It flourishes on every corner and between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by men.
Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their fathers and mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their elders, listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation, catching the contagion of it, familiarising themselves with licentiousness and debauchery.
Mrs.Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does not frown upon is the public-house.

No disgrace or shame attaches to it, nor to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of entering it.
I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, "I never drink spirits when in a public-'ouse." She was a young and pretty waitress, and she was laying down to another waitress her pre-eminent respectability and discretion.

Mrs.Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that it was quite proper for a clean young girl to drink beer, and to go into a public-house to drink it.
Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often the men and women are unfit to drink it.

On the other hand, it is their very unfitness that drives them to drink it.

Ill-fed, suffering from innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the sickly stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory operative hankers after excessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods.