My Dear, with a view to getting assistance towards the solution of the great testamentary problem, I went yesterday to see Bemerton the bookseller and inquire about the literature of charity (for, as that witty cleric, the late Dean Beeching, wrote:—
It all comes out of the books I read
And it all goes into the books I write
—or, more accurately, the letters I write, for I have never touched authorship proper) and he produced from those inexhaustible shelves a report on alms-houses and kindred endowments published in 1829 under the title The Endowed Charities of the City of London. This exceedingly formidable tome I am going to peruse and send you the results; and really I don’t think I could do a more disinterested thing, for none of your money is coming to me, and it consists of nearly eight-hundred double-column pages of the kind of small type into which the Editor of the Times puts the letters of the most insignificant of his correspondents.
Bemerton, by the way, told me a very nice ghost story which, when I can find an hour or two, I am going to write out for you. It was told him by a distinguished Orientalist, and he believes it and I should like to.
There’s a threat of Prohibition coming to England too, but I hope against it. There is too much of “Thou shalt not” in the world. If people were trusted more, there would probably be less excess and folly. So far as I can gather from those who know America, one effect—and by no means a desirable one—of the dry enactment is to increase trickery and mendacity. The illicit sale of alcoholic beverages still goes on, but as it is illegal it must be done secretly and lies must be told to cover it. Personally I would rather think of a nation too convivially merry than of one systematically deceptive.
Omar should be arrayed against Prohibition at once:
A blessing, we should use it, should we not?
And if a curse, why then Who set it there?
—that wants some answering. All the same, there are probably more people who would be better for less drink than those who would be improved by more; but the second class exists. I have met several of them.