But these Inns of South England (such as still stand!)—what can be said in proper praise of them which shall give their smell and colour and their souls? There is nothing like them in Europe, nor anything to set above them in all the world. It is within their walls and at their boards that one knows what South England once did in the world and why. If it is gone it is gone. All things die at last. But if it is gone—why, no lover of it need remain to drag his time out in mourning it. If South England is dead it is better to die upon its grave.
Whether it dies in our time or no you may test by the test of its Inns. If they may not weather the chaos, if they fail to round the point that menaces our religion and our very food, our humour and our prime affections—why, then, South England has gone too. If, if (I hardly dare to write such a challenge), if the Inns hold out a little time longer—why, then, South England will have turned the corner and Europe can breathe again. Never mind her extravagances, her follies or her sins. Next time you see her from a hill, pray for South England. For if she dies, you die. And as a symptom of her malady (some would say of her death-throes) carefully watch her Inns.
Of the enemies of Inns, as of rich men, dull men, blind men, weak-stomached men and men false to themselves, I do not speak: but of their effect. Why such blighting men are nowadays so powerful and why God has given them a brief moment of pride it is not for us to know. It is hidden among the secret things of this life. But that they are powerful all men, lovers of Inns, that is, lovers of right living, know well enough and bitterly deplore. The effect of their power concerns us. It is like a wasting of our own flesh, a whitening of our own blood.
Thus there is the destruction of an Inn by gluttony of an evil sort—though to say so sounds absurd, for one would imagine that gluttony should be proper to Inns. And so it is, when it is your true gluttony of old, the gluttony of our fathers made famous in English letters by the song which begins:
I am not a glutton
But I do like pie.
But evil gluttony, which may also be called the gluttony of devils, is another matter. It flies to liquor as to a drug; it is ashamed of itself; it swallows a glass behind a screen and hides. There is no companionship with it. It is an abomination, and this abomination has the power to destroy a Christian Inn and to substitute for it, first a gin-palace, and then, in reaction against that, the very horrible house where they sell only tea and coffee and bubbly waters that bite and sting both in the mouth and in the stomach. These places are hotbeds of despair, and suicides have passed their last hours on earth consuming slops therein alone.
Thus, again, a sad enemy of Inns is luxury. The rich will have their special habitations in a town so cut off from ordinary human beings that no Inn may be built in their neighbourhood. In which connection I greatly praise that little colony of the rich which is settled on the western side of Berkeley Square, in Lansdowne House, and all around the eastern parts of Charles Street, for they have permitted to be established in their midst the "Running Footman," and this will count in the scale when their detestable vices are weighed upon the Day of Judgment, upon which day, you must know, vices are not put into the scale gently and carefully so as to give you fair measure, but are banged down with enormous force by strong and maleficent demons.
Then, again, a very subtle enemy of Inns is poverty, when it is pushed to inhuman limits, and you will note especially in the dreadful great towns of the North, more than one ancient house which was once honourable and where Mr. Pickwick might very well have stayed, now turned ramshackle and dilapidated and abandoned, slattern, draggle-tail, a blotch, until the yet beastlier reformers come and pull it down to make an open space wherein the stunted children may play.