SPEAKING within bounds, I should say that one-half of England is engaged in manufacturing beer for the other half. Possibly it takes two-thirds of the entire population to make beer enough for the other third, but I think an equal division would be about the thing. The British public is very drouthy.

One is astounded at the amount of drinking that is done here. Go where you will, turn whichever way you choose, the inevitable “public,” or the “pub” as they say between drinks, stares you in the face. And on the streets almost every other vehicle you see is a vast, massive, clumsy truck, loaded either with full kegs for the publics, or taking away empty ones.

The British public house is not the same thing as the American. Except in a few instances you see none of the glass and mahogany palaces of New York, you see none of the flashy bars with plate glass, silver rails, elegant glass-ware, and the gorgeous bar-tender with diamonds as large as hickory nuts.

The London public house is a dingy affair, the dingier the better, with barrels piled upon barrels, and cob-webs as plenty as liquor. There is a wild superstition prevalent that age has something to do with the quality of liquor, and therefore, every place devoted to the sale or handling of the stuff, assumes as much of a Methuselean appearance as possible. You are to have a party of friends at your lodgings, we will say. You must have at least two kinds of liquor to entertain them withal, for no Englishman does anything without moistening his clay, and his clay is of a variety that absorbs a great deal of moisture. You pay for it and the man sends home the bottles.

Now an American liquor dealer would carefully wipe the bottles, and they would be delivered at your house as clean and tidy as a laundried shirt, but not so here. They are sent with dust on them, and with cobwebs on them, and to brush off the dust would be sacrilege. That dust is a sort of patent—a testimonial to its age, and consequently a guarantee of its excellence.

I mortally offended one liquor dealer by asking him to show me his machine for dusting bottles, and also would he kindly explain to me his process for cob-webbing them, and was it expensive to keep spiders? The man actually resented it—was angry about it. Singular how sensitive the Islanders can be about trifles like that! To keep spiders for the manufacture of cobwebs would be more enterprising than to buy cobwebs, and no American would dust bottles by hand, when a very simple machine could be devised for the purpose.

The British landlord don’t set the bottle before his customer as his brother does in free and enlightened America. Now at home,—as I have been told by those who frequent bar-rooms—the barkeeper sets before his customer a bottle of the liquor he prefers, and the drouthy man helps himself to such quantity as he deems sufficient for the purpose desired. If he is fixing himself for a common riot, he takes a certain quantity; if for a murder, more or less, according to how aggravated the crime is to be. A man would take more to fit himself to kill his wife than he would for his mother-in-law, and the wife-killing draught is at the same price as the mother-in-law annihilator.

But over here the bar-maid measures your liquor. You may have three penn’orth, four penn’orth or six penn’orth. It is measured out to you and handed to you, and you swallow it and go away.

I remonstrated with one proprietor as to the absurdity of the custom, and the meanness of it.

“I will show you the reason for it,” he said, quietly. Just then a bold Briton came in and the landlord directed the maid behind the bar to set down a bottle. The astonished customer was invited to help himself, after the American custom. He was an astonished Briton, but he managed to express his gratification at the innovation. Seizing the bottle he poured out an ordinary dinner tumbler full, and, looking grieved because the glass was no larger, drank it off without a wink.

I could easily see why the British landlord measures the liquor to the British public. Two such customers on the American plan would bankrupt a very opulent proprietor.

The quality of liquor used by the better classes is perhaps a trifle better than that consumed in America, at least so I have been informed by those who use liquors. A vast quantity of brandy is imported from France, and it is so cheap there that it doubtless approximates to purity. The whiskies drank are entirely Scotch and Irish, the English making none whatever. Wines are consumed in great quantities, and there is no question as to the purity of the cheaper grades, which is to say they are undoubtedly the pure juice of the grape. The duty on wines is so small that there is no inducement, as in America, for the manufacture of bogus varieties.

But the liquors consumed in London by the lower classes are probably the most execrable and vile that the ingenuity of the haters of mankind ever invented. The brandy they drink is liquid lightning—chain lightning—which goes crashing through the system, breaking down and destroying every pulsation towards anything good. The gin—well, their gin is the very acme, the absolute summit, of vileness. There is a quarrel in every gill of it, a wife-beating in every pint, and a murder in every quart. A smell of a glass of it nearly drove me to criminal recklessness.

