“I do, and I can never tolerate the argument that a man who drinks makes a beast of himself, because the beast can have no desire to minister to a sense which he does not possess.”
“Then you would say, that the universal desire for some sort of intoxication is a proof of the higher and immortal nature of man,” said Mr. Crowe.
“In a certain degree, yes; because all error is a perversion of some truth. A booze of bad beer and a glass of gin do for the lower man what Shakespeare and Keats, Bacon and Macaulay do for the cultured man—lift him for a while from his sordid surroundings, and raise him to a Monte Cristo palace of beautiful imagery. Mind, this is all the more sinful, all the more degrading at last, because it is buying of the devil at the price of your soul what God would have given you in another and a better way, if you had asked Him.”
“Very pretty,” said Crowe, “but I don’t believe it a bit!”
Dr. Graves said he thought that the theory was as clever, yet as improbable, as that of an American friend of his, who held that all children told lies, because by nature their dramatic faculties were in advance of their moral principles. Fibbing children were on this theory all premature poets.
And so the symposium ended, and the little party broke up.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
MILDRED FINDS HER WORK.
“This is not our work,” you say, “this is the work of men.” Be it so if you like. Let them be the hands to do it: but who, if not women, are to be the hearts of the redemption of the poor from social wrong?
—Stopford Brooke.