And this sin, which begins in kindness and ends always in ut

THE ETHICS OF DRINK AND OTHER SOCIAL QUESTIONS

_OR_

_JOINTS IN OUR SOCIAL ARMOUR_

BY JAMES RUNCIMAN

_Author of "A Dream of the North Sea," "Skippers and Shellbacks," Etc_

London

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

27, PATERNOSTER ROW

MDCCCXCII [1892]

_THE ETHICS OF THE DRINK QUESTION_.

All the statistics and formal statements published about drink are no

doubt impressive enough to those who have the eye for that kind of

thing; but, to most of us, the word "million" means nothing at all, and

thus when we look at figures, and find that a terrific number of gallons

are swallowed, and that an equally terrific amount in millions sterling

is spent, we feel no emotion. It is as though you told us that a

thousand Chinamen were killed yesterday; for we should think more about

the ailments of a pet terrier than about the death of the Chinese, and

we think absolutely nothing definite concerning the "millions" which

appear with such an imposing intention when reformers want to stir the

public. No man's imagination was ever vitally impressed by figures, and

I am a little afraid that the statistical gentlemen repel people instead

of attracting them. The persons who screech and abuse the drink sellers

are even less effective than the men of figures; their opponents laugh

at them, and their friends grow deaf and apathetic in the storm of

whirling words, while cool outsiders think that we should be better

employed if we found fault with ourselves and sat in sackcloth and ashes

instead of gnashing teeth at tradesmen who obey a human instinct. The

publican is considered, among platform folk in the temperance body, as

even worse than a criminal, if we take all things seriously that they

choose to say, and I have over and over again heard vague blather about

confiscating the drink-sellers' property and reducing them to the state

to which they have brought others. Then there is the rant regarding

brewers. Why forget essential business only in order to attack a class

of plutocrats whom we have made, and whom our society worships with

odious grovellings? The brewers and distillers earn their money by

concocting poisons which cause nearly all the crime and misery in broad

Britain; there is not a soul living in these islands who does not know

the effect of the afore-named poisons; there is not a soul living who

does not very well know that there never was a pestilence crawling over

the earth which could match the alcoholic poisons in murderous power.

There is a demand for these poisons; the brewer and distiller supply the

demand and gain thereby large profits; society beholds the profits and

adores the brewer. When a gentleman has sold enough alcoholic poison to

give him the vast regulation fortune which is the drink-maker's

inevitable portion, then the world receives him with welcome and

reverence; the rulers of the nation search out honours and meekly bestow

them upon him, for can he not command seats, and do not seats mean

power, and does not power enable talkative gentry to feed themselves fat

out of the parliamentary trough? No wonder the brewer is a personage.

Honours which used to be reserved for men who did brave deeds, or

thought brave thoughts, are reserved for persons who have done nothing

but sell so many buckets of alcoholized fluid. Observe what happens when

some brewer's wife chooses to spend £5000 on a ball. I remember one

excellent lady carefully boasting (for the benefit of the Press) that

the flowers alone that were in her house on one evening cost in all

£2000. Well, the mob of society folk fairly yearn for invitations to

such a show, and there is no meanness too despicable to be perpetrated

by women who desire admission. So through life the drink-maker and his

family fare in dignity and splendour; adulation surrounds them; powerful

men bow to the superior force of money; wealth accumulates until the

amount in the brewer's possession baffles the mind that tries to

conceive it--and the big majority of our interesting race say that all

this is good. Considering, then, how the English people directly and

indirectly force the man of drink onward until he must of necessity

fancy there is something of the moral demi-god about him; considering

how he is wildly implored to aid in ruling us from Westminster;

considering that his aid at an election may procure him the same honour

which fell to the share of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham--may we not say

that the community makes the brewer, and that if the brewer's stuff mars

the community we have no business to howl at him. We are answerable for

his living, and moving, and having his being--the few impulsive people

who gird at him should rather turn in shame and try to make some

impression on the huge, cringing, slavering crowd who make the

plutocrat's pompous reign possible.

But for myself, I cannot be bothered with bare figures and vague abuse

nowadays; abstractions are nothing, and neat arguments are less than

nothing, because the dullest quack that ever quacked can always clench

an argument in a fashion. Every turn that talk can take on the drink

question brings the image of some man or woman, or company of men and

women, before me, and that image is alive to my mind. If you pelt me

with tabular forms, and tell me that each adult in Britain drank so many

pints last year, you might just as well recite a mathematical proof. I

fix on some one human figure that your words may suggest and the image

of the bright lad whom I saw become a dirty, loafing, thievish sot is

more instructive and more woeful than all your columns of numerals.

