THE LORD OF THE SLUM
He stood at the corner of a terrace that opens off the steep street
that leads from the heart of the high-perched city right down to the
sea. With his right hand he gripped the paling, while he swayed gently
from side to side. A big, burly, swarthy man with a close-cropped
black beard, he sawed the air with his left hand, while he glanced with
bleared eyes down the street. From the bottom of the steep a car came
lumbering up, and a gleam of intelligence came into his eyes. He let
go his hold on the paling, and made for the tram lines. He plainly
wanted to board the car, but his feet moved in contrary directions, and
on the pavement he described an arc. And he {98} lurched back on the
paling, gripping it this time with both hands, while the car with its
freight of passengers went clanking past up the steep. There, with
helpless limbs, with his head bowed on his breast, he held on to the
paling, while the sunlight flooded the firth with molten silver--the
product of an ancient civilisation and a thousand years of
Christianity. In that remote era which ended in August 1914 we would
have passed him there without so much as a feeling of surprise. But
to-day we are as a man awakened from heavy slumber, stung by a sudden
dart to a new realisation. And we saw not that one solitary man sunk
in his sodden degradation, but the multitude which he represents, that
multitude whose drunkenness means destruction to their brothers
wrestling in the trenches with an unbeaten and ruthless foe. Two years
ago the call went ringing through the Empire, and from the far
North-West to the long wash of Australasian seas {99} an indomitable
race arose to war for the right. Statesmen and preachers summoned them
to a holy war, and they came with transfigured eyes. But, alas! a holy
war can only be waged by a holy nation. And as the eyes gaze at that
figure swaying on the paling, and on the mind there flashes the
realisation of what lies behind him, the heart can but cry in deepest
awe: May God have mercy upon us!
I
There can come no moral resurrection for any except to those who
realise the evil of which they are partakers. It is not in the spirit
of Pharisaic censoriousness that we must judge that brawny workman
swaying on the paling, and all that he represents. For these men are
what we made them. It is the nation in its corporate capacity that
shaped and moulded these lives after that pattern. If we had set
ourselves expressly to produce this result, we could {100} not have
taken a surer way of attaining the end. We drove the people into the
congested and foul tenements of narrow streets. Let the well-to-do
classes try to realise the conditions of life to which men such as this
have been doomed. Let them picture to themselves what life can be like
in a one-roomed or two-roomed house in a crowded barracks. Imagine a
man and wife with an infant and two or more children, and often a
lodger, living in such a house. For them there is no change of air
either day or night; their bodies cannot be cleaned nor their clothes
washed; they are denied cleanliness in their whole environment; it is
impossible to cook appetising food or to serve it in a pleasing manner;
there is no escape for them from noise and squalor; they have no
privacy either living or dying; and there is always the spectre of want
hovering near.[1] What recompense has {101} the State provided for
them in their misery? What provision has been made that men and women
may escape for a little to breathe a purer air and feel that they have
part in a life richer than this? The State has not been wholly
unmindful of them. It has provided for them the public-house, and,
with paternal care, has multiplied these places of {102} recreation and
happiness where the mass of human misery is greatest. The State has
been lavish in its provision. In the Cowgate of Edinburgh it has
provided one public-house for every 200 of the population, though in
the leisured and rich districts there is only one licence for every
1300 of the population;[2] in the Cowcaddens of Glasgow it has provided
at the rate of thirty public-houses to the half-mile. It surrounds the
poor and the miserable with an atmosphere reeking with alcohol. The
trade in alcohol enfeebles the will, saps the resisting power, and then
trades upon that enfeebled will. {103} This is the door of escape from
misery which the State provides. Who can blame the people for availing
themselves of this national remedy for their woe pressed upon them by
the State at every corner? If the drunkenness of masses of the
population be a national weakness and a crying scandal, it is not their
fault. It is the State that is responsible, and as citizens of the
State we have each to bear our share of the responsibility and of the
shame. It is no use decrying publicans and brewers, for these are only
what we ourselves made them. Let us take ourselves to task and condemn
our own folly and our own sin.
