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Many visit the public-houses and try to drink themselves out of their gloom. “To get drunk,” we have been told, is “the shortest way out of Manchester,” and many citizens in every city go at any rate some distance along this way. They find they live a larger, fuller life as, standing in the warm bright bar, they drink and talk as if they were “lords”. The returns which suggest that the drink bill of a workman’s family is 5s. or 6s. a week prove how popular is this use of leisure, and they who begin a holiday by drinking probably spend the rest of it in sleeping. The identification of rest with sleep is very common, and a workman who knows he has a fair claim to rest thinks himself justified in sleeping or dozing hour after hour during Saturday and Sunday. “What,” I once asked an engineer, “should I find most of your mates doing if I called on Sunday?” His answer was short: “Sleeping”.

Another large body of workers as soon as they are free hurry off to some form of excitement. They go in their thousands to see a football-match, they yell with those who yell, they are roused by the spectacle of battle, and they indulge in hot “sultry” talk. Or they go to some race or trial of strength on which bets are possible. They feel in the rise and fall of the chance of winning a new stirring of their dull selves, and they dream of wealth to be enjoyed in wearing a coat with a fur collar and in becoming owners of sporting champions. Or they go to music halls—1,250,000 go every week in London—where if the excitement be less violent it still avails to move their thoughts into other channels. They see colour instead of dusky dirt, they hear songs instead of the clash of machinery, they are interested as a performer risks his life, and the jokes make no demands on their thoughts. The theatres probably are less popular, at any rate among men, but they attract great numbers, especially to plays which appeal to generous impulses. An audience enjoys the easy satisfaction of shouting down a villain. The same sort of excitement is that provided on Sunday mornings in the clubs, where in somewhat sordid surroundings, a few actors and singers try to stir the muddled feelings of their audience by appeals, which are more or less vulgar.