Established by Edward L. Youmans
APPLETONS'
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
EDITED BY
WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS
VOL. LV
MAY TO OCTOBER, 1899
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
[Illustration: Herbert Spencer]
APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
AUGUST, 1899.
PUBLIC CHARITY AND PRIVATE VIGILANCE.
BY FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS, PH. D.,
PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
The Comptroller of the City of New York deserves the thanks of all
good citizens for his serious indictment of the abuses of public
charity that have grown up in this city and State within the past ten
years. Probably very few of the more intelligent men and women of the
community were aware that three million dollars, raised by taxation,
are annually appropriated to the assistance of private charitable
institutions, over which the public has no real control and only the
most shadowy authority through the inspection of the State Board of
Charities. Of those who were informed of this fact, very few indeed
were acquainted with the specific abuses which the comptroller's
article exposes. To a few individuals, however, who have devoted time
and money unselfishly to the defense of public interests and to the
exposure of the evils of irresponsible relief, these facts have long
been familiar. Such can not fail to take satisfaction in the clear
presentation of the case by Mr. Coler. Especially to the men and women
who have been connected with the work of the State Charities Aid
Association and the Charity Organization Society will Mr. Coler's
article be welcome, as a strong re-enforcement of arguments which they
for years have been presenting to the people of New York, oftentimes,
it has seemed, to but unwilling hearers.
It is therefore in no spirit of fundamental disagreement, but rather
in the desire to further the reform which the comptroller demands,
that I venture to criticise in two particulars the statement as he has
left it.
It is an incomplete view of the enormously difficult problem of
charity which fails to set forth some of the reasons that have led to
the growth of an excessive faith in the excellence of private
institutions and in the wisdom of a co-operation between them and the
public, which is taken for granted when they receive appropriations of
public money.
Great as have been the abuses associated with private charity, they
are small when compared with the abuses that have existed in the
public administration of poor relief. As all familiar with the history
of this subject know, the old English poor law was so administered in
the rural parishes that paupers were in a more eligible position than
industrious farm laborers; that women with bastard children were
publicly rewarded for unchastity; and that, now and again, rent-paying
farmers were willing to surrender their lands to the paupers to work
them for what could be made, rather than to go on paying rates. The
exposure of the evils of the system, which was made in the report of
the famous Poor Law Commission appointed in 1832, and the attempt to
abolish them by the provisions of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834,
ought to be studied by every citizen who desires to perform his full
duty as a guardian of public interests, and especially by every
individual whose sympathies lead him to undertake any practical effort
for the amelioration of pauperism. In the United States, on account of
the extremely decentralized character of our poor-relief system
generally, we have no such impressive body of critical literature as
that which was brought out in England during the first half of the
present century. None the less, whenever special investigations of the
management of town and city relief administration and of the
management of almshouses have been made, deplorable abuses have almost
invariably been exposed, and individuals acquainted with the facts
have argued that any possible misdirection of either private or public
funds through private agencies could not equal the corruption and the
inhumanity for which officialism has been responsible.
Let us look at one noteworthy example. In 1891 a special committee
appointed to report on outdoor alms in the town of Hartford,
Connecticut, discovered a state of affairs with which nothing revealed
in Mr. Coler's statements can for a moment be compared. The general
situation, the committee said, was found to be as follows:
"In 1885 Hartford was paying $2.07 for each man, woman, and child of
its population in poor relief. New Haven was paying $1.30; Bridgeport,
$1.03; Waterbury, 81 cents; Norwich, $1.54; New Britain, $1.39, etc.;
for twelve Connecticut cities an average of $1.22 per capita against
our $2.07; and with Hartford far ahead of her nearest competitor. For
outdoor relief the figures were similar. Hartford, 90 cents per
capita; New Haven, 51 cents; Norwalk, 23 cents, etc.--an average for
the twelve of 61 cents per capita, with only one higher, Hartford in
the lead again by fifty per cent. Five Massachusetts cities, including
Boston, Worcester, and Lowell, average $1.16 for all relief, against
our $2.07; and 24 cents for outdoor relief against our 90 cents. Five
other New England cities, including Providence and Bangor, average 33
cents for all relief, against our $2.07; and 12 cents for outdoor,
against our 90 cents. Four New York cities--New York, Brooklyn,
Buffalo, and Albany--average 63 cents, against our $2.07; and 43
cents, against our 90 cents. Five cities in Pennsylvania and Maryland,
including Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Baltimore, average 38 cents
against our $2.07; and 4 cents, against our 90 cents. Seven Western
and Southern cities, including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee,
and Charleston, average 62 cents for all relief, against our $2.07;
and 17 cents, against our 90 cents."
A similar comparison extended by the committee to the principal cities
of Europe, including Berlin, Dresden, and Stuttgart, showed that here
again Hartford led them all. In short, it appeared to be proved that
Hartford was spending on the poor more money per capita of population
than any other city in the United States, and more than any other in
the world, with certain exceptions in Italy, and the noteworthy
exceptions of London, $3.75 per capita, and Paris, $3.66 per capita.
Hartford, however, outranked even London in its percentage of pauper
population, which was 6.2 in Hartford, against 2.46 in London. While
in Hartford every sixteenth person was a recipient of municipal
bounty, in London the proportion was only one in forty. Paris led all,
with one in eight.
Investigation of the causes of this deplorable state of affairs
revealed an astonishing understanding between the paupers and the
officials. Tramps were given residence and support for the sake of
their votes on election day. Grocery stores were practically
subsidized. Families whose individual members could be made useful
politically were supported in outdoor relief.
That the showing was so much better for New York and other great
American cities was not a proof of greater honesty or wisdom of
administration on the part of municipal officials. The difference was
almost wholly due to the enormous extension of private as over against
public charity outside of typical New England Commonwealths like
Connecticut, where the town method of dealing with such matters still
holds its own against other forms of philanthropic enterprise. Proof
on this point would be overwhelming were we to take the necessary
space to present it. One has only to go through the annual reports of
the New York State Board of Charities and read the exposures that have
repeatedly been made of the state of affairs on the islands of the
East River and in the county almshouses of the State to satisfy
himself that were the whole burden of supporting the pauper population
of this Commonwealth, and especially of this city, thrown upon the
public, private enterprise withdrawing from the competition, the
appropriations mentioned by Mr. Coler would sink into ridiculous
insignificance by comparison. The appropriation of public money to
private institutions has become a scandalous abuse, but we shall never
understand its strength until we frankly face the fact that the public
has been experimenting with it, hoping thus to find a way of escape
from the greater abuses that attend the administration of public
relief by public agencies except when they are incessantly watched and
held up to the broadest light of publicity by the disinterested
efforts of private citizens.
The omission of this side of the matter from Mr. Coler's discussion
may perhaps be regarded as a mere failure to deal with the whole of a
very large and difficult problem. But it is more than a mere omission;
it is, I think, a positive error, and a serious one, into which the
comptroller falls when he lays as much stress as he does upon the
expenditure, for salaries and wages, of a large proportion of the sums
appropriated by the city for private institutions. The real question
here, as all sound experience has repeatedly demonstrated, is not
whether the expenditure is for salaries in general rather than for
relief. This Mr. Coler practically admits when he says that a great
deal of money spent for relief is worse than wasted, because it
fosters pauperism instead of repressing it, and when, at the close of
his article, he says that he found it necessary to create in his
department a bureau to investigate the character of institutions
asking aid. This is a frank confession that the expenditure of money
for salaries or for wages may be wiser than its expenditure in relief,
provided the salaries or wages are earned in actual investigation,
which results in exposing fraud and preventing expenditures on
improper applicants. This is the very kernel of the whole matter,
whether it is a private or a public administration of charity that we
are considering. The use of money, public or private, for the payment
of salaries that are mere sinecures is dishonesty pure and simple, and
neither the comptroller nor any of those private organizations that
make it their business to watch and criticise administration can have
a more imperative duty than that of putting an end to such corruption.
But, on the other hand, there could be no better index of positive
progress in solving the practical problems of charity than a steady
increase in the ratio of expenditures in salaries and wages on account
of investigation and prevention to the amount spent in actual relief.
That, in fact, would be an ideal administration of public and private
charities in which the efficiency of investigators and the practical
sagacity of relieving agents was so high that nearly the whole sum
expended had to be charged to their salary account.
This is precisely the principle which private organizations like the
State Charities Aid Association and the Charity Organization Society
have labored in season and out of season to make the public and the
officials comprehend. Innumerable exposures of the impostures
practiced upon a credulous public by the great class of professional
mendicants, tramps, and place seekers have furnished all the evidence
that sensible men need to satisfy themselves that large sums expended
by the public and by private individuals of charitable proclivities
have no other result than that of encouraging pauperism and misery. It
is largely due to the tireless efforts of the State Charities Aid
Association for many years past that the institutions receiving public
moneys in this State have been watched with such vigilance that there
is now a strict system of accounting in all of them, and that it has
become the duty of the State Board of Charities not only to insist
upon such accounting and to carry out a thorough inspection, but also
to frame and enforce rules for their government.