It was not enough that we provided the narcotic of drunkenness for the
man, but we set ourselves to alleviate also the lot of the woman.
There was a pressure of public opinion which prevented respectable
women from frequenting public-houses. Provision had to be made for
them. This provision was made in the legislation of Mr. Gladstone in
{104} 1860 and 1861 whereby grocers were licensed to sell alcohol. It
is only fair to say that the purpose of the legislation was not to
encourage the consumption of alcohol. In those days people were
obsessed with the idea that by multiplying the opportunities for
procuring alcohol, its consumption would decrease! The grocer's
licence was to safeguard people from the public-house! The result has
been the most disastrous of any legislation passed by sane statesmen.
It enabled women to obtain alcohol in a respectable manner, sanctioned
both by legislation and society, and to use it under conditions of
privacy, unhampered by any restraint. The State enormously increased
the facilities for drunkenness and strengthened the forces of
temptation by the multiplying of tens of thousands of liquor-selling
establishments. To these temptations the women in ever-increasing
numbers succumbed. When war broke out, and the men mustered to the
defence of their country, the {105} women were left the comfort of
alcohol. The result was an increase in the drunkenness of women, and a
corresponding increase in child mortality.
Who can blame these women? With their husbands and sons summoned to
wrestle with death, what wonder that 'feelings of faintness' overtook
them, and that for those feelings they resorted to the only unfailing
remedy they knew--alcohol! These women live their lives under
conditions which make it impossible for them ever to be well. They
climb up and down weary stairs endlessly. There is no escape from
hopeless toil. The unhealthy conditions of life render them chronic
invalids. In the grocer's shop the State provides for them the
panacea. Here is exhilaration amid the worries of their drab
existence, and escape from the anxieties which oppressed them. And in
a little while they are slaves to the national remedy provided for
them. Their husbands often come back on leave to find {106} their
homes ruined--the larder empty, the fire dying for lack of fuel, the
children unkempt and ill-nourished. In many districts the allowances
made by the State to the dependants of its fighting men were but a
further State-endowment of the publican. It was for this that our
soldiers bared their breasts to the foe and looked death in the face.
This was the reward of their sacrifice, the guerdon of their wounds.
In their absence the State provided for their wives the solace and stay
of alcohol; but the State heeded not the fact that by so doing it
ruined the home and destroyed the children. If there be condemnation,
let the State be condemned; and from that condemnation for us, as its
citizens, there can be no escape.
II
When we consider the results of the trade in alcohol, the wonder grows
how it is that this State-regulated monopoly {107} for the
manufacturing of paupers, lunatics, and criminals has been suffered to
continue so long. To it most of the evils which afflict the
body-politic can be traced. It nullifies all efforts at social
improvement. Philanthropic movements have poured out money like water
to improve the condition of the people, but faster than slums can be
cleared away or emptied, new slums are created and filled by the
victims of alcohol. The funds of Guardians and of Parish Councils are
mainly used to support those whom alcohol has impoverished. There is
the authority of Mr. John Burns, the late President of the Local
Government Board, for the statement that out of 100,000 applicants for
poor relief at Wandsworth during a period of twenty years, only twelve
were abstainers.... It not only fills our workhouses, it also crowds
our jails. According to the late Lord Alverstone nine-tenths of the
crime of this country was due to drink.... Insanity finds in it a
fruitful source. {108} Twenty per cent. of all the men and ten per
cent. of all the women in a London County Council asylum--the Claybury
Asylum--have become insane through alcohol.... The social evil is
mainly due to alcohol. Under its influence women descend to vice.