And yet they all drink it, and especially the women. The most disgusting sight the world can produce is a London gin drinking woman standing at a bar, waiting feverishly for her “drain,” with unkempt hair, a small but intensely dirty shawl, with stockingless feet, and shoes down at the heel, with eyes rheumy and watery, that twinkle with gin light out from the obscurity of gin-swelled flesh, with a face on which the scorching fingers of a depraved appetite have set red lines, as ineffaceable as though they had been placed there by red-hot iron, every one of which is the unavailing protest of a long-outraged stomach.

There she stands, a blotch upon the face of nature and a satire upon womanhood. It is difficult to realize that this bloated mass was once a fair young girl, and had a mother who loved her, and it is equally difficult to comprehend how any power, even that of Nature, could ever make use of it. But the elements are kindly to man. When they have done their work, sweet flowers may grow out of this putridity.

In America this sort of being exists, but it is herded somewhere out of sight. It does not stand at the bars in the best streets to offend the eyes of decent people. But it is everywhere here. It is in the Strand and on Piccadilly and Regent street.

The average Englishman of the lower, and even the middle classes, dearly loves to booze. Drunkenness is not the result either of conviviality or desperation as it is in other countries. It is the one thing longed for and set deliberately about.

Rare John Leech, illustrated it in his picture in Punch, years ago. A man was lying very drunk at the foot of a lamp-post. A benevolent old lady of the Exeter Hall school seeing him, called a cabman. “The poor man is sick,” quoth the kindly dame, “why don’t you help him?” “Sick, is he,” replied cabby, “sick! don’t I vish I ’ad just ’arf of vot ails him?” The cabby spoke the honest sentiment of his heart. The Londoner of his class loves it for the effect it has upon him, and as he accomplishes his design with English gin, he carries with him a breath that suggests the tomb of a not very ancient king, a breath which has a density, a center, as one might say.

At twelve o’clock, Saturday night, he would fight a rattlesnake and give the snake the first bite. Were a venomous snake to bite such an Englishman the man would never know it, for alcohol is a sure cure for reptilian poison, but the poor snake would wriggle faintly away to some secluded spot and die sadly. This is why, I presume, I have seen no rattlesnakes in London; they cannot safely prosecute the business for which they were created. They are similarly worried, I believe, in West Virginia.

To drink this vile stuff successfully one would want his stomach glass-lined and backed up with fire-brick. I never would attempt it except as the man did in Kentucky. He walked into a bar, and distrusting the quality of the whisky, called up a negro and gave him a glass before drinking his own. The landlord, divining his purpose, knocked the glass out of the negro’s hand. “No you don’t!” said the Boniface, “that nigger is mine, and worth fifteen hundred dollars. Get an Irishman to try it on.”

And while I am about it I may say that alcoholization is not confined to the lower order by any means. Almost every body drinks something beside water. The tradesman who can afford it has claret at his table, and during the day his “drains” of brandy are very frequent. The gentry and nobility drink more costly wines and better brandy, but liquor is everywhere. Nothing is done without the accompanying drink; it is universal and in all places. The climate prevents the injury that would visit the same man in America, but it hurts. If the English could only live as temperately as the Americans they would be the greatest race of people on earth.

The exclusiveness of the English is manifest in their vices as in their virtues. Every bar is divided in the front by partitions, one for each class. Over the one designated as “the private bar,” you get precisely the same liquors as at the others, but you pay more for it, because laborers and the like are not admitted. One compartment exacts four pence, the next three pence, and the last and lowest two pence. But all are served out of the same wood.

But very few men are employed behind English bars, women filling those places. The London bar-maid is an institution to be studied. To begin with she must be pretty, for being pretty is a part of her qualifications. As her feet cannot be seen, owing to her standing behind the bar, she is generally pretty. Then they are required to dress well, and all in one establishment dress their hair alike. In one place the maids part their hair on one side, in another on the other, and in a third in the middle. They are alike in each shop.