These criticisms I offer, however, only because, as I said at the
outset, I desire to see the fundamental proposition of Mr. Coler's
statement strengthened and made to bear practical fruit. It is indeed
a very serious question whether the appropriation of public money to
private institutions has not become so great an evil that it would be
better to put a stop to it once for all. And yet I must confess to a
doubt whether, upon a complete survey of all the facts, this would be
the judgment of the most practical and far-seeing men. The granting of
appropriations gives to the city and the State a reason and an excuse
for a strict inspection of organizations that otherwise might do
incalculable mischief by preying upon the credulity of a generous
public while concealing their actual operations. I therefore am
inclined to think that the path of practical wisdom lies through an
attempt to perfect the existing co-operation between public and
private agencies, and to bring it to a sounder business basis by
developing inspection, publicity, and accountability. If private
organizations are encouraged to do all in their own power under a
system wherein the State grants them aid under strict conditions, lays
down necessary rules for their government and guidance, and
remorselessly exposes all their transactions, the actual result may be
better in the long run than if State and private associations
proceeded independently of one another, often duplicating each other's
work, or, if not that, working at cross-purposes.
RECENT LEGISLATION AGAINST THE DRINK EVIL.
BY APPLETON MORGAN.
Five years ago it was sought in these pages[1] to discover the cause
or causes of the total failure in the United States of prohibitive
legislation.
[Footnote 1: The Popular Science Monthly for February, 1894.]
Our conclusion, so far as a conclusion could be said to have been
reached, was that the failure lay in the misapplication of ways to
means, rather than of means to ends--namely, that an attempt to
abolish the crime (or misdemeanor) of drunkenness by punishing, not
the criminal, but the community in which he committed the crime, and
to prevent law-breaking by legislating out of existence the neutral
instrument which happened to form the particular temptation to the
particular law-breaker (or with which he found it convenient to commit
the crime), was quite too logical to be practicable; as, for instance,
laws abolishing the use of spoons, as so many temptations to
housebreakers; or of railways, because trespassers on railway tracks
were often killed; or steamboats, because steamboat boilers sometimes
burst, would be quite too logical for public convenience. Whence it
followed that there was no demand for prohibitive liquor laws, and
therefore only failure had resulted from attempting to enforce them.
In the five years since that paper was printed almost every one of the
United States (in fact, all, with but one exception) have recognized
such failure and striven to so recast each its statutes as to plant
the responsibility for breach of public order upon the real offender
without hardship to the law-abiding classes. The results of these
attempts have evolved many novel and unusual contrivances and much
curious operation of statutory and statistical wisdom, and some
remarkable propositions--so much so that it is believed that an effort
to digest them (not by States, but by the principles, or rather by the
remedies, attempted) will be interesting consideration for readers of
the Popular Science Monthly. If the following summary shall develop
two apparent paradoxes--first, that the fewer the places where liquor
is sold the larger the consumption of liquor; and, second, that the
larger the consumption of liquor the less drunkenness--the present
writer can only submit that these paradoxes are not his own, but seem
to arise from the official statistics submitted under the oaths of the
authorities commissioned to collect them, as hereinafter will more
fully appear:
Of the forty-nine States and Territories in the United States, the
solitary exception above noted is the State of Maine. With a heroism
that is actual martyrdom of self-interest and convenience, the State
of Maine has clung with imperious tenacity to her policy of absolute
prohibition, and to the logic of the report of her citizen, who,
sixty-three years ago, carried her first prohibition law through her
Legislature. Said that report: "The objection will doubtless be made
that had we such a law it could not be enforced. Now, admit the
validity of this objection, and it proves the utter hopelessness of
the case; for no one, we presume, will venture the supposition that
you can accomplish, against law, that which you could not effect with
it."[2]
[Footnote 2: Report of General James Appleton to the Legislature
of Maine, July 15, 1837.]
Admitting, as all the world does admit, that the abolition of
drunkenness is desirable, against such pitiless, such iron, logic as
this, there is no appeal, and from it there is no escape even to-day.
But the trouble was, and is, that it is placing an entire Commonwealth
in time of peace under martial law. It was in the fitness of things
that General Appleton, a soldier, who had seen intoxication in a form
most likely to impress him with dangers to the public--i. e., in
soldiers to whom the safety of the State in time of war was
intrusted--should have brought in the first prohibition law on
record;[3] and that, in the teeth of more than two generations of
failure, the sovereign State of Maine should have adhered to his
martial logic, with the loss of her commerce and the reduction of her
census, is a tribute to both the logic of a soldier or the
self-insistence of the State which must compel admiration! In
sixty-three years Maine has seen her commerce disappear and her
population dwindle. She has seen not only her contemporary sister
States, but those admitted yesterday and the day before, pass her in
affluence and prosperity. But the only remedy for her failure she will
listen to the suggestion of is an increased severity of prohibition
statutes and an increased crucifixion of her law-abiding citizens,
lest one of her own or a single stranger within her gates should
obtain a glass of alcoholic compound within her borders.
