The public-house, after centuries of philanthropic tall-talk and hundreds of miles of newspaper and magazine writing, tracts and essays, remains still the Elysian field for the tired toiler. The well-meaning efforts of the societies which have endeavoured to attract the poor to hear countesses play the fiddle, and baronets sing comic songs in temperance halls, have not been crowned with anything like success, for the simple reason that there is an air of charity and goody-goody about the scheme which the poor always regard with suspicion. They want their amusement as a right, not as a favour, and they decline to be patronized.
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Having separated the criminals from the workers, the next task must be to separate the old from the young, in planning out measures of reform and applying remedies. The condition of many of the older people, even among the poorer workers, is almost hopeless. They could never adapt themselves now to the life the philanthropist dreams for them. They could not be brought to see that marriage is any better than cohabitation, that thrift is a virtue, or that there is any higher pleasure in life than the gratification of the animal instincts. To gratify intellectual instincts, men must have intellects trained and cultivated to gratify. The older denizens of Horrible London have had their intellects dulled rather than sharpened by long years of familiarity with want, privation, and wretched surroundings. They have lived come-day, go-day, God-send-Sunday lives too long to be suddenly awakened to a taste for intellectual amusements or to higher aspirations; and, what is more, the bulk of the class I allude to are absolutely ignorant, and can neither read nor write.
But the evil exists in some of the worst districts, and to an extent of which the public little dreams. If some of the flagrant pieces of jobbery in this class of property, which have been the result of vestry government, could be brought to light, the public would cease to wonder how such a condition of things could have come to pass. 2ff7e9595c
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