Half the infections of the social disease are traceable to the
weakening of the will power by drink.... Evil though it be in itself,
its evil goes far beyond itself, for it is the short-cut to all the
other vices.... It is one of the great causes of the decline of the
race in thus polluting the springs of life, poisoning and sterilising
them; but, far more, it is responsible for an enormous share of the
appalling infant mortality which destroys in many districts a fifth of
the child life in the first year.... It lowers the vitality and makes
the tissues more susceptible to attacks by the germs of disease, and
thus greatly increases the deathrate.... It multiplies coffins and
empties cradles.... Were this one monopoly abolished {109} and the
people delivered from the State-licensed temptations which are for ever
inviting them to their ruin, almost all workhouses and jails would be
closed and the nation delivered from the burden of pauperism and crime
which weighs so heavily upon it. Yet the nation in the time of its
greatest peril spends L180,000,000 a year upon the drink-traffic. This
is the price which it pays for the lowering of its own vitality and for
the weakening of its striking power. A government which connives at
that cannot be a government that is waging war really in earnest.
Shipping, food, coals, the railways, roads, and a host of men are in
great measure sacrificed to a trade which weakens the nation in face of
the enemy.
The favourite argument in support of the liquor trade is the argument
that upholds the liberty of the subject. In a free country people must
be free to destroy themselves if they so wish, that others may be free
to use alcohol {110} without abusing it. If we are to aim at freedom,
let us have a freedom worth while. At present the nation is not free
to control or eliminate the greatest peril in our midst. We are
entrusted with the administration of our schools and roads and gas and
poor-rates, and we elect men who control these. But we elect nobody
who controls alcohol. We have as citizens no say as to whether the
grocer in the village will get a licence to corrupt our family life
with alcohol, or whether the poor places be crowded with public-houses.
That is in the hands of justices, and justices are created by a
mysterious power behind politics. In a free country this power of
planting down places for the sale of alcohol independently of the will
of the people is an anachronism by which the poor are enslaved. When
we speak of freedom let us consider this freedom--freedom for the
children of the poor to grow up untempted. Let us remember that the
race has now to depend mainly upon {111} the poor for its continuation
and for its virility. A nation that will doom the rising generation to
the atmosphere of gin and whisky round its cradles, seals its own doom.
The children brought up in its atmosphere will deem alcohol not only
inevitable but also desirable. They will be 'happy in the mire because
they are not conscious of the slough.' The true liberty of the subject
cannot mean racial destruction.... Recently a woman in a mean street
in London went to the public-house with a sick baby in her arms.
'While she was there it died, but she stayed on drinking and holding
the dead baby.'[3] That dead baby in the arms of its alcoholic mother
in a public-house visualises the grim and terrible situation. It is
the personification of all the millions of baby lives throttled to
death by alcohol--of a race sinking to decay in its grasp.
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III
We must not, however, forget that the Government of this country, while
the manhood of the race was perishing abroad, were not wholly
indifferent to the welfare of childhood at home. When they found that
ship-repairing and shipbuilding and the production of munitions were
hampered and delayed by drunkenness, they adopted restrictions of
various kinds. But in most cases these restrictions were worse than
useless. The Government surrendered its powers in the matter of the
greatest evil afflicting the nation, to a Board of Control. That
authority meant well. It sought to limit the consumption of alcohol by
limiting the hours of its sale. This Board forgot that a man can in
five minutes buy enough whisky to keep him comfortably alcoholic for
five months. To shut the public-house for certain hours meant for many
the laying in of a store of whisky when formerly a few {113} nips
sufficed. But no regulations made by man since the day of the Bourbons
equalled in sheer fatuity the decree that a man who wanted a gill of
whisky could not get it unless he bought a quart? With a wage that
passed his rosiest dreams, to secure the gill he of course bought the
quart. No wonder the consumption of alcohol increased to L181,959,000
in 1915, as compared to L164,453,000 in 1914. This was the fruit of a
policy which aimed at producing sobriety.
But there are some good results claimed by the Board of Control. The
number of convictions for drunkenness decreased! But what was the
price paid for this improvement in our streets? It was the greater
corruption of the home. The drinking was driven out of the
public-house into the house; the drunkard no longer offended the public
gaze in the street, he carried his vice and degradation into the bosom
of his family. Formerly his drunkenness was limited by certain hours;
now his drunkenness was {114} continuous while his store lasted. And
he took care it lasted. If the streets were partially cleansed, the
children were impregnated as never before by the atmosphere of alcohol,
and the women were taught to share in the drunken orgy. To-day the
claim is made that, at last, the consumption of alcohol is on the
decline. When four millions of men are with the colours, fighting
across the seas, it would be indeed marvellous if there was not a
decline in the sale of alcohol at home!