[Footnote 3: General Appleton was commander of the First Brigade
of the Second Division of Massachusetts infantry in the War of
1812-1815, his resignation dating 1828.]
But, cling as the State of Maine may to the fierce logic of
prohibition, it appears that her forty-eight sisters have found its
unappealable rigor too rigid, and have modulated it in the diverse
ways now to be considered.
In these remaining forty-eight States and Territories of the Union the
statistics regulating liquor seem to divide themselves, as to the
remedies attempted, into ten heads, as follows:
I. Abolish all liquor laws except those for revenue.
II. Example.
III. Education.
IV. Government control of all warehousing and sales.
V. Regulation of hours for retailing liquors.
VI. Refusal of employment to drinkers. Change of pay-day.
VII. Personal damage law.
VIII. Encourage the use of light wines and beers; remove all duties or
imposts on food products; quality inspection.
IX. High revenue--national, interstate, or State.
X. Local option.
For No. I, pure and simple, we have but a single report, perhaps (as
of a frontier State) not exemplary, or safe to guide the more interior
States, but given exactly for what it may be worth. The Governor of
Montana (a State which boasts the bad eminence of having
proportionately more liquor-sellers paying license fees than any other
State in the Union--having, in fact, one licensed liquor-seller to
every fifty-five inhabitants) reports as follows:
"Saloons are run wide open night and day; while there is a great deal
of drinking there is very little drunkenness, and one in an
intoxicated condition is promptly arrested and fined." One other
State, however (Louisiana), has the continental idea that liquor laws
are for "revenue only." Louisiana, therefore, has an elaborate excise,
guiltless of any suggestion of reformative objects. So far as her
statistics go, she is the most temperate State in the Union.
II. EXAMPLE.--This may be called the apostolic cure--the one laid down
by the apostle St. Paul (I Corinthians, viii, 13)--though we find a
prominent English ecclesiastic, Dean Hole, on being asked if he was
not aware that people ought to abstain for the sake of their example
to others, replied: "I have never seen any one converted by example. I
have often challenged teetotalers to produce Mr. Jones converted by
the example of Mr. Brown, but I am waiting for him. I don't see why I
should make a fool of myself because others do." I should not deal
with the matter quite so summarily myself. Doubtless the example of a
thrifty, wholesome, prosperous laborer, if left (without exhortation
or impertinence of third parties) to work upon his dram-drinking,
wretched neighbor, might have its laudable effect: such example not
being deprived in advance of its value by the fetters of a written
pledge which a man's personal pride might force him to ostentatiously
observe--or if the exemplary person does not get his living by
denouncing liquor--or by the coercion of a Ladies' Temperance Union!
But as the person converted by the example would be certain not to
parade the fact, no statistics could even then be attainable. The case
or cases, if genuine, would be hidden in the consciences of the
converts and beyond any marshaling in figures. All we can do is to
hope and trust that our good examples may prevail, and that, like the
apostle St. Paul (whom our British ecclesiastic begs to differ with),
there may be some among us strong enough physically as well as
spiritually to say, "If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no
meat while the world standeth."
These considerations have not, however, deterred certain States from
ingrafting example upon the statute-book, as nearly as it could be
made a subject of legislation, by enacting that there shall be held
before the eye of the possible drinker the spectacle of his neighbors
drinking rum: trusting, doubtless, to the rum itself to work a
condition in the drinker to afford the example required, and so add to
the unestimated but hoped-for good example to bad example at hand.
Three States--i. e., Indiana, Michigan, and Utah--and the city of
Atlanta, Georgia, by municipal ordinance, provide that the premises on
which liquor is retailed by drinks shall have no screen or other
obstruction before its windows, so that passers-by may see the
drinking which goes on therein and its horrible accompanying
circumstances. The reports from these States, however, are not such as
to commend this policy of example to universal acceptance.