Before me passes a tremendous procession of the lost: I can stop its

march when I choose and fix on any given individual in the ranks, so

that you can hardly name a single fact concerning drink, which does not

recall to me a fellow-creature who has passed into the place of wrecked

lives and slain souls. The more I think about it the more plainly I see

that, if we are to make any useful fight against drink, we must drop the

preachee-preachee; we must drop loud execrations of the people whose

existence the State fosters; we must get hold of men who _know_ what

drinking means, and let them come heart to heart with the victims who

are blindly tramping on to ruin for want of a guide and friend. My

hideous procession of the damned is always there to importune me; I

gathered the dolorous recruits who form the procession when I was

dwelling in strange, darkened ways, and I know that only the magnetism

of the human soul could ever have saved one of them. If anybody fancies

that Gothenburg systems, or lectures, or little tiresome tracts, or

sloppy yarns about "Joe Tomkins's Temperance Turkey," or effusive

harangues by half-educated buffoons, will ever do any good, he must run

along the ranks of my procession with me, and I reckon he may learn

something. The comic personages who deal with the subject are cruelly

useless; the very notion of making jokes in presence of such a mighty

living Terror seems desolating to the mind; I could not joke over the

pest of drink, for I had as lief dance a hornpipe to the blare of the

last Trumpet.

I said you must have men who _know_, if you care to rescue any tempted

creature. You must also have men who address the individual and get fast

hold of his imagination; abstractions must be completely left alone, and

your workers must know so much of the minute details of the horror

against which they are fighting that each one who comes under their

influence shall feel as if the story of his life were known and his soul

laid bare. I do not believe that you will ever stop one man from

drinking by means of legislation; you may level every tavern over twenty

square miles, but you will not thereby prevent a fellow who has the

_bite_ of drink from boozing himself mad whenever he likes. As for

stopping a woman by such merely mechanical means as the closing of

public-houses, the idea is ridiculous to anybody who knows the foxy

cunning, the fixed determination of a female soaker. It is a great moral

and physical problem that we want to solve, and Bills and clauses are

only so much ink and paper which are ineffective as a schoolboy's

copybook. If a man has the desire for alcohol there is no power known

that can stop him from gratifying himself; the end to be aimed at is to

remove the desire--to get the drinker past that stage when the craving

presses hardly on him, and you can never bring that about by rules and

regulations. I grant that the clusters of drink-shops which are stuck

together in the slums of our big towns are a disgrace to all of us, but

if we closed 99 per cent. of them by Statute we should have the same

drunken crew left. While wandering far and wide over England, nothing

has struck me more than the steady resolution with which men will obtain

drink during prohibited hours; the cleverest administrator in the world

could not frame a network of clauses that could stop them; one might

close every drink-selling place in Britain, and yet those folks that had

a mind would get drink when they wanted it. You may ply bolts and bars;

you may stop the working of beer-engines and taps; but all will be

futile, for I repeat, that only by asserting power over hearts, souls,

imaginations, can you make any sort of definite resistance to the

awe-striking plague that envenoms the world. With every humility I am

obliged to say that many of the good people who aim at reform do not

know sufficiently well the central facts regarding drink and drinkers.

It is beautiful to watch some placid man who stands up and talks gently

to a gathering of sympathizers. The reposeful face, the reposeful voice,

the refinement, the assured faith of the speaker are comforting; but

when he explains that he has always been an abstainer, I am inclined to

wonder how he can possibly exchange ideas with an alcoholized man. How

_can_ he know where to aim his persuasions with most effect? Can he

really sympathize with the fallen? He has never lived with drunkards or

wastrels; he is apart, like a star, and I half think that he only has a

blurred vision of the things about which he talks so sweetly. He would

be more poignant, and more likely to draw people after him, if he had

living images burned into his consciousness. My own set of pictures all

stand out with ghastly plainness as if they were lit up by streaks of

fire from the Pit. I have come through the Valley of the Shadow into

which I ventured with a light heart, and those who know me might point

and say what was said of a giant: "There is the man who has been in

hell." It was true. Through the dim and sordid inferno, I moved as in a

trance for awhile, and that is what makes me so keen to warn those who

fancy they are safe; that is what makes me so discontented with the

peculiar ethical conceptions of a society which bows down before the

concocter of drink and spurns the lost one whom drink seizes. I have

learned to look with yearning pity and pardon on all who have been

blasted in life by their own weakness, and gripped by the trap into

which so many weakly creatures stumble. Looking at brutal life, catching

the rotting soul in the very fact, have made me feel the most careless

contempt for Statute-mongers, because I know now that you must conquer

the evil of evils by a straight appeal to one individual after another

and not by any screed of throttling jargon. One Father Mathew would be

worth ten Parliaments, even if the Parliaments were all reeling off

curative measures with unexampled velocity. You must not talk to a

county or a province and expect to be heard to any purpose; you must

address John, and Tom, and Mary. I am sure that dead-lift individual

effort will eventually reduce the ills arising from alcohol to a

minimum, and I am equally sure that the blind groping of half-informed

men who chatter at St. Stephen's will never do more good than the

chatter of the same number of jackdaws. It is impossible to help

admiring Sir Wilfrid Lawson's smiling courage, but I really do not

believe that he sees more than the faint shadows of the evils against

which he struggles; he does not know the true nature of the task which

he has attacked, and he fancies that securing temperance is an affair of

bolts, and bars, and police, and cackling local councils. I wish he had

lived with me for a year.