They are required to make themselves pleasant to customers, for each one is expected to influence an amount of trade to the house. They are exceedingly free and easy damsels, without being positively indelicate, and there isn’t a cabman in the city who is so much a master of chaff as they are. They will wink and leer at you in the most free way possible, they will talk to the very verge of indelicacy if they think it will please you, and if they form another judgment of your tastes they will be as sedate as priests. These bar-maids were all born a great while ago, and have improved all their time.

They are not only expected to be pretty, but they must have the power of extracting drinks for themselves from the young or old fellows who delight to chaff with them. If the young fellow who is enjoying the delight of her conversation is not sufficiently prompt, the warning eye of the landlord or landlady intimates that she has wasted enough time upon him, and she simply asks him, when he has ordered a drink for himself, if he won’t treat her, and he always does. Per consequence by eleven at night the gentle maids are in a condition highly satisfactory to the house, for their drunkenness represents so much money in his till. He who serves the British public with drink would utilize the very soul of an employe to make money, man or woman.

As a rule the wife of the landlord of a popular drinking place takes personal charge of the bar, and she is a thousand times more cruel and grasping than her husband. When a woman does unsex herself, she can give a man points in wickedness that he never dreamed of. These wives are as eager to have liquor paid for for themselves as bar-maids, and the sharp eye they keep upon the girls to see that they swallow enough to make the business profitable is something wonderful.

They are invariably dressed very richly, with elaborate coiffures, and sparkling with diamonds. As the British young man prefers blonde hair to any other, the landladies are mostly of that persuasion. If they were born brunettes there are arts by which they can be changed, and besides wigs are very cheap in this country.

The British woman drinks as much as the British man, and possibly more. I am not speaking of the low, degraded woman, but of the respectability. It is nothing singular to see women, respectable women, sitting in bars with their husbands and lovers, and the amount of stout and “brandy cold,” they make away with is something wonderful.

I was through the wonderful park at Richmond the other day. It was a holiday, and all London was out of the city in the parks. All the little roadside inns were filled with the populace, women and children being largely in the majority; and there was never a woman, no matter if she had a child at the breast, who did not have a monster pot of pewter filled either with porter or ale. And they gave it to their little children as freely as an American mother would milk.

The drinking house in London is, as a rule, especially for drinking. There are no free lunches, no nibbling bits, free on any bar. Nothing but liquids are sold. An American speculator conceived the brilliant idea of starting a bar with the addition of the American free lunch, with which to attract trade. It did attract altogether too much. In twenty minutes the lunch, which should have lasted all day, was gone, and the British public was indignant that it was not renewed. They pronounced the proprietor a swindle, and the speculation was a disastrous failure.

At some of the bars an attempt is made to take the curse off the liquor traffic by making some pretence of selling eatables. But the British public knows this is a sham, and resents it by never buying any comestibles at the counter. The British public scorns eating in such a place, and insists upon drinks. Indeed, the British public won’t eat at all as long as it can drink.

What they generally have in these places under glass covers, are curiously indigestible meat pies, sandwiches, cheese, cakes and buns. Sometimes at railway stations a hungry Briton buys and partakes of these things, but not often, and never without his glass of something to wash it down. This is the time I forgive him for drinking. It is necessary.

The sandwich is made either of ham or beef, and may be said to be the universal cold refreshment. It is about four inches long by two wide, and is a miracle of thinness. It is the thinnest thing on earth. I have often purchased them, not to eat, but to admire this quality. How bread and meat can be cut so thin, especially bread, is one of the mysteries that never will be solved till I penetrate a public kitchen and see the operation. It is an art I suppose, and the professor of it gets, I presume, a very high salary. He ought to. The bread is stringy enough and the meat tough enough to be cut as thin as might be desired, but the puzzle is how any one can acquire the skill to cut it, that way. But they do it. The English sandwich is more an object of interest to me than the obelisk, and is just about as digestible. I would as soon undertake to eat the one as the other.