III. EDUCATION.--Within the past four years several States--Wisconsin,
Ohio, New Jersey, Nevada--have enacted statutes providing that pupils
in the public schools should be particularly instructed in so much at
least of the science of toxicology as relates to the uses and abuses
of alcohol, and of its effect upon the human system. Such instruction,
if honestly imparted by capable teachers and by honest text-books, can
not fail to be of the highest value. Capable teachers and honest
text-books could not possibly teach, for example, that alcoholic
liquors were an unmixed evil, could not deny their medicinal value, or
their stimulative aid in fortifying against disease or exposure, or in
supplying the waste of age; could not teach (as I gave instances of of
fanatical teachings) that it were better to die for the need of a
glass of whisky than to have one's life saved by the use of it, or
that the use of liquor "destroys both body and soul" (in the teeth of
the facts that only the most flagrant and protracted abuse of liquor
ever, and that after a long term of years, destroyed a human body, and
that statistics as to the soul are not attainable). Much is to be
hoped for under this benign instruction. It is not possible that our
youth will not miss to acquire much important information, such as
that "wine is a good servant if well used"; that total abstinence is
a regimen only to be pursued by advice of a physician; that the vast
majority of human beings can and do partake moderately of alcoholic
liquors, not only without injurious consequences, but with positive
benefit; and that, as it is a source of much enjoyment, and much
discomfort often springs from its discontinuance, it is difficult to
say why such use should be discontinued under ordinary circumstances.
Our youth will learn, too, that there are many nations that thrive
without alcoholic drinks--nations, for example, professing the
Mohammedan faith, to whom alcohol is forbidden by their religion; but
that among them the use of stronger narcotics, such as opium and
Indian hemp, is extremely common, and the exchange from alcohol to
these narcotics can hardly be looked upon as a gain. The result of
this State instruction may be confidently looked for, and can not
possibly do harm. It is too early as yet to procure data for
discussion of the amount of good accomplished by this legislation. We
must wait until the adolescent pupil has grown to man's estate, to
middle age, until his mortal change, and search his record, and the
record of the family he leaves behind him, for the benefits of the
paternal legislation. In short, it is exceedingly doubtful if data
upon this subject, in the nineteenth century at least, will ever be
collected at all. It is noticeable, however, that in the States'
scheme of education the peripatetic temperance lecturer, with his
lurid colored charts of the human stomach in the horrors of suffering
from what he calls "the flowin' bowl," have no place, and no salary is
provided for such "university extension" processes. A suggestion
lately made in these pages that temperance lecturers as well as liquor
dealers being obliged to take out licenses (at least as caterers to
the public amusement) is conspicuous by its absence from the
educational plan.
IV. GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF TRAFFIC.--The idea of a government monopoly
in liquor is from continental Europe, and, like most ideas from that
source, is paternal and monarchical pure and simple. The idea reached
perfection in what is known as the Gothenburg system, which,
attracting considerable attention from students of the liquor problem,
was introduced into the statutes of Georgia, where after a brief trial
it was discarded. The State of South Carolina, however, adopted its
principal features, calling it the "dispensary system," and is still
maintaining it.
The story of the Gothenburg system is as follows: Since the days of
Gustavus Adolphus III there had existed in Sweden and Norway a policy
making the distillation of a liquor called _bränxin_, or brandy, a
right running with the ownership of land first, afterward with a
tenancy of land, and ultimately a right secured to tavern-keepers.
This brandy being distilled from grain or potatoes, and containing
about fifty per cent of alcohol, was cheap, and in consequence of the
poor food supply grew into universal use, until not only men and women
but very young children drank it. Drunkenness became the rule, and
pauperism and crime prevailed in startling proportions, outrunning the
range of either charity or police to control them. In this state of
affairs a Dr. Wisselgren, Dean of Gothenburg, a Swedish city, arose,
and from his exertions grew the famous Gothenburg system.
Stripped of detail, this system provides that stock companies called
brandy companies shall receive from the crown a monopoly of liquor
sales, on condition of maintaining eating houses, reading rooms,
lodgings, and other conveniences for the community, and out of surplus
profits contribute to the police, the poor, and the educational, funds
of the community. The companies shall be under inspection of the royal
governor, with no appeal from his discretion, and also under
inspection of officers of the three funds entitled to the surplus
profits. The companies must close their places of sale on Sundays, can
sell only to persons over eighteen years of age, and in the rooms
devoted to drinking alone there must be no chairs or settees. After
drinking, the purchaser must depart. Such rooms must not be in
communication directly with the eating and lodging rooms. In these
latter cleanliness and cheapness must prevail, but the company may
raise the price and dilute the strength of the brandy sold.
With much amendment and revision, this system appears to be to-day
substantially in effect, with what good results opinions differ. It
was speedily rejected after brief trial in Georgia for a high-license
system pure and simple. In South Carolina its introduction from
Georgia provoked riot and even bloodshed on account of the right of
search which it involved. The main feature is, of course, that the
State becomes the real buyer, jobber, and retailer of all ardent
spirits. Here it has been found difficult of complete administration,
and, unless its success should be more distinguished than at present,
it probably is but a short-lived expedient.
V. REGULATION OF HOURS OF SALE.--All the liquor-licensing States and
Territories regulate the hours of opening and closing drinking places.
They all agree in closing them during the small hours (that is, from
midnight or one o'clock A. M. until about sunrise or an hour after).
It is difficult to all what effect for good or ill these statutes can
have upon either the decrease of drunkenness or the increase of
revenue. Doubtless they are convenient for the public force of cities
or the constabulary of the smaller towns, so that they may know when
to be prepared for possible breaking of the public peace. But in no
State, so far as we can discover, are they applied to Sunday, the day
when, in large cities especially, and in the heated season, the
inconvenience of hermetically closed ale and beer houses is most
exasperating to the wayfarer, and intolerable and even (from a
sanitary standpoint) dangerous to the wage-earning and poorer classes,
packed in torrid and fetid tenements on the figment of a danger of
"disturbing a public worship" (I say "figment" because no instance of
a disturbance of public worship by the sale of liquor can be found in
the history of this planet). Why in torrid weather the worthy poor man
and his family who can not afford ice-boxes can not quench a natural
and normal thirst, and so avoid contracting disease by drinking stale
and impure water in the superheated apartments of city tenement houses
where an average of three families to a window pane has been said to
be the rule, I for one have never been able to comprehend. A good
Sunday law, as in London, not allowing but compelling the opening of
beer houses on certain hours on Sundays, would be a most desirable
thing, especially in our great cities. The fact, too, that at present
the streets of our American cities are woefully lacking in other
sanitary conveniences, which are only supplied meagerly by an
occasional drinking place, would appear an additional reason why a
Sunday-opening law would be quite as convenient and quite as welcome
as a Sunday-closing law. Such a law would have the effect of at least
meeting public convenience, and might well be substituted for the
present ridiculous closing laws. Into what legislative intellect it
ever first entered to conceive that the cause of temperance would be
assisted by closing liquor saloons seven hours out of the twenty-four
(and those seven the hours when all Nature, drunk or sober, is asleep)
it passes imagination to conjecture. Most Legislatures have followed
the first one, however, and enacted such provisions.
VI. REFUSAL OF EMPLOYMENT TO PERSONS KNOWN TO BE HABITUAL USERS OF
LIQUOR.--In two States--viz., New York and Ohio--clauses have been
introduced forbidding the employment by railways and other common
carriers of passengers, of persons known to be addicted to the use of
intoxicants. In the latter State the common carrier must be notified
that such person has been known to be intoxicated while in said
carrier's "active" employment, in order to bind the carrier with
knowledge. Such a provision as this may be criticised as the Czar of
Russia's proposition for a universal disarmament is likely to be
criticised--as admirable and millennial, but of no value if gradually
adopted, and impossible of instant adoption. No public industry, not
even the liquor industry, could cease and disappear in a day without
throwing tens of thousands of wage-earners out of employment, and it
would be hardship indeed if the family of the drinking man, the
toiling wife, scheming to save a morsel of the weekly wages from the
dram shop, should be forced to accept the alternative of no wages at
all. The suggestion presents, again, a maze of presumption from which,
once entered into, no practical exit would present itself. Supposing
that no skilled laborer, no finisher, no engineer, no oiler, no
fireman, etc., could be found who was a total abstainer for any one
factory or railway service, let alone a hundred or a hundred thousand
cases? Clearly this discussion could only be pursued as a curiosity
(or, say, a fascinating speculation as to the effects of an industrial
chaos). The first item in the recipe for making hare stew was to catch
your hare. To run our commerce with totally abstaining employees we
must find our totally abstaining employees. To pause to create them
would bring commerce, and with it society, including the churches, the
schools, and the Temperance Unions themselves, to a standstill like
that of Joshua's moon in Ajalon! In connection with this employment
question, however, a practical suggestion has been made. It is
suggested that, as Saturday night is the workman's "night off" and the
ensuing Sunday is his holiday, it might work well to make the weekly
pay-day of a Monday instead of a Saturday. The experiment is worth a
trial. The change could be made abruptly, and the bad half an hour to
the workman would occur but once. Let him be handed his wages some
Monday morning when the Saturday night's spree and the long Sunday's
headache had been novel and conspicuous omissions. The necessity of
good shape for Tuesday's stint would prevent a Monday night at the bar
room, and the probability is that the wife and family might realize a
substantial instead of a marginal proportion of the weekly wage. At
any rate, compared with some of the suggestions made for remedying the
drink evil, this is superbly sensible. Indeed, one who has not had
occasion to examine these matters can have little idea of the
absurdity to which otherwise perfectly sane persons will go in
combating an evil with which they are very properly impressed, but to
the consequences of an abrupt removal of which it has not occurred to
them to pay any attention whatever; for example, the seriously
proposed law against "treating"--that is, against inviting a friend to
"take a drink" with him. Granted that the tippling habit is encouraged
by the social instinct, and that the great peril of drunkenness comes
(as an old New England farmer expressed it) "not from drinkin', but
from drinkin' agin," a law to prevent treating, like a law forbidding
a man from inviting his neighbor home to dinner, or his wife inviting
the other man's wife over to luncheon, would be obliged to first find
its lawgiver. But gentlemen who solve the liquor question are not apt
to be particular to find a jurisdiction and a source for the laws they
propose. It is interesting to note that in one State (Nevada) an
anti-treating law was once actually passed, but repealed, "having
proved impracticable" (at least, that is the official record of the
reason for its repeal, no particulars being given).
