THE CAUSES OF CRIME.
INTEMPERANCE.
The power of the appetite for alcoholic stimulus is something amazing. A
laboring-man feels it especially on account of the drag on his nervous
system of steady and monotonous labor, and because of the few mental
stimuli which he enjoys. He returns to his tenement-house after a hard
day's work, "dragged out" and craving excitement; his rooms are
disagreeable; perhaps his wife cross, or slatternly, and his children
noisy; he has an intense desire for something which can take him out of
all this, and cause his dull surroundings and his fatigue to be
forgotten. Alcohol does this; moreover, he can bear alcohol and tobacco,
to retard the waste of muscle, as the sedentary man cannot. In a few
steps, he can find jolly companions, a lighted and warmed room, a
newspaper, and, above all, a draught which, for the moment, can change
poverty to riches, and drive care and labor and the thought of all his
burdens and annoyances far away.
[Illustration: THE FORTUNES OF A STREET WAIF. (Third Stage.)]
The liquor-shop is his picture-gallery, club, reading-room, and social
_salon,_ at once. His glass is the magic transmuter of care to
cheerfulness, of penury to plenty, of a low, ignorant, worried life, to
an existence for the moment buoyant, contented, and hopeful. Alas that
the magician who thus, for the instant, transforms him with her rod,
soon returns him to his low estate, with ten thousand curses haunting
him! The one thus touched by the modern Circe is not even imbruted, for
the brutes have no such appetite; he becomes a demonized man; all the
treasures of life are trampled under his feet, and he is fit only to
dwell "among the tombs." But, while labor is what it is, and the
liquor-shop alone offers sociality and amusement to the poor, alcohol
will still possess this overwhelming attraction. The results in this
climate, and under the form of alcoholic stimulus offered here, are
terrible beyond all computation. The drunkards' homes are the darkest
spots even in the abyss of misery in every large city. Here the hearts
of young women are truly broken, and they seek their only consolation in
the same magic cup; here children are beaten, or maimed, or
half-starved, until they run away to join the great throng of homeless
street-rovers in our large towns, and grow up to infest society. From
these homes radiate misery, grief, and crime. They are the nests in
which the young fledgelings of misfortune and vice begin their flight.
Probably two-thirds of the crimes of every city (and a very large
portion of its poverty) come from the over-indulgence of this appetite.
As an appetite, we do not believe it can ever be eradicated from the
human race.
If we look at criminal statistics for the effects of this appetite, we
will find that in the New York City prisons, during 1870, there were,
out of 49,423 criminals, 30,507 of confessedly intemperate habits, while
no doubt, with a large portion of the rest, indulgence in liquor was the
cause of their offenses.
In the Albany Penitentiary there were, in 1869-70, 1,093 convicts, of
whom 893 admitted they were intemperate. Of this whole number only 563
could read and write, and only 568 were natives of this country.
Among the children of misfortune in our city, the homeless boys and
girls, and those compelled by poverty to attend the Industrial Schools
(which I shall hereafter describe), it would be safe to say that ninety
out of a hundred are the children of drunkards.
As a direct cause of crime in children, drunkenness takes but a small
place. This is not an appetite of childhood. Very few boys or girls of
the poorest class are addicted to it till they become mature.
The effort for Total Abstinence has been, indeed, an untold blessing to
the working class in this country and many parts of Europe. It may be
said, in many regions, to have broken the wand of the terrible
enchantress. It has introduced a new social habit in drinking. It has
connected abstinence with the ceremonial of religion and the pleasures
of social organizations. It has addressed the working-man--as, in fact,
he often is--as a child, and saved him from his own habits, by a sworn
abstinence. Thousands of men could never have freed themselves from this
most tyrannical appetite, except by absolute refusal to touch. In fact,
it may be said that no vice is ever abandoned by gradual steps. The only
hope for any one under the control of any wrong indulgence is in entire
and immediate abandonment.
With those, too, who had not fallen under the sway of this appetite,
especially if of the working class, abstinence was the safest rule.
The "Total Abstinence Reform" in this country, in Great Britain, and in
Sweden, was one of the happiest events that ever occurred in the history
of the working classes. Its blessings will descend through many
generations. But in its nature it could not last. It was a tremendous
reaction against the heavy and excessive drinking of fifty years since.
It was a kind of noble asceticism. Like all asceticism, it could not
continue as a permanent condition. Its power is now much spent. Wherever
it can be introduced now among the laboring classes, it should be; and
we believe one of the especial services of the Irish Catholic clergy, at
this day, to the world, is in supporting and encouraging this great
reform.
All who study the lower classes are beginning, however, now to look for
other remedies of the evil of intemperance.
It has become remarkably apparent, during the last few years, that one
of the best modes of driving out low tastes in the masses is to
introduce higher. It has been found that galleries and museums and parks
are the most formidable rivals of the liquor-shops. The experience near
the Sydenham Palace, in England, and other places of instructive and
pleasant resort for the laboring masses, is, that drinking-saloons do
not flourish in opposition. Wherever, in the evening, a laboring-man can
saunter in a pleasant park, or, in company with his wife and family,
look at interesting pictures, or sculpture, or objects of curiosity, he
has not such a craving for alcoholic stimulus.
Even open-air drinking in a garden--as is so common on the Continent--is
never so excessive as in an artificial-lighted room. Where, too, a
working-man can, in a few steps, find a cheerfully-lighted reading-room,
with society or papers, or where a club is easily open to him without
drinking, it will also be found that he ceases to frequent the saloon,
and almost loses his taste for strong drink.
Whatever elevates the taste of the laborer, or expands his mind, or
innocently amuses him, or passes his time pleasantly without indulgence,
or agreeably instructs, or provides him with virtuous associations,
tends at once to guard him from habits of intoxication. The Kensington
Museum and Sydenham Palace, of London; the Cooper Union, the Central
Park, and free Reading-rooms of New York, are all temperance-societies
of the best kind. The great effort now is to bring this class of
influences to bear on the habits of the laboring-people, and thus
diminish intemperance.
It is a remarkable fact, in this connection, that, though ninety out of
the hundred of our children in the Industrial Schools are the children
of drunkards, not one of the thousands who have gone forth from them has
been known to have fallen into intemperate habits. Under the elevating
influences of the school, they imperceptibly grow out of the habits of
their mothers and fathers, and never acquire the appetite.
Another matter, which is well worthy of the attention of reformers, is
the possibility of introducing into those countries where "heavy
drinking" prevails, the taste for light wines and the habit of open-air
drinking. The passion for alcohol is a real one. On a broad scale it
cannot be annihilated. Can we not satisfy it innocently? In this
country, for instance, light wines can be made to a vast extent, and
finally be sold very cheaply. If the taste for them were formed, would
it not expel the appetite for whisky and brandy, or at least, in the
coming generation, form a new habit?
There is, it is true, a peculiar intensity in the American temperament
which makes the taking of concentrated stimulus natural to it. It will
need some time for men accustomed to work up their nervous system to a
white heat by repeated draughts of whisky or brandy to be content with
weak wines. Perhaps the present generation never will be. But the laws
of health and morality are so manifestly on the side of drinking light
wines as compared with drinking heavy liquors, that any effort at social
improvement in this direction would have a fair chance of success. Even
the slight change of habit involved in drinking leisurely at a table in
the open air with women and children--after the German fashion--would be
a great social reform over the hasty bar-drinking, while standing. The
worst intoxication of this city is with the Irish and American
bar-drinkers, not the German frequenters of gardens.
LIQUOR LAWS.
In regard to legislation, it seems to me that our New York License laws
of 1866 were, with a few improvements, a very "happy medium" in
law-making. The ground was tacitly taken, in that code, that it
subserved the general interests of morality to keep one day free from
riotous or public drinking, and allow the majority of the community to
spend it in rest and worship; and, inasmuch as that day was one of
especial temptation to the working-classes, they were to be treated to a
certain degree like minors, and liquor was to be refused to them on it.
Under this law, also, minors and apprentices, on weekdays, were
forbidden to be supplied with intoxicating drinks, and the liquor-shops
were closed at certain hours of the night. Very properly, also, these
sellers of intoxicating beverages, making enormous profits, and costing
the community immensely in the expenses of crime occasioned by their
trade, were heavily taxed, and paid to the city over a million dollars
annually in fees, licenses, and fines. The effects of the law were
admirable, in the diminution of cases of arrest and crime on the Sunday,
and the checking of the ravages of intoxication.
But it was always apparent to the writer that, with the peculiar
constitution of the population of this city, it could not be sustained,
unless concessions were made to the prejudices and habits of certain
nationalities among our citizens. Our reformers, however, as a class,
are exceedingly adverse to concessions; they look at questions of habits
as absolute questions of right and wrong, and they will permit no
half-way or medium ground. But legislation is always a matter of
concession. We cannot make laws for human nature as it ought to be, but
as it is. If we do not get the absolutely best law passed, we must
content ourselves with the medium best. If our Temperance Reformers had
permitted a clause in the law, excepting the drinking in gardens, or of
lager-beer, from the restrictions of the License Law, we should not,
indeed, have had so good a state of things as we had for a few years,
under the old law, but we might have had it permanently. Now, we have
nearly lost all control over drinking, and the Sunday orgies and crimes
will apparently renew themselves without check or restraint. If a reform
in legislation claim too much, there is always a severe reaction
possible, when the final effects will be worse than the evils sought to
be corrected.
The true plan of reform for this city would be to cause the License Law
of 1866 to be re-enacted with certain amendments. The "intoxicating
drinks" mentioned should be held not to include lager-beer or certain
light wines; and garden-drinking might be permitted, under strict police
surveillance.
The Excise Board should be allowed very summary control, however, even
over the German gardens and lager-beer drinking-places, so that, if they
were perverted into places of disturbance and intoxication, the licenses
could be revoked.
[Illustration: THE FORTUNES OF A STREET WAIF. (Fourth Stage.)]
By separating absolutely the licenses for light drinks and those for
rum, whisky, and heavy ales, a vast deal of drunkenness might be
prevented, and yet the foreign habits not be too much interfered with,
and comparatively innocent pleasures permitted. In small towns and
villages, a reasonable compromise would seem to be to allow each
municipality to control the matter in the mode it preferred: some
communities in this way, forbidding all sale of intoxicating liquors,
and others permitting it, under conditions; but each being responsible
for the evils or benefits of the system it adopted.
If a student of history were reviewing the gloomy list of the evils
which have most cursed mankind, which have wasted households, stained
the hand of man with his fellow's blood, sown quarrels and hatreds,
broken women's hearts, and ruined children in their earliest years, bred
poverty and crime, he would place next to the bloody name of War, the
black word--INTEMPERANCE. No wonder that the best minds of modern times
are considering most seriously the soundest means of checking it. If
abstinence were the natural and only means, the noble soul would still
say, in the words of Paul: "It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to
drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth."
But abstinence is not thoroughly natural; it has no chance of a
universal acceptance; and experience shows that other and wider means
must be employed. We must trust to the imperceptible and widely-extended
influences of civilization, of higher tastes, and more refined
amusements on the masses. We must employ the powers of education, and,
above all, the boundless force of Religion, to elevate the race above
the tyranny of this tremendous appetite.