The meat pie is made of hashed beef, the fat being put in liberally, enclosed in a wrapper of dough, and all baked together, in some sort of way. I could procure and write out the process, but being a true American and loving the American people I will not. It is utterly indigestible. I ate one at eleven P.M. one night, and woke up in the morning feeling as though I had swallowed the plaster bust of the infant Samuel at prayer that stood on my mantel. The pie is a trifle worse than the sandwich. The cheese cake may be dismissed with the simple remark that it is a trifle worse than the meat pie. The bun is a stand-off as to the others. Altogether they make a frightful stomachic quartet. But the British public, who know nothing of our hash and other luxuries, are content with them, and I don’t know as I shall undertake to reform them in this particular. I pity them, but there are so many things to reform here that I shall not attempt any movement in that direction. Life is very short.

The Englishman takes his liquor straight, or neat, as they call it. Mixed drinks are entirely unknown. The sherry cobbler, the mint julep, the fragrant cock-tail, are never heard of in regular English bars, but the drouthy man who drinks, and they all do, takes either brandy or Scotch or Irish whisky, raw from a barrel, and swallows his portion and walks away satisfied. One woman in a famous drinking place was taught by an American to make cock-tails, and the fame of the mixture drew all the Americans to this particular place. The proprietor was sore displeased at this trade, and raised the price two pence above what was regular, to keep it away. It took too much of the girl’s time to compound the mixture.

Drinking does not have the effect upon an Englishman that it does upon an American. The Englishman is a more stolid and phlegmatic man anyhow, and the climate is less exciting. There is not the exhilaration in the atmosphere that there is in America, and the moist humidity that you exist in is very favorable to the consumption of alcoholic drinks. I had got so before I had been here a week, that I think I could have endured a glass of brandy and water. I did not do it, but I say I could have done it.

The prices of liquors average quite as high as in America, and tobacco and everything made of it, is much higher and the quality is vile. A decent cigar, or one counted decent here, costs twenty-five cents, it being of the grade that in New York sells for ten cents.

No tobacco is chewed except by sailors, and the Englishman, very properly, considers it a disgusting habit, only to be practiced by very low people. In consequence of the high price of tobacco, pipes and cigarettes are very generally used. The Englishman of the better class smokes his pipe upon the street, the same as an American does his cigar. He prefers a pipe to a cigar, possibly because it is better, and possibly because it is cheaper. Your Englishman loves dearly to get the value of his money, and he generally does it.

The lover of drink in America, especially our German fellow citizens, are emphatic in their denunciation of the liquor laws of the United States. They ought to live in England a little while to appreciate the privileges they have at home. Hartford, Connecticut, is, I believe, a paradise to those who live there. One old lady who was born and had always lived in Hartford, came to die—an impertinence of Nature, as all Hartford people firmly believe. People should die in other places, but not in Hartford. But this old lady had come to death, and her minister was consoling her.

“I trust, Mrs. Thompson,” he said, professionally, “that you are prepared to die?”

“I am,” was her answer; “I owe no pew rent.”

“And are you content with the change?”

“Well, on the whole, yes. Heaven is no doubt a very nice place, but I shall greatly miss my Hartford privileges.”

There is no especial moral to this story, except that if our German population were compelled to endure English law they would greatly miss their American privileges. While you can get all the drink you want during the day, you must either have it at home or go without it after twelve o’clock at night.

In London no liquor can be procured after twelve o’clock at night. Every bar, big or little, is closed, and this law is not evaded, for the risk is too great. A man’s license would be taken from him immediately, and without remedy.

Persons are not licensed to sell liquor in England—it is the premises that are licensed. The Board having it in charge license one public house in a district, basing it upon the supposed necessity, and these premises hold this license till deprived of it by violation of law. If you desire to sell liquor you cannot go and rent a room and open your bar; you are compelled to buy the lease of a place which carries the license with it. Consequently a licensed place is a valuable piece of property. One at the corner of St. Martin’s street and Orange, a dingy building in a dingy neighborhood, was bought by an American to be used as an American bar, and he paid twenty-five thousand dollars bonus for the lease. The annual rental of the place is fifteen hundred dollars, and the lease for which he paid the bonus has forty-five years to run. For any other business the bonus would have been next to nothing in that neighborhood.