VII. THE PERSONAL DAMAGE LAW.--that is, the holding of a seller of
liquor to a person known to be dangerous when in drink responsible for
damage caused by his intoxication. This principle has now become
ingrafted in the laws of seventeen of the United States, sometimes
coupled with high license and local option and sometimes not. It is
really only an application of the principle of the common law that a
man must so use his own as not to injure his neighbor; that
communities had the same right to hold a supplier of intoxicants to a
violent drinker as a criminal as it had to punish the keeper of a
dangerous beast (of a biting dog, for example, knowing it to be
such--i. e., if the animal has once bitten a human being or killed a
domestic animal kept for revenue, as a cow or a sheep). This civil
damage law has been made statutory in many ways. In Ohio the seller is
held indefinitely for the "expenses of any one who takes charge of the
intoxicated person" after notice to the seller not to sell to that
person. In Michigan the damages may be exemplary. In Vermont, if the
drunkard is imprisoned the seller must pay two dollars per day to his
wife or minor children in addition to suffering an imprisonment. In
New Hampshire and Nebraska, and in several other States, a person
arrested for drunkenness is given his liberty if he will disclose the
name of the person who sold him the liquor on which he became
intoxicated. In most of the other States (as in New York) the damages
are not limited except by the facts of such case. In New York, too,
the preliminary notice is insisted on. In other States (as Idaho) the
seller's damage is the loss of his license, if notice not to sell has
been properly served upon him. In Arkansas the liquor seller as a
condition of his license must give a bond to pay all damages awarded.
In Nebraska the seller must give a bond to support all widows and
orphans, and pay all legal expenses of prosecution as well as all
damage resulting from any intoxication induced by or traceable to his
sales.
VIII. ENCOURAGE THE USE OF LIGHT WINES AND BEERS.--The suggestion has
often been made that this would undoubtedly solve at one swoop a
respectable proportion of the problem. The practical difficulty would
be to institute the reform in any but the cities and larger towns.
Everybody has remarked that, to see the true and distinguished squalor
of drunkenness, one must seek the villages, sparsely settled
communities, the rural districts whence come the "come-ons," the
willing victims of the green-goods men, anxious to cheat their
Government (and so, one might say, at least a shade less estimable
than the sharper who only proposes to cheat a fellow-citizen). It
seems to me that the reason for this difference lies distinctly in the
fact that the countryman, who will gratify his appetite for drink, has
no choice but the concoction of ardent spirits, high wines, or
whatever it is which the local publican sets before him. To him the
word "wine" suggests a luxury beyond his venture or his purse. And so
for the price at which, in a large city, he could obtain half a
bottle, or even a bottle, of wholesome red wine, the consumption of
which at a settling would do no possible harm, he throws into his
stomach a glass of biting poison, and, horrible to relate, another and
another; whereas the whole bottle, or at least the half bottle,
probably shared with a neighbor, would have satisfied his craving
without ruining his digestion or stealing away his brains. This clause
of our discussion runs largely into our IX. But meanwhile here are
some figures which may startle prohibitionists as completely as did
the figures given in these pages four years ago, which went to prove
that habitual drunkards lived longer than total abstainers. (These
figures have been strenuously denied in declamation and denouncement.