IV
If some of the steps taken by the Central Control Board cannot commend
themselves to temperance reformers, there have been other policies
initiated by them which are undoubtedly in the right direction. The
prohibition of the sale of ardent spirits within certain areas has
inaugurated a new and beneficial national policy. The time may not be
yet come for a total prohibition of alcohol throughout the country.
{115} Those who know anything of the intolerable conditions under which
men and women live in the crowded, noisome tenements of our great
cities, realise that these people must have some way of escape from
their miserable environment. Total prohibition is the ideal to be kept
steadily in view, but before that ideal can be realised the people must
be prepared for it. The only way to prepare for the ideal is by a
reconstruction of the social order. New and sanitary housing for the
poor must precede the policy of total prohibition. But the time is
fully ripe for a prohibition of ardent spirits during the war and
during the period of demobilisation. And it is on this policy that the
Board have launched forth. In the district of Annan and in wide
stretches of the north of Scotland the sale of spirits is now
prohibited. In a recent visit paid to the Hebrides, I found among the
people a spirit of thankfulness that they have at last been delivered
from a great evil. Drunkenness has vanished among them. {116} A new
era of prosperity has been inaugurated.
This policy, which has been made effective in the places where it has
been put in force, ought to be at once applied generally. It is
grotesque to endeavour to promote sobriety in patches, shut in by
geographical boundaries. It has not been applied in the places which
need it most. In the common lodging-houses and farmed-out houses of
the Grassmarket and West Port of Edinburgh there were found, by a
recent census, a population of 1383 persons of whom 518 were engaged in
war-work, It is futile to expect that these workers, living in an
atmosphere reeking with alcohol, can render the State the best service
they are capable of. And to these places come, every week-end, workers
from the naval base and soldiers on leave. And these workers and these
soldiers pass their brief holiday in that alcoholic atmosphere. The
result can only be deleterious to them and to the State.
There are more sailors and soldiers to be {117} found in the poor
places of Edinburgh and Glasgow than in all the villages of the West of
Scotland put together. Why should the few be protected from the sale
of ardent spirits and the many left to be victims of temptation? There
is only one remedy--the general application to the country of that
policy which is now restricted to favoured areas. There must be equal
treatment for the whole country and an equal chance given to all who
are serving the State.
The time to make that policy effective is now. While the nation is in
the midst of the great conflict for its existence, the people will
gladly welcome any restrictions which will strengthen the State in its
hour of need. The heart of the nation is prepared for sacrifice. But
when the danger is passed, the mood will change. It will not be so
easy then to make drastic changes in the habits of the people. And the
time when restrictions will be most necessary will be when the army is
demobilised. If restrictions are not {118} imposed now, it will be
impossible to impose them then.
There is a growing feeling that the quickest road to the desired end
may be found in the nationalisation of the liquor trade. Many would
shrink from this policy if they thought that the State would become a
permanent species of glorified publican. But the end in view is the
transformation of the liquor trade. Only the State can achieve that.
The State, with full control, can make the public-houses centres of
recreation, with the temptation of spirits removed. And the way will
be clear for mending or ending, as experience will prove which is the
better policy. The true reformer will care far more for the reform
than for the means by which it is to be achieved. If the reform can
best be realised through State-ownership, then the sooner it comes the
better.
If the remedy for the evils wrought by drunkenness does not, and
cannot, lie along the road of supplying more {119} facilities for the
sale of alcohol, we must at the same time never forget that the craving
for alcohol is a craving for a fuller life--for life lit up by colour
and social joy. Those who meet that hunger for a richer life with
nothing but a dreary 'don't,' with no remedy save that of the surgical
operation, expose themselves to jibes such as