Sunday is an especially drouthy day in London. All the bars are closed till one o’clock P.M., and are then open but an hour. Then they are closed till six, and are permitted to keep open from that hour till eleven. And let it be remembered that law in England is law. You cannot laugh at it as you do in America. There is no evasion of this law attempted. The publics are required to be closed and they are closed. There are no side-doors, as in New York—there is no selling on the sly—they are closed. The only exception is at the railroad stations. The refreshment bars there are permitted to be kept open as long as trains arrive or depart, for the British Government recognizes the necessity of an Englishman having his grog till the prescribed hour for his getting into his bed. The thirsty soul who pants for beer after twelve goes to Charing Cross station, and buys a ticket to the first station out, which is “tuppence ha’penny,” or five cents. Then he walks into the bar, and being a “traveler,” can buy, drink and pay for all the stimulants he desires, till the last train has arrived or departed for the night. His ticket he puts into his pocket, to be used when he desires.

The night trade in liquor is something enormous. A landlord in the Haymarket, whose lease is about expiring, is now paying one thousand dollars a year rent, and the proprietors have notified him that his renewal will cost him just five times that sum. He told me that he should not renew, but that he would gladly if he were allowed to keep open till half-past twelve, a half hour after the regular time. That half hour each day would more than make the difference in rent.

A walk along Piccadilly after twelve explains this difference. The street, from end to end, is crowded with prostitutes, and drunken rakes who think they are having a good time, but they are not. They walk up and down, chaffing with these poor unfortunates. They take them into the publics, and pay for their drinks, all of which the landlord not only approves of but encourages. And the English prostitute can drink as heartily and just as long as any man alive. She has just as drouthy a system, and it takes just as much to fill it. And there they sit, and chaff, and booze, till the clock strikes twelve and the place is closed. The landlord turns off the gas and puts up his shutters, cursing the law that compels him to close just as his harvest begins.

As there are literally tens of thousands of these women walking the street, and as ninety per cent of them are drunk at ten, with a carrying capacity of continuing to drink every minute as long as anybody will pay for it, and as there is an equal number of men prowling the streets whose highest idea of amusement is to pay for it, the importance of an extra half hour after midnight may be appreciated.

But it is of no use. Law is law in England, and whether the citizen likes it or not, he is compelled to obey it in letter and spirit. Were a public house to be open a minute after the hour, a policeman would walk in and close it for him, and the next day the nearest magistrate would revoke his license, and he could never get one again. No proprietor would rent him a place, for the license is too valuable to be risked by a violator of law.

There are a few bars in London that make a specialty of American drinks, which are very curious. The names they palm off as American are very funny to an American, because they are never heard of over there. None of my readers ever go into bars, except for curiosity, but just imagine this list of drinks:

“Copper-cooler,” “Pick-me-up,” “Our Swizzle,” “Maiden’s Blush,” “Bosom-caresser,” “Corpse-reviver,” “Flash-of-Lightning,” and so on.

And these names are actually believed by Englishmen to be genuinely American, and in common use in the States.

Ice is about the scarcest thing in England, and cannot be had at the majority of bars. At some of the very best it will be furnished, if very forcibly asked for, but then in too small quantities to be satisfactory to an American, who is accustomed to taking his drinks ice cold. The frozen reminiscence of Winter is rather expensive here, and, besides that, the Englishman very rightly considers it unhealthy. The water is drank in its natural temperature, and it is really wonderful how soon one becomes accustomed to it.

The prices of strong beverages run about the same as in the United States. Brandy is three pence, six cents of our Bird of Freedom money, and when the amount is considered, your three pence buys about the same as twelve and one-half cents in New York. Malt liquors are about the same. The glass is a trifle smaller, and the regular price at the small publics is two pence, an equivalent, quantity considered, of five cents.

The quality of malt liquors is a long way below the American article, and America, singular as it may seem, drinks better English ale than the Englishman does. The ale made here for home consumption is vile stuff, while that made for export is infinitely better. The Englishman eats what he cannot sell.

To get at these facts concerning drinking has cost me an inconceivable amount of wear and tear of feeling, which sacrifice I trust my readers will appreciate.