The number, misery, and hopeless condition of the slaves of strong
drink, of both sexes, have been already dealt with at considerable
length.
We have seen that there are in Great Britain one million of men and
women, or thereabouts, completely under the domination of this cruel
appetite. The utter helplessness of Society to deal with the drunkard
has been proved again and again, and confessed on all hands by those
who have had experience on the subject. As we have before said, the
general feeling of all those who have tried their hands at this kind of
business is one of despair. They think the present race of drunkards
must be left to perish, that every species of effort having proved
vain, the energies expended in the endeavour to rescue the parents will
be laid out to greater advantages upon the children.
There is a great deal of truth in all this. Our own efforts have been
successful in a very remarkable degree. Some of the bravest, most
devoted, and successful workers in our ranks are men and women who were
once the most abject slaves of the intoxicating cup. Instances of this
have been given already. We might multiply them by thousands.
Still, when compared with the ghastly array which the drunken army
presents to-day, those rescued are comparatively few. The great reason
for this is the simple fact that the vast majority of those addicted to
the cup are its veritable slaves. No amount of reasoning, or earthly
or religious considerations, can have any effect upon a man who is so
completely under the mastery of this passion that he cannot break away
from it, although he sees the most terrible consequences staring him in
the face.
The drunkard promises and vows, but promises and vows in vain.
Occasionally he will put forth frantic efforts to deliver himself,
but only to fall again in the presence of the opportunity.
The insatiable crave controls him. He cannot get away from it.
It compels him to drink, whether he will or not, and, unless delivered
by an Almighty hand, he will drink himself into a drunkard's grave and
a drunkard's hell.
Our annals team with successful rescues effected from the ranks of
the drunken army. The following will not only be examples of this,
but will tend to illustrate the strength and madness of the passion
which masters the slave to strong drink.
Barbara.--She had sunk about as low as any woman could when we found
her. From the age of eighteen, when her parents had forced her to
throw over her sailor sweetheart and marry a man with "good prospects,"
she had been going steadily down.
She did not love her husband, and soon sought comfort from the little
public-house only a few steps from her own door. Quarrels in her home
quickly gave place to fighting, angry curses, and oaths, and soon her
life became one of the most wretched in the place. Her husband made no
pretence of caring for her, and when she was ill and unable to earn
money by selling fish in the streets, he would go off for a few months,
leaving her to keep the house and support herself and babies as best
she could. Out of her twenty years of married life, ten were spent in
these on-and-off separations. And so she got to live for only one
thing--drink. It was life to her; and the mad craving grew to be
irresistible. The woman who looked after her at the birth of her child
refused to fetch her whisky, so when she had done all she could and
left the mother to rest, Barbara crept out of bed and crawled slowly
down the stairs over the way to the tap-room, where she sat drinking
with the baby, not yet an hour old, in her arms. So things went on,
until her life got so unbearable that she determined to have done with
it. Taking her two eldest children with her, she went down to the bay,
and deliberately threw them both into the water, jumping in herself
after them. "Oh, mither, mither, dinna droon me!" wailed her little
three-year-old Sarah, but she was determined and held them under the
water, till, seeing a boat put out to the rescue she knew that she was
discovered. Too late to do it now, she thought, and, holding both
children, swam quickly back to the shore. A made-up story about having
fallen into the water satisfied the boatman, and Barbara returned home
dripping and baffled. But little Sarah did not recover from the shock,
and after a few weeks her short life ended, and she was laid in the
Cemetery.
Yet another time, goaded to desperation, she tried to take her life
by hanging herself, but a neighbour came in and cut her down
unconscious, but still living. She became a terror to all the
neighbourhood, and her name was the bye-word for daring and desperate
actions. But our Open-Air Meetings attracted her, she came to the
Barracks, got saved, and was delivered from her love of drink and sin.
From being a dread her home became a sort of house of refuge in the
little low street where she lived; other wives as unhappy as herself
would come in for advice and help. Anyone knew that Barbie was
changed, and loved to do all she could for her neighbours.
A few months ago she came up to the Captain's in great distress over a
woman who lived just opposite. She had been cruelly kicked and cursed
by her husband, who had finally bolted the door against her, and she
had turned to Barbie as the only hope. And of course Barbie took her
in, with her rough-and-ready kindness got her to bed, kept out the
other women who crowded round to sympathise and declaim against the
husband's brutality, was both nurse and doctor for the poor woman till
her child was born and laid in the mother's arms. And then, to
Barbie's distress, she could do no more, for the woman, not daring to
be absent longer, got up as best she could, and crawled on hands and
knees down the little steep steps, across the street, and back to her
own door. "But, Barbie!" exclaimed the Captain, horrified,
"you should have nursed her, and kept her until she was strong enough."
But Barbie answered by reminding the Captain of "John's" fearful
temper, and how it might cost the woman her life to be absent from her
home more than a couple of hours.
The second is the case of--
Maggie.--She had a home, but seldom was sober enough to reach it at
nights. She would fall down on the doorsteps until found by some
passer-by or a policeman.
In one of her mad freaks a boon-companion happened to offend her.
He was a little hunch-back, and a fellow-drunkard; but without a
moment's hesitation, Maggie seized him and pushed him head-foremost
down the old-fashioned wide sewer of the Scotch town. Had not some one
seen his heel's kicking out and rescued him, he would surley have been
suffocated.
One winter's night Maggie had been drinking heavily, fighting, too,
as usual, and she staggered only as far, on her way home, as the narrow
chain-pier. Here she stumbled and fell, and lay along on the snow, the
blood oozing from her cuts, and her hair spread out in a tangled mass.
At 5 in the morning, some factory girls, crossing the bridge to their
work, came upon her, lying stiff and stark amidst the snow and
darkness.
To rouse her from her drunken sleep was hard, but to raise her from the
ground was still harder. The matted hair and blood had frozen fast to
the earth, and Maggie was a prisoner. After trying to free her in
different ways, and receiving as a reward volleys of abuse and bad
language, one of the girl's ran for a kettle of boiling water, and by
pouring it all around her, they succeeded by degrees in melting her on
to her feet again! But she came to our Barracks, and got soundly
converted, and the Captain was rewarded for nights and days of toil by
seeing her a saved and sober woman.
All went right till a friend asked her to his house, to drink his
health, and that of his newly-married wife. "I wouldn't ask you to
take anything strong," he said. "Drink to me with this lemonade."
And Maggie, nothing suspecting, drank, and as she drank tasted in the
glass her old enemy, whisky! The man laughed at her dismay, but a
friend rushed off to tell the Captain. "I may be in time, she has not
really gone back"; and the Captain ran to the house, tying her bonnet
strings as she ran. "It's no good--keep awa'--I don't want to
see'er, Captain," wailed Maggie "let me have some more--oh, I'm on
fire inside." But the Captain was firm, and taking her to her home,
she locked herself in with the woman, and sat with the key in her
pocket, while Maggie, half mad with craving, paced the floor like a
caged animal, threatening and entreating by terms. "Never while I live,"
was all the answer she could get; so she turned to the door, and busied
herself there a moment or two. A clinking noise. The Captain started
up--to see the door open and Maggie rush through it! Accustomed to
stealing and all its "dodges," she had taken the lock off the door,
and was away to the nearest public-house.
Down the stairs, Captain after her, into the gin palace; but before the
astonished publican could give her the drink she was clamouring for,
the "bonnet" was by her side, "If you dare to serve her, I'll break the
glass before it reaches her lips. She shall not have any!" and so
Maggie was coaxed away, and shielded till the passion was over, and she
was Herself once more.
But the man who gave her the whisky durst not leave his house for
weeks. The roughs got to know of the trap he had laid for her,
and would have lynched him could they have got hold of him.
The third is the case of Rose.
Rose was ruined, deserted, and left to the streets when only a girl of
thirteen, by a once well-to-do man, who is now, we believe, closing his
days in a workhouse in the North of England.
Fatherless, motherless, and you might almost say friendless, Rose trod
the broad way to destruction, with all its misery and shame, for twelve
long years. Her wild, passionate nature, writhing under the wrong
suffered, sought forgetfulness in the intoxicating cup, and she soon
became a notorious drunkard. Seventy-four times during her career she
was dragged before the magistrates, and seventy-four times, with one
exception, she was punished, but the seventy-fourth time she was
as far off reformation as ever. The one exception happened on the
Queen's Jubilee Day. On seeing her well-known face again before him, the
magistrate enquired, "How many times has this woman been here before?"
