Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill CHAPTER III THE FRIENDLY BOWL Hard things are said of the London public-house. It is dirty; it is dingy; there is nothing to sit on; there is nothing to read; it possesses neither intellect nor domino set; it is not a place where a man can take his wife and family; it should be improved, it should be suppressed (subtle distinction), and so on. The curious side of these assaults is that the people who rave at the public-house are not the people one sees in it, and one wonders whether they passionately desire public-houses after their own heart, and, presumably, for their own use. I have visions of the public-house of their dreams, aesthetic and antiseptic, furnished, according to persuasion, with Fabian tracts, or tracts of greater orthodoxy. I imagine a staid crowd in that reformed public- house, let us say, the Reverend Dr Horton and party, quaffing the foaming cider-cup and discussing the principles of reconstruction; Mr Sidney Webb and Mr Bernard Shaw passionately engaged at spillikins . . . and the working man in the modest background. The idea has little attraction, because, frankly, I like the London public-house, just as I like the Paris cafe" and the German beer-hall. I do not see why we should make our public-houses into Parisian cafe's, for our needs differ from those of Parisians, and we do not, among other things, visit public-houses to play dominoes or to read The Spectator. Men go to public-houses to drink, either because they are thirsty, or because they like drink. Notably, the working man goes there to be rid of that wife and family of which he sees quite enough. I know it is difficult for the well-to-do man, whose house contains ten rooms, who has a private room at his office, and a sulking chair at his club, to understand that the working man, w...