
and gentian in the place of hops, finings in the place of storage, are
the universal order; and so depraved and perverted has the fine old
English taste in beer become that brewers who have set up to provide an
honest article and sent it out to their customers have had it returned
with the curt comment that "nobody would drink such hog-wash, and what
the customers wanted was beer, and not brewer's apron." Every now and
again scares crop up in consequence of the use of improper ingredients;
there is an inquiry, a Royal Commission, and the Englishman still
goes on stolidly drinking. Arsenic will not drive him away from his
favourite tipple, neither will _cocculus indicus_ or any of the round
dozen abominations upon which the brewer's chemist takes his stand.
If there is one thing more than another that is considered the chief
necessity of life in the English household of the poorer class, it is
beer, and its sister beverage, porter. From morning till night the
can is continually going between the house of the artisan and the
neighbouring "public." The first thing in the morning the artisan
himself must have a couple of goes of rum and milk; by eleven o'clock
he is ready for a pint of four-half; at noon, when he knocks off for
dinner, he will imbibe a quart or more of the same beverage; and at
night, after work, he sits in the taproom till closing-time, and drinks
as much as ever he can pay for or chalk up. Meanwhile, his wife must
have her drop of porter in the morning, her drop of bitter to dinner,
and her drop of something hot before going to bed. Also on Saturday
afternoons, when the twain go marketing together, they must have a few
drinks, just to show there is no ill-feeling; while on Saturday night
the artisan not infrequently improves the shining hours by "getting
blind," to use his own elegant phrase. Thus it quite commonly happens
that a third and even a half of the total income of a household of the
artisan class is spent in alcohol. Thrift, provision for a rainy day
and for old age, become an impossibility. Underfeeding usually walks
hand in hand with overdrinking; the man loses his nerve, the woman her
comeliness and her capacity; and the end is pauperism and a pauper's
grave, if nothing worse.
Among the English middle and upper classes there is distinctly a
greater tendency to moderation than among the lower classes. For all
that, the middle classes especially can point to a great many brilliant
examples of the fine art of soaking. Publicans, betting-men, commercial
travellers, proprietors of businesses, solicitors' clerks, journalists,
and the like get through an amount of drinking in the course of a day
which would probably appal even themselves if they kept an account
of it. "Let's 'ave a drink," is invariably one of the first phrases
dropped when two Englishmen meet. "We'll 'ave another" is sure to
follow; and so is, "'Ang it, man! we _must_ have a final." Among the
middle classes, too, as also among the upper classes, there is a very
great deal of secret drinking, particularly among women and persons
whose professional or official positions necessitate the maintenance
of an appearance of extreme respectability. The grocer's license and
his fine stock of carefully selected wines and spirits offer a ready
means of supply to the female dipsomaniac, who would not be seen in
a public-house for worlds; besides, gin can be charged as tea in a
grocery account, and many a bottle of brandy has figured in such
accounts under the innocent pseudonym of "rolled ox-tongue."
Though the English upper classes, as I have said, drink with a certain
moderation, their moderation really embraces a quantity of liquor which
would send the artisan quite off his head. Whiskies-and-sodas at noon,
Burgundy at lunch, with cognac to one's coffee, three kinds of wine at
dinner, followed by liqueurs and whisky, make no appreciable mark on a
man who is living at his ease and can sleep as long as he likes; but
the sum total of alcohol is quite considerable, and probably greater
than that consumed by the "drunken sot" for whom my lord has such
contempt.
Of English drinking, generally, one may remark that it is done in a
very deliberate and unsociable way. The English cannot be said to drink
for company's sake. They do not foregather and carry on their drinking
merrily. In their cups they are neither witty nor happy, but just dull
and dour and inclined to be quarrelsome. They drink for drinking's
sake,--for the sake of intoxication, and to drown trouble. I wish them
good luck and less of their vile concoctions!