If you talk with strong emotion about the dark horror of drink you

always earn plenty of jibes, and it is true that you do give your hand

away, as the fighting men say. It is easy to turn off a light paragraph

like this: "Because A chooses to make a beast of himself, is that any

reason why B, and C, and D should be deprived of a wholesome article of

liquid food?"--and so on. Now, I do not want to trouble B, and C, and D

at all; A is my man, and I want to get at him, not by means of a

policeman, or a municipal officer of any kind, but by bringing my soul

and sympathy close to him. Moreover, I believe that if everybody had

definite knowledge of the wide ruin which is being wrought by drink

there would be a general movement which would end in the gradual

disappearance of drinking habits. At this present, however, our state is

truly awful, and I see a bad end to it all, and a very bad end to

England herself, unless a great emotional impulse travels over the

country. The same middle class which is envenomed by the gambling

madness is also the heir of all the more vile habits which the

aristocrats have abandoned. Drinking--conviviality I think they call

it--is not merely an excrescence on the life of the middle class--it

_is_ the life; and work, thought, study, seemly conduct, are now the

excrescences. Drink first, gambling second, lubricity third--those are

the chief interests of the young men, and I cannot say that the

interests of mature and elderly men differ very much from those of the

fledglings. Ladies and gentlemen who dwell in quiet refinement can

hardly know the scenes amid which our middle-class lad passes the span

of his most impressionable days. I have watched the men at all times and

in all kinds of places; every town of importance is very well known to

me, and the same abomination is steadily destroying the higher life in

all. The Chancellors of the Exchequer gaily repeat the significant

figures which give the revenue from alcohol; the optimist says that

times are mending; the comfortable gentry who mount the pulpits do not

generally care to ruffle the fine dames by talking about unpleasant

things--and all the while the curse is gaining, and the betting,

scoffing, degraded crew of drinkers are sliding merrily to destruction.

Some are able to keep on the slide longer than others, but I have seen

scores--hundreds--stop miserably, and the very faces of the condemned

men, with the last embruted look on them, are before me. My subject has

so many thousands of facets that I am compelled to select a few of the

most striking. Take one scene through which I sat not very long ago, and

then you may understand how far the coming regenerator will have to go.

A great room was filled by about 350 men and lads, all of the middle

class; a concert was going on, and I was a little curious to know the

kind of entertainment which the well-dressed company liked. Of course

there was drink in plenty, and the staff of waiters had a busy time; a

loud crash of talk went on between the songs, and, as the drink gathered

power on excited brains, this crash grew more and more discordant. Nice

lads, with smooth, pleasant faces, grew flushed and excited, and I am

afraid that I occupied myself in marking out possible careers for a good

many of them as I studied their faces. There was not much fun of the

healthy kind; fat, comfortable, middle-aged men laughed so heartily at

the faintest indecent allusion that the singers grew broader and

broader, and the hateful music-hall songs grew more and more risky as

the night grew onward. By the way, can anything be more loathsomely

idiotic than the average music-hall ditty, with its refrain and its

quaint stringing together of casual filthiness? If I had not wanted to

fix a new picture on my mind I should have liked better to be in a

tap-room among honestly brutal costers and scavengers than with that

sniggering, winking gang. The drink got hold, glasses began to be broken

here and there, the time was beaten with glass crushers, spoons, pipes,

and walking-sticks; and then the bolder spirits felt that the time for

good, rank, unblushing blackguardism had come. A being stepped up and

faced a roaring audience of enthusiasts who knew the quality of his

dirtiness; he launched out into an unclean stave, and he reduced his

admirers to mere convulsions. He was encored, and he went a trifle

further, until he reached a depth of bestiality below which a gaff in

Shoreditch could net descend. Ah! Those bonny lads, how they roared with

laughter, and how they exchanged winks with grinning elders! Not a

single obscure allusion to filth was lost upon them, and they took more

and more drink under pressure of the secret excitement until many of

them were unsteady and incoherent. I think I should shoot a boy of mine

if I found him enjoying such a foul entertainment. It was léze-Humanity.