The Police Superintendent answered, "Fifty times." The magistrate
remarked, in somewhat grim humour, "Then this is her Jubilee," and,
moved by the coincidence, he let her go free. So Rose spent her
jubilee out of prison.
It is a wonder that the dreadful, drunken, reckless, dissipated life
she lived did not hurry her to an early grave; it did affect her
reason, and for three weeks she was locked up in Lancaster Lunatic
Asylum, having really gone mad through drink and sin.
In evidence of her reckless nature, it is said that after her second
imprisonment she vowed she would never again walk to the police
station; consequently, when in her wild orgies the police found it
necessary to arrest her, they had to get her to the police station as
best they could, sometimes by requisitioning a wheelbarrow or a cart,
or the use of a stretcher, and sometimes they had to carry her right
out. On one occasion, towards the close of her career, when driven to
the last-named method, four policemen were carrying her to the station,
and she was extra violent, screaming, plunging and biting, when, either
by accident or design, one of the policemen let go of her head, and it
came in contact with the curbstone, causing the blood to pour forth in
a stream. As soon as they placed her in the cell the poor creature
caught the blood in her hands, and literally washed her face with it.
On the following morning she presented a pitiable sight, and before
taking her into the court the police wanted to wash her, but she
declared she would draw any man's blood who attempted to put a finger
upon her; they had spilt her blood, and she would carry it into the
court as a witness against them. On coming out of gaol for the last
time, she met with a few Salvationists beating the drum and singing
"Oh! the Lamb, the bleeding Lamb; He was found worthy." Rose, struck
with the song, and impressed with the very faces of the people,
followed them, saying to herself, "I never before heard anything like
that, or seen such happy looking people." She came into the Barracks;
her heart was broken; she found her way to the Penitent Form, and
Christ, with His own precious blood, washed her sins away. She arose
from her knees and said to the Captain, "It is all right now."
Three months after her conversion a great meeting was held in the
largest hall in the town, where she was known to almost every inhabitant.
There were about three thousand people present. Rose was called upon
to give her testimony to the power of God to save. A more enthusiastic
wave of sympathy never greeted any speaker than that which met her from
that crowd, every one of whom was familiar with her past history.
After a few broken words, in which she spoke of the wonderful change
that had taken place, a cousin, who, like herself, had lived a
notoriously evil life, came to the Cross.
Rose is now War Cry sergeant. She goes into the brothels and
gin palaces and other haunts of vice, from which she was rescued,
and sells more papers than any other Soldier.
The Superintendent of Police, soon after her conversion, told the
Captain at the Corps that in rescuing Rose a more wonderful work had
been done than he had seen in all the years gone by.
S. was a native of Lancashire, the son of poor, but pious, parents.
He was saved when sixteen years of age. He was first an Evangelist,
then a City Missionary for five or six years, and afterwards a Baptist
Minister. He then fell under the influence of drink, resigned,
and became a commercial traveller, but lost his berth through drink.
He was then an insurance agent, and rose to be superintendent, but was
again dismissed through drink. During his drunken career he had
delirium tremens four times, attempted suicide three times, sold up six
homes, was in the workhouse with his wife and family three times.
His last contrivance for getting drink was to preach mock sermons,
and offer mock prayers in the tap-rooms.
After one of these blasphemous performances in a public-house, on the
words, "Are you Saved?" he was challenged to go to the Salvation
Barracks. He went, and the Captain, who knew him well, at once made
for him, to plead for his soul, but S. knocked him down, and rushed
back to the public-house for more drink. He was, however, so moved by
what he had heard that he was unable to raise the liquor to his mouth,
although he made three attempts. He again returned to the meeting,
and again quitted it for the public-house. He could not rest, and for
the third time he returned to the Barracks. As he entered the last
time the Soldiers were singing: --
"Depth of mercy, can there be
Mercy still reserved for me?
Can my God his wrath forbear?
Me, the chief of Sinners, spare?
This song impressed him still further; he wept, and remained in the
Barracks under deep conviction until midnight. He was drunk all the
next day, vainly trying to drown his convictions. The Captain visited
him at night, but was quickly thrust out of the house. He was there
again next morning, and prayed and talked with S. for nearly two hours.
Poor S. was in despair. He persisted that there was no mercy for him.
After a long struggle, however, hope sprung up, he fell upon his knees,
confessed his sins, and obtained forgiveness.
When this happened, his furniture consisted of a soap-box for a table,
and starch boxes for chairs. His wife, himself, and three children,
had not slept in a bed for three years. He has now a happy family,
a comfortable home, and has been the means of leading numbers of other
slaves of sin to the Saviour, and to a truly happy life.
Similar cases, describing the deliverance of drunkards from the bondage
of strong drink, could be produced indefinitely. There are Officers
marching in our ranks to-day, who where once gripped by this fiendish
fascination, who have had their fetters broken, and are now free men in
the Army. Still the mighty torrent of Alcohol, fed by ten thousand
manufactories, sweeps on, bearing with it, I have no hesitation in
saying, the foulest, bloodiest tide that ever flowed from earth to
eternity. The Church of the living God ought not--and to say nothing
about religion, the people who have any humanity ought not, to rest
without doing something desperate to rescue this half of a million who
are in the eddying maelstrom. We purpose, therefore, the taking away
of the people from the temptation which they cannot resist. We would
to God that the temptation could be taken away from them, that every
house licensed to send forth the black streams of bitter death were
closed, and closed for ever. But this will not be, we fear, for the
present at least.
While in one case drunkenness may be resolved into a habit, in another
it must be accounted a disease. What is wanted in the one case,
therefore, is some method of removing the man out of the sphere of the
temptation, and in the other for treating the passion as a disease,
as we should any other physical affection, bringing to bear upon it
every agency, hygienic and otherwise, calculated to effect a cure.
The Dalrymple Homes, in which, on the order of a magistrate and by
their own consent, Inebriates can be confined for a time, have been a
partial success in dealing with this class in both these respects;
but they are admittedly too expensive to be of any service to the poor.
It could never be hoped that working people of themselves, or with the
assistance of their friends, would be able to pay two pounds a week for
the privilege of being removed away from the licensed temptations to
drink which surround them at every step. Moreover, could they obtain
admission they would feel themselves anything but at ease amongst the
class who avail themselves of these institutions. We propose to
establish Homes which will contemplate the deliverance, not of ones and
twos, but of multitudes, and which will be accessible to the poor,
or to persons of any class choosing to use them. This is our national
vice, and it demands nothing short of a national remedy--anyway,
one of proportions large enough to be counted national.
1. To begin with, there will be City Homes, into which a man can be
taken, watched over, kept out of the way of temptation, and if
possible delivered from the power of this dreadful habit.
In some cases persons would be taken in who are engaged in business in
the City in the day, being accompanied by an attendant to and from the
Home. In this case, of course, adequate remuneration for this extra
care would be required.
2. Country Homes, which we shall conduct on the Dalrymple principle;
that is, taking persons for compulsory confinement, they binding
themselves by a bond confirmed by a magistrate that they would
remain for a certain period. The general regulations for both
establishments would be something as follows: --
(1). There would be only one class in each establishment. If it was
found that the rich and the poor did not work comfortably
together, separate institutions must be provided.
(2). All would alike have to engage in some remunerative form of
employment. Outdoor work would be preferred, but indoor
employment would be arranged for those for whom it was most
suitable, and in such weather and at such times of the year when
garden work was impracticable.
(3). A charge of 10s. per week would be made. This could be
remitted when there was no ability to pay it.
The usefulness of such Homes is too evident to need any discussion.
There is one class of unfortunate creatures who must be objects of pity
to all who have any knowledge of their existence, and that is, those
men and women who are being continually dragged before the magistrates,
of whom we are constantly reading in the police reports, whose lives
are spent in and out of prison, at an enormous cost to the country,
and without any benefit to themselves.
We should then be able to deal with this class. It would be possible
for a magistrate, instead of sentencing the poor wrecks of humanity to
the sixty-fourth and one hundred and twentieth term of imprisonment,
to send them to this Institution, by simply remanding them to come up
for sentence when called for. How much cheaper such an arrangement
would be for the country!