How often have you seen a drunken man stagger along the street!
His clothes are soiled from falling, his face is bruised, his
eyes are dull. Sometimes he curses the boys that tease him.
Sometimes he tries to smile, in a drunken effort to placate
pitiless, childish cruelty.
His body, worn out, can stand no more, and he mumbles that he is
GOING HOME.
The children persecute him, throw things at him, laugh at him,
running ahead of him.
GROWN MEN AND WOMEN, TOO, OFTEN LAUGH WITH THE CHILDREN, nudge
each other, and actually find humor in the sight of a human being
sunk below the lowest animal.
The sight of a drunken man going home should make every other man
and woman sad and sympathetic, and, horrible as the sight is, it
should be useful, by inspiring, in those who see it, a
determination to avoid and to help others avoid that man's fate.
----
That reeling drunkard is GOING HOME.
He is going home to children who are afraid of him, to a wife
whose life he has made miserable.
He is going home, taking with him the worst curse in the
world--to suffer bitter remorse himself after having inflicted
suffering on those whom he should protect.
AND AS HE GOES HOME MEN AND WOMEN, KNOWING WHAT THE HOME-COMING
MEANS, LAUGH AT HIM AND ENJOY THE SIGHT. ----
In the old days in the arena it occasionally happened that
brothers were set to fight each other. When they refused to
fight they were forced to it by red-hot irons applied to their
backs.
We have progressed beyond the moral condition of human beings
guilty of such brutality as that. But we cannot call ourselves
civilized while our imaginations and sympathies are so dull that
the reeling drunkard is thought an amusing spectacle.