I have yet to learn that any attempt has been made by industry in
collection of counter-figures to demonstrate their fallacy.[4]) But
here are certain other figures: It appears by the official report of
Dr. Nagle to the Health Department of the city of New York for the
first thirty-one weeks of the year 1893 (the city then prior to the
consolidation or to the present "Raines" law) that in the community
(as it then was of 1,765,645 inhabitants) out of 29,080 deaths only
twenty-nine were directly traceable to the use of liquor. And this in
a community where 10,749 liquor saloons were in operation from sunrise
to midnight daily, not to mention the use of wines and liquors in
hundreds of hotels and clubs and of wines and malt liquors on tens of
thousands of private tables. These figures are startling, and read
quite as extravagantly as those quite to the reverse conclusion with
which the prohibitionists are wont to appall us. But they are from
the official sources, and, unlike the awful figures which show a
larger mortality from the use of liquor alone than the mortality from
all known causes (liquor included), can be verified by taking the
trouble to consult the files of the (New York) City Record. As for the
part which drinking wine has to do with this official summary, I may
mention the difficulty of approximating to the sales of what may be
properly called "light wines." But I have been able to ascertain (as
some indication of it, perhaps) that in the fifty-two weeks of this
same year (1893) there were consumed in the same city 265,414 cases of
champagne! So it would appear that even champagne is a mitigant,
rather than an aggravator, of at least the public horrors of
drunkenness.
[Footnote 4: Perhaps for convenience of reference the figures
heretofore found so startling may be repeated. Of 4,234 deaths
collected by the British Medical Association, divided for
reference into five classes--namely: _a_, total abstainers; _b_,
habitually temperate; _c_, careless drinkers; _d_, free drinkers;
_e_, habitual drunkards--the ages of death of those in each class
were registered, together with the causes of death; and the
average of death for each class computed with the following
result:
Total abstainers lived on an average 51.22 years;
Habitually temperate lived on an average 62.13 "
Careless drinkers lived on an average 59.67 "
Free drinkers lived on an average 57.59 "
Habitual drunkards lived on an average 52.03 "
To cancel such a statement as this, some industry is required on
the other side; at least a collection of 4,234 other cases.
Anybody can say that a laboriously tabulated statement is false.
But it requires patience to demonstrate it.]
I am not unconscious of the fluent answer to these figures. It will be
of course urged by the prohibitionist that they only show deaths the
"direct" cause of dram-drinking. But such answer is correspondingly
unsafe. For, since death, albeit normal to us all comes from some
cause (notably from old age, for example), a better formula would be
that, since many deaths are caused by old age, and as old age is
caused by living too long, we should be careful not to live too long.
Hence, as life is prolonged by eating, as well as shortened by
drinking (granting that contention), to abstain from the use of food
is the only course of wisdom!
This encouragement to the drinking of light wines has, so far, only
positively found its way into the statute-books of the one essentially
wine-growing State, California, though in other States it has made its
limited appearance. Nor does there seem to be any reason why every
State should not include in its laws such a provision, for example, as
that of Oregon (certainly not known as _per se_ a "wine-growing State"
at present), which provides that "owners of vineyards may sell their
products without license"; or of Utah, which, however, adds to a
similar provision that the sale must be in quantities not less than
five gallons. Even Kansas provides that wine or cider, grown by the
maker for his own use or to be sold for communion purposes, is not
within the prohibitions. However, as in most of the States, the price
of a license to sell only wines, or wines and beers, is less than the
price of a license to sell ardent spirits, it may fairly be said that
an encouragement to drinking wines in preference to distilled liquors
has become parcel of the public policy in most communities. In Georgia
the sellers of wines who are also manufacturers thereof are exempted
from paying any license. The State of Michigan is justly proud of its
Dairy and Food Commission, which provides for the examination and
secures the purity not only of fruits, butter, milk, cheese, but of
buckwheat flour, jellies, canned goods, lard, vinegar, coffee, sirups
and molasses, chocolate, cocoanuts, baking powder, flavoring
extracts, mustard, and other spices. And this same law (elsewhere
considered as to adulteration of liquors) seems to encourage light
wines by a distinct provision that "the blending of liquors will be
permitted if spirits or other ingredients are not added." In Rhode
Island, if manufactured from fruit or grain grown in the State, no
license is required for the manufacture of cider, wine, or malt
liquors; and (with a thrift not uncharacteristic) alcohol, while
subject to a heavy license for home consumption, may be produced for
exportation without any license at all.
IX. REMOVE ALL DUTIES, TAXES, IMPOSTS, OR BURDENS OF ANY SORT ON FOOD
PRODUCTS, SERIALS, OR MEATS, in order that the food supply may be
unfailing everywhere.