. ENGLISH SAG A

drive them away with her parasol. One of our party
remained till midnight saw many horrors which I c
describe; the animal nature had full vent."1

cannot

A drunken land at times the old fighting England of the
urban 'fifties was: the right to empty his can of beer whenever
he pleased was the first clause of Magna Carta which the Eng-
lishman took with him from the country to the town. In 1850
Manchester, with its 400,000 inhabitants, had 475 "publics'* and
1,143 beer houses. Every night the eternal revelry would begin
outside their flare-lit doors: the tip-tapping of the wooden dogs,
the tangled hair and dirty, sodden faces swaying, swinging, and
leaping to the music of fiddle or seraphine. In the casinos or
music saloons, where a man might pay id. or 3^. for admission,
eat apples and oranges and afterwards sup on tripe and trotters,
drink and harmony went hand in hand, as, arnid a strong flavour
of gin, corduroy and tobacco smoke, the rough audience joined
in the chorus of the last music-hall ditty. On Saturday night,
after the workman's weekly pay had been taken, it was a revolting
sight for a sensitive man to witness the ghastly scenes at the
tavern doors. Drunken women by the hundred lay about
higgledy-piggledy in the mud, hollow-eyed and purple-cheeked,
their ragged clothing plastered with muck.2 Occasionally one
would stagger up to fight or to beat off some whimpering wife
come with her bedraggled babes to seek a drunken husband
before the coming week's housekeeping money was all spent
* • • ~ • • * • «

For though the worst days of hunger, destitution and low
wages were over, and the industrious, frugal artisan, like- the
resourceful manufacturer, was enjoying better times, the more
the nation became industralised, the more squalid became the
background of the bulk of its people. The greater" towns-
several of them now nearing the half-million mark— were still
organised on the parish model that had sufficed when they were
half rural: that is to say they were without efficient local govern-
ment, sanitation or communal amenity. Even the capital, the
seat of Parliament and the centre of national culture and fashion,
was by modem standards indescribably filthy. Here, as every-
where else, the rate of expansion had outgrown the civic in-
stitutions and organisation of the past, and the result was

Ute^ *