[Illustration]
The great wave of temperance which is now sweeping Europe and America
has its chief impulse, no doubt, in ethical and religious sentiment.
But a new force is operative--the force of an exact knowledge of the
evil physical effects of alcohol. It would be impossible to exaggerate
the importance of this new element in temperance reform.
The story of the modern series of scientific experiments with alcohol,
begun about twenty-five years ago and still in progress, is given by
Dr. Henry Smith Williams in this number of MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE.
These investigations, largely conducted in Continental Europe, include
experiments on the senses, upon the muscles, and upon the different
human intellectual activities, from the simplest to the most complex.
Without exception they show that every function of the normal human
body is injured by the use of alcohol--even the moderate use; and that
the injury is both serious and permanent.
This knowledge is of concern to all the world. But there is in America
a particular and special concern over a condition which may be believed
to be unparalleled in human history--certainly in modern civilization:
the power of the saloon in American government, especially the
government of cities.
The fact is notorious; yet the condition is not clearly understood.
Sixty years ago, with the first flood of European immigration, the
character of American city governments changed suddenly and entirely.
A great proportion of the peasantry who arrived here from the farms of
Europe stopped in our cities. They were isolated from the rest of the
population; their one great social center was the saloon. And out of
this social center came their political leaders and the manipulators of
their votes. The European peasant saloon-keeper, for more than half a
century, has been the ruler of a great proportion of American cities.
The case of Tammany Hall, for so many years the real governing body of
New York, is most familiar. Its politicians for half a century have
graduated into public affairs through the common school of the saloon.
Its leaders at the present time are perfect examples of the European
peasant saloon-keeper type, which has come to govern us. The same
condition exists to a large extent in nearly every one of the larger
cities in the country. An analysis of the member-ship of the boards of
aldermen in these cities for the past few decades shows a percentage of
saloon-keepers with foreign names which is astonishing.
A government necessarily takes the character of those conducting it.
The business of saloon-keeping, which produced the present management
of our cities, involves, from the conditions which surround it, a
disregard for both law and proper moral ideals. Ordinary commercial
motives urge the proprietors, as a class, to increase the sale of a
commodity which the State everywhere endeavors to restrict; and a
savage condition of competition drives them still further--till a
great proportion break the provisions of the law in some way; while
a considerable number ally themselves with the most degraded and
dangerous forms of vice.
The government by this class has been exactly what might have been
expected. A body of men--drawn from an ancestry which has never
possessed any knowledge or traditions of free government; educated in
a business whose financial successes are made through the disregard of
law--are elevated to the control of the machinery of law and order in
the great cities. Another type of citizen--men of force and enterprise
unsurpassed in the history of the world--by adapting the discoveries of
the most inventive century of the world to the uses of commerce, have
massed together in the past half century a chain of great cities upon
the face of a half savage continent, and left them to the government
of such people as these. The commercial enterprise of these cities has
been the marvel of the world; their government has reached a point of
moral degradation and inefficiency scarcely less than Oriental.
The debauching of our city life by this kind of government has been
frequently pictured in this magazine. A government by saloon-keepers,
and by dealers in flagrant immorality, finds both its power and profit
in the establishment of vice by its official position. The progress of
such a government is shown in George Kennan's description of the former
régime in San Francisco, published in MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE of
September, 1907:
"Instead of protecting the public by enforcing the laws, it devoted
itself mainly to making money by allowing gamblers, policy-sellers,
brothel keepers, and prostitutes to break the laws. Its honest
officers and men tried, at first, to do their duty; but the police
commissioners, under the influence or direction of Ruef, interfered
with their efforts to close illegal and immoral resorts; the police
court judges, allowing themselves to be swayed by selfish political
considerations, released the prisoners whom they arrested."
Conditions similar to this have been shown in this magazine to exist
in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburg, and other great cities
of America. The results have been a general disintegration in the
moral fiber of cities. Life itself is much more unsafe than under the
well-ordered governments of European cities. The murder rate in Chicago
and New York is six or eight times as great as in London and Berlin.
Even such a primary necessity of civilization as the safety of women is
lost sight of. A leading Chicago newspaper said in 1906:
"It has ever been our proudest boast as a people that in this country
woman is respected and protected as she is in no other. That boast is
becoming an empty one in Chicago. Women have not only been annoyed and
insulted in great numbers on the street within a very short time, but
not a few have been murdered. In the year before the Hollister tragedy,
there were seventeen murders of women in Chicago, which attracted the
attention of the city."
The system of government which produces this result was well described
some years ago by the late Bishop Potter, speaking of conditions in New
York.
"A corrupt system," he said, "whose infamous details have been steadily
uncovered, to our increasing horror and humiliation, was brazenly
ignored by those who were fattening on its spoils, and the world was
presented with the astounding spectacle of a great municipality, whose
civic mechanism was largely employed in trading in the bodies and
souls of the defenseless."
Aside from giving direct encouragement and propagation to the more
terrible forms of vice, the European peasant saloon-keeper government
of our cities furnishes a fitting field for so-called respectable
men--but really criminals of the worst type--who help organize and
perpetuate saloon government for the purpose of securing, by bribery,
franchises for public utilities without paying therefor. Thus American
cities have been robbed as well as badly governed.
There are signs of amelioration of these conditions in most of the
great cities of the country. But every advance is made against the
fierce antagonism of just such systems as Bishop Potter described;
and those systems exist in every large American city to-day--either
in direct control or ready to take control at the slightest sign of
relaxation by the forces which are opposing them. And the foundation of
this evil structure is the European peasant saloon-keeper.
MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE, in the next year, will consider the
horrible influence of the saloon on American life. Dr. Williams will
follow his article in the present number by studies of the influence of
alcohol upon society at large, upon racial development, and upon the
State. The author is especially equipped for his work. He is in the
first place perhaps the greatest living popularizer of national science
and history in America; and he has himself made life-long observations
upon the influence of alcohol--both physical and social--first as
a medical practitioner in the treatment of the insane at the great
asylums at Bloomingdale and Randalls Island, and later by study and
observation in the chief capitals of Europe, where he has lived the
greater part of the last ten years. The sound judgment and impartial
temper which have characterized his work in other fields will be found
in his treatment of this great subject.