The orgie rattled on, to the joy of all the steaming, soddened company,

and I am not able to guess where some of the songs and recitations came

from. There are deeps below deeps, and I suppose that there are skilled

literary workmen who have sunk so far that they are ready to supply the

unspeakable dirt which I heard.

There was a merry crowd at the bar when this astounding function ceased,

and the lively lads jostled, and laughed, and quoted some of the more

spicy specimens of nastiness which they had just heard.

Now, I should not have mentioned such an unsavoury business as this, but

that it illustrates in a curious way the fact that one is met and

countered by the power of Drink at every turn in this country. Among

that unholy audience were one or two worthies who ought by rights to

have called the police, and forced the promoters of the fun to appear

before the Bench in the morning. But then these magistrates had an

interest in Beer, and Brewery shares were pretty well represented in the

odious room, and thus a flagrant scandal was gently passed aside. The

worst of it is that, after a rouse like this, the young men do not care

to go to bed, so they adjourn to some one's rooms and play cards till

any hour. In the train next morning there are blotchy faces, dull eyes,

tongues with a bitter taste, and there is a general rush for "liveners"

before the men go to office or warehouse; and the day drags on until the

joyous evening comes, when some new form of debauch drowns the memory of

the morning's headache. Should you listen to a set of these men when the

roar of a long bar is at its height at night, you will find that the

life of the intellect has passed away from their midst. The fellows may

be sharp in a small way at business, and I am sure I hope they are; but

their conversation is painful in the extreme to any one who wishes to

retain a shred of respect for his own species. If you listen long, and

then fix your mind so that you can pick out the exact significance of

what you have heard, you become confounded. Take the scraps of "bar"

gabble. "So I says, 'Lay me fours.' And he winks and says, 'I'll give

you seven to two, if you like.' Well, you know, the horse won, and I

stood him a bottle out of the three pound ten, so I wasn't much in."

"'What!' says I; 'step outside along o' me, and bring your pal with you,

and I'll spread your bloomin' nose over your face.'" "_That_ corked

him." "I tell you Flyaway's a dead cert. I know a bloke that goes to

Newmarket regular, and he's acquainted with Reilly of the Greyhound, and

Reilly told him that he heard Teddy Martin's cousin say that Flyaway was

tried within seven pounds of Peacock. Can you have a better tip than

that?" "I'll give you the break, and we'll play for a bob and the

games." "Thanks, deah boy, I'll jest have one with you. Lor! wasn't I

chippy this morning? I felt as if the pavement was making rushes at me,

and my hat seemed to want a shoehorn to get it on or off for that

matter. Bill's whisky's too good." "I'm going out with a Judy on Sunday,

or else you'd have me with you. The girls won't leave me alone, and the

blessed dears can't be denied." So the talk goes steadily forward. What

can a bright lad learn there? Many of the assembly are very young, and

their features have not lost the freshness and purity of skin which give

such a charm to a healthy lad's appearance. Would any mother like to

see her favourite among that hateful crowd? I do not think that mothers

rightly know the sort of places which their darlings enter; I do not

think they guess the kind of language which the youths hear when the

chimes sound at midnight; they do not know the intricacies of a society

which half encourages callow beings to drink, and then kicks them into

the gutter if the drink takes hold effectually. The kindly, seemly woman

remains at home in her drawing-room, papa slumbers if he is one of the

stay-at-home sort; but Gerald, and Sidney, and Alfred are out in the

drink-shop hearing talk fit to make Rabelais turn queasy, or they are in

the billiard-room learning to spell "ruin" with all convenient speed, or

perhaps they have "copped it"--that is the correct phrase--rather early,

and they are swaggering along, shadowed by some creature--half girl,

half tiger-cat--who will bring them up in good time. If the women knew

enough, I sometimes think they would make a combined, nightly raid on

the boozing-bars, and bring their lads out.

Some hard-headed fellows may think that there is something grandmotherly

in the regrets which I utter over the cesspool in which so many of our

middle-class seem able to wallow without suffering asphyxia; but I am

only mournful because I have seen the plight of so many and many after

their dip in the sinister depths of the pool. I envy those stolid people

who can talk so contemptuously of frailty--I mean I envy them their

self-mastery; I quite understand the temperament of those who can be

content with a slight exhilaration, and who fiercely contemn the

crackbrain who does not know when to stop. No doubt it is a sad thing

for a man to part with his self-control, but I happen to hold a brief

for the crackbrain, and I say that there is not any man living who can

afford to be too contemptuous, for no one knows when his turn may come

to make a disastrous slip.

Most strange it is that a vice which brings instant punishment on him

who harbours it should be first of all encouraged by the very people who

are most merciless in condemning it. The drunkard has not to wait long

for his punishment; it follows hard on his sin, and he is not left to

the justice of another world. And yet, as we have said, this vice, which

entails such scathing disgrace and suffering, is encouraged in many

seductive ways. The talk in good company often runs on wine; the man who

has the deadly taint in his blood is delicately pressed to take that

which brings the taint once more into ill-omened activity; but, so long

as his tissues show no sign of that flabbiness and general

unwholesomeness which mark the excessive drinker, he is left unnoticed.

Then the literary men nearly always make the subject of drink attractive

in one way or other. We laugh at Mr. Pickwick and all his gay set of

brandy-bibbers; we laugh at John Ridd, with his few odd gallons of ale

per day; but let any man be seen often in the condition which led to Mr.

Pickwick's little accident, and see what becomes of him. He is soon

shunned like a scabbed sheep. One had better incur penal servitude than

fall into that vice from which the Government derives a huge

revenue--the vice which is ironically associated with friendliness, good

temper, merriment, and all goodly things. There are times when one is

minded to laugh for very bitterness.

And this sin, which begins in kindness and ends always in utter

selfishness--this sin, which pours accursed money into the

Exchequer--this sin, which consigns him who is guilty of it to a doom

worse than servitude or death--this sin is to be fought by Act of

Parliament! On the one hand, there are gentry who say, "Drink is a

dreadful curse, but look at the revenue." On the other hand, there are

those who say, "Drink is a dreadful thing; let us stamp it out by means

of foolscap and printers' ink." Then the neutrals say, "Bother both your

parties. Drink is a capital thing in its place. Why don't you leave it

alone?" Meantime the flower of the earth are being bitterly blighted. It

is the special examples that I like to bring out, so that the jolly lads

who are tempted into such places as the concert-room which I described

may perhaps receive a timely check. It is no use talking to me about

culture, and refinement, and learning, and serious pursuits saving a man

from the devouring fiend; for it happens that the fiend nearly always

clutches the best and brightest and most promising. Intellect alone is

not worth anything as a defensive means against alcohol, and I can

convince anybody of that if he will go with me to a common lodging-house

which we can choose at random. Yes, it is the bright and powerful

intellects that catch the rot first in too many cases, and that is why I

smile at the notion of mere book-learning making us any better. If I

were to make out a list of the scholars whom I have met starving and in

rags, I should make people gape. I once shared a pot of fourpenny ale

with a man who used to earn £2000 a year by coaching at Oxford. He was

in a low house near the Waterloo Road, and he died of cold and hunger

there. He had been the friend and counsellor of statesmen, but the vice

from which statesmen squeeze revenue had him by the throat before he

knew where he was, and he drifted toward death in a kind of constant

dream from which no one ever saw him wake. These once bright and

splendid intellectual beings swarm in the houses of poverty: if you pick

up with a peculiarly degraded one you may always be sure that he was one

of the best men of his time, and it seems as if the very rich quality of

his intelligence had enabled corruption to rankle through him so much

the more quickly. I have seen a tramp on the road--a queer, long-nosed,

short-sighted animal--who would read Greek with the book upside-down. He

was a very fine Latin scholar, and we tried him with Virgil; he could go

off at score when he had a single line given him, and he scarcely made a

slip, for the poetry seemed ingrained. I have shared a pennyworth of

sausage with the brother of a Chief Justice, and I have played a piccolo

while an ex-incumbent performed a dance which he described, I think, as

Pyrrhic. He fell in the fire and used hideous language in Latin and

French, but I do not know whether that was Pyrrhic also. Drink is the

dainty harvester; no puny ears for him, no faint and bending stalks: he

reaps the rathe corn, and there is only the choicest of the choice in

his sheaves. That is what I want to fix on the minds of young

people--and others; the more sense of power you have, the more pride of

strength you have, the more you are likely to be marked and shorn down

by the grim reaper; and there is little hope for you when the reaper

once approaches, because the very friends who followed the national

craze, and upheld the harmlessness of drink, will shoot out their lips

at you and run away when your bad moment comes.

The last person who ever suspects that a wife drinks is always the

husband; the last person who ever suspects that any given man is bitten

with drink is that man himself. So stealthily, so softly does the evil

wind itself around a man's being, that he very often goes on fancying

himself a rather admirable and temperate customer--until the crash

comes. It is all so easy, that the deluded dupe never thinks that

anything is far wrong until he finds that his friends are somehow

beginning to fight shy of him. No one will tell him what ails him, and I

may say that such a course would be quite useless, for the person warned

would surely fly into a passion, declare himself insulted, and probably

perform some mad trick while his nerves were on edge. Well, there comes

a time when the doomed man is disinclined for exertion, and he knows

that something is wrong. He has become sly almost without knowing it,

and, although he is pining for some stimulus, he pretends to go without,

and tries by the flimsiest of devices, to deceive those around him. Now

that is a funny symptom; the master vice, the vice that is the pillar of

the revenue, always, without any exception known to me, turns a man into

a sneak, and it generally turns him into a liar as well. So sure as the

habit of concealment sets in, so surely we may be certain that the

dry-rot of the soul has begun. The drinker is tremulous; he finds that

light beverages are useless to him, and he tries something that burns:

his nerve recovers tone; he laughs at himself for his early morning

fears, and he gets over another day. But the dry-rot is spreading; body

and soul react on each other, and the forlorn one soon begins to be

fatally false and weak in morals, and dirty and slovenly in person. Then

in the dead, unhappy nights he suffers all the torments that can be

endured if he wakes up while his day's supply of alcohol lies stagnant

in his system. No imagination is so retrospective as the drunkard's, and

the drunkard's remorse is the most terrible torture known. The wind

cries in the dark and the trees moan; the agonized man who lies waiting

the morning thinks of the times when the whistle of the wind was the

gladdest of sounds to him; his old ambitions wake from their trance and

come to gaze on him reproachfully; he sees that fortune (and mayhap

fame) have passed him by, and all through his own fault; he may whine

about imaginary wrongs during the day when he is maudlin, but the night

fairly throttles him if he attempts to turn away from the stark truth,

and he remains pinned face to face with his beautiful, dead self. Then,

with a start, he remembers that he has no friends. When he crawls out in

the morning to steady his hand he will be greeted with filthy

public-house cordiality by the animals to whose level he has dragged

himself, but of friends he has none. Now, is it not marvellous? Drink is

so jolly; prosperous persons talk with such a droll wink about vagaries

which they or their friends committed the night before; it is all so

very, very lightsome! The brewers and distillers who put the

mirth-inspiring beverages into the market receive more consideration,

and a great deal more money, than an average European prince;--and yet

the poor dry-rotted unfortunate whose decadence we are tracing is like a

leper in the scattering effects which he produces during his shaky

promenade. He is indeed alone in the world, and brandy or gin is his

only counsellor and comforter. As to character, the last rag of that

goes when the first sign of indolence is seen; the watchers have eyes

like cats, and the self-restrained men among them have usually seen so

many fellows depart to perdition that every stage in the process of

degradation is known to them. No! there is not a friend, and dry, clever

gentlemen say, "Yes. Good chap enough once on a day, but can't afford to

be seen with him now." The soaker is amazed to find that women are

afraid of him a little, and shrink from him--in fact, the only people

who are cordial with him are the landlords, among whom he is treated as

a sort of irresponsible baby. "I may as well have his money as anybody

else. He shan't get outrageously drunk here, but he may as well moisten

his clay and keep himself from being miserable. If he gets the jumps in

the night that's his look-out." That is the soaker's friend. The man is

not unkind; he is merely hardened, and his morals, like those of nearly

all who are connected with the great Trade, have suffered a twist. When

the soaker's last penny has gone, he will receive from the landlord many

a contemptuously good-natured gift--pity it is that the lost wastrel

cannot be saved before that weariful last penny huddles in the corner of

his pocket.

While the harrowing descent goes on our suffering wretch is gradually

changing in appearance: the piggish element that is latent in most of us

comes out in him; his morality is sapped; he will beg, borrow, lie, and

steal; and, worst of all, he is a butt for thoughtless young fellows.

The last is the worst cut of all, for the battered, bloodless, sunken

ne'er-do-well can remember only too vividly his own gallant youth, and

the thought of what he was drives him crazed.

There is only one end; if the doomed one escapes _delirium tremens_ he

is likely to have cirrhosis, and if he misses both of these, then dropsy

or Bright's disease claims him. Those who once loved him pray for his

death, and greet his last breath with an echoing sigh of thankfulness

and relief: he might have been cheered in his last hour by the graceful

sympathy of troops of friends; but the State-protected vice has such a

withering effect that it scorches up friendship as a fiery breath from a

furnace might scorch a grass blade. If one of my joyous, delightful lads

could just watch the shambling, dirty figure of such a failure as I have

described; if he could see the sneers of amused passers-by, the timid

glances of women, the contemptuous off-hand speech of the children--"Oh!

him! That's old, boozy Blank;" then the youths might well tremble, for

the woebegone beggar that snivels out thanks for a mouthful of gin was

once a brave lad--clever, handsome, generous, the delight of friends,

the joy of his parents, the most brilliantly promising of all his

circle. He began by being jolly; he was well encouraged and abetted; he

found that respectable men drank, and that Society made no demur. But he

forgot that there are drinkers and drinkers, he forgot that the

cool-headed men were not tainted by heredity, nor were their brains so

delicately poised that the least grain of foreign matter introduced in

the form of vapour could cause semi-insanity. And thus the sacrifice of

Society--and the Exchequer--goes to the tomb amid contempt, and hissing,

and scorn; while the saddest thing of all is that those who loved him

most passionately are most glad to hear the clods thump on his coffin.

I believe, if you let me keep a youngster for an hour in a room with me,

I could tell him enough stories from my own shuddery experience to

frighten him off drink for life. I should cause him to be haunted.

There is none of the rage of the convert in all this; I knew what I was

doing when I went into the base and sordid homes of ruin during years,

and I want to know how any justification _not_ fitted for the libretto

of an extravaganza can be given by certain parliamentary gentlemen in

order that we may be satisfied with their conduct. My wanderings and

freaks do not count; I was a Bohemian, with the tastes of a Romany and

the curiosity of a philosopher; I went into the most abominable company

because it amused me and I had only myself to please, and I saw what a

fearfully tense grip the monster, Drink, has taken of this nation; and

let me say that you cannot understand that one little bit, if you are

content to knock about with a policeman and squint at signboards. Well,

I want to know how these legislators can go to church and repeat certain

prayers, while they continue to make profit by retailing Death at so

much a gallon; and I want to know how some scores of other godly men go

out of their way to back up a traffic which is very well able to take

care of itself. A wild, night-roaming gipsy like me is not expected to

be a model, but one might certainly expect better things from folks who

are so insultingly, aggressively righteous. One sombre and thoughtful

Romany of my acquaintance said, "My brother, there are many things that

I try to fight, and they knock me out of time in the first round." That

is my own case exactly when I observe comfortable personages who deplore

vice, and fill their pockets to bursting by shoving the vice right in

the way of the folks most likely to be stricken with deadly precision by

it.

It is not easy to be bad-tempered over this saddening business; one has

to be pitiful. As my memory travels over England, and follows the tracks

that I trod, I seem to see a line of dead faces, that start into life if

I linger by them, and mop and mow at me in bitterness because I put out

no saving hand. So many and many I saw tramping over the path of

Destruction, and I do not think that ever I gave one of them a manly

word of caution. It was not my place, I thought, and thus their bones

are bleaching, and the memory of their names has flown away like a

mephitic vapour that was better dispersed. Are there many like me, I

wonder, who have not only done nothing to battle with the mightiest

modern evil, but have half encouraged it through cynical recklessness

and pessimism? We entrap the poor and the base and the wretched to their

deaths, and then we cry out about their vicious tendencies, and their

improvidence, and all the rest. Heaven knows I have no right to

sermonize; but, at least, I never shammed anything. When I saw some

spectacle of piercing misery caused by Drink (as nearly all English

misery is) I simply choked down the tendency to groan, and grimly

resolved to see all I could and remember it. But now that I have had

time to reflect instead of gazing and moaning, I have a sharp conception

of the thing that is biting at England's vitals. People fish out all

sorts of wondrous and obscure causes for crime. As far as England is

concerned I should lump the influences provocative of crime and

productive of misery into one--I say Drink is the root of almost all

evil. It is heartbreaking to know what is going on at our own doors,

for, however we may shuffle and blink, we cannot disguise the fact that

many millions of human beings who might be saved pass their lives in an

obscene hell--and they live so in merry England. Durst any one describe

a lane in Sandgate, Newcastle-on-Tyne, a court off Orange Street or

Lancaster Street, London, an alley in Manchester, a four-storey tenement

in the Irish quarter of Liverpool? I think not, and it is perhaps best

that no description should be done; for, if it were well done it would

make harmless people unhappy, and if it were ill done it would drive

away sympathy. I only say that all the horrors of those places are due

to alcohol alone. Do not say that idleness is answerable for the

gruesome state of things; that would be putting cause for effect. A man

finds the pains of the world too much for him; he takes alcohol to bring

on forgetfulness; he forgets, and he pays for his pleasure by losing

alike the desire and capacity for work. The man of the slums fares

exactly like the gentleman: both sacrifice their moral sense, both

become idle; the bad in both is ripened into rankness, and makes itself

villainously manifest at all seasons; the good is atrophied, and finally

dies. Goodness may take an unconscionable time a-dying, but it is

sentenced to death by the fates from the moment when alcoholism sets in,

and the execution is only a matter of time.

England, then, is a country of grief. I never yet knew one family which

had not lost a cherished member through the national curse; and thus at

all times we are like the wailing nation whereof the first-born in every

house was stricken. It is an awful sight, and as I sit here alone I can

send my mind over the sad England which I know, and see the army of the

mourners. They say that the calling of the wounded on the field of

Boródino was like the roar of the sea: on my battle-field, where drink

has been the only slayer, there are many dead; and I can imagine that I

hear the full volume of cries from those who are stricken but still

living. The vision would unsettle my reason if I had not a trifle of

Hope remaining. The philosophic individual who talks in correctly frigid

phrases about the evils of the Liquor Trade may keep his reason balanced

daintily and his nerve unhurt. But I have images for company--images of

wild fearsomeness. There is the puffy and tawdry woman who rolls along

the street goggling at the passengers with boiled eye. The little pretty

child says, "Oh! mother, what a strange woman. I didn't understand what

she said." My pretty, that was Drink, and you may be like that one of

these days, for as little as your mother thinks it, if you ever let

yourself touch the Curse carelessly. Bless you, I know scores who were

once as sweet as you who can now drink any costermonger of them all

under the stools in the Haymarket bar. The young men grin and wink as

that staggering portent lurches past: I do not smile; my heart is too

sad for even a show of sadness. Then there are the children--the

children of Drink they should be called, for they suck it from the

breast, and the venomous molecules become one with their flesh and

blood, and they soon learn to like the poison as if it were pure

mother's milk. How they hunger--those little children! What obscure

complications of agony they endure and how very dark their odd

convulsive species of existence is made, only that one man may buy

forgetfulness by the glass. If I let my imagination loose, I can hear

the immense army of the young crying to the dumb and impotent sky, and

they all cry for bread. Mercy! how the little children suffer! And I

have seen them by the hundred--by the thousand--and only helped from

caprice; I could do no other. The iron winter is nearing us, and soon

the dull agony of cold will swoop down and bear the gnawing hunger

company while the two dire agencies inflict torture on the little ones.

Were it not for Drink the sufferers might be clad and nourished; but

then Drink is the support of the State, and a few thousand of

raw-skinned, hunger-bitten children perhaps do not matter. Then I can

see all the ruined gentlemen, and all the fine fellows whose glittering

promise was so easily tarnished; they have crossed my track, and I

remember every one of them, but I never could haul back one from the

fate toward which he shambled so blindly; what could I do when Drink was

driving him? If I could not shake off the memories of squalor, hunger,

poverty--well-deserved poverty--despair, crime, abject wretchedness,

then life could not be borne. I can always call to mind the wrung hands

and drawn faces of well-nurtured and sweet ladies who saw the dull mask

of loathsome degradation sliding downward over their loved one's face.

Of all the mental trials that are cruel, that must be the worst--to see

the light of a beloved soul guttering gradually down into stench and

uncleanness. The woman sees the decadence day by day, while the blinded

and lulled man who causes all the indescribable trouble thinks that

everything is as it should be. The Drink mask is a very scaring thing;

once you watch it being slowly fitted on to a beautiful and spiritual

face you do not care over-much about the revenue.

And now the famous Russian's question comes up: What shall we do? Well,

so far as the wastrel poor are concerned, I should say, "Catch them when

young, and send them out of England so long as there is any place abroad

where their labour is sought." I should say so, because there is not a

shadow of a chance for them in this country: they will go in their turn

to drink as surely as they go to death. As to the vagabond poor whom we

have with us now I have no hope for them; we must wait until death weeds

them out, for we can do nothing with them nor for them.

Among the classes who are better off from the worldly point of view, we

shall have sacrifices offered to the fiend from time to time. Drink has

wound like some ubiquitous fungus round and round the tissues of the

national body, and we are sure to have a nasty growth striking out at

intervals. It tears the heart-strings when we see the brave, the

brilliant, the merry, the wise, sinking under the evil clement in our

appalling dual nature, and we feel, with something like despair, that we

cannot be altogether delivered from the scourge yet awhile. I have stabs

of conscience when I call to mind all I have seen and remember how

little I have done, and I can only hope, in a shame-faced way, that the

use of intoxicants may be quietly dropped, just as the practice of

gambling, and the habit of drinking heavy, sweet wines, have passed away

from the exclusive society in which cards used to form the main

diversion. Frankly speaking, I have seen the degradation, the

abomination, and the measureless force of Drink so near at hand that I

am not sanguine. I can take care of myself, but I am never really sure

about many other people, and I had good reason for not being sure of

myself. One thing is certain, and that is that the creeping enemy is

sure to attack the very last man or woman whom you would expect to see

attacked. When the first symptoms are seen, the stricken one should be

delivered from _ennui_ as much as possible, and then some friend should

tell, in dull, dry style, the slow horror of the drop to the Pit. Fear

will be effective when nothing else will. Many are stronger than I am

and can help more. By the memory of broken hearts, by the fruitless

prayers of mothers and sorrowing wives, for the sake of the children who

are forced to stay on earth in a living death, I ask the strong to help

us all. Blighted lives, wrecked intellects, wasted brilliancy, poisoned

morality, rotted will--all these mark the road that the King of Evils

takes in his darksome progress. Out of the depths I have called for aid

and received it, and now I ask aid for others, and I shall not be

denied.

_October, 1889._

_VOYAGING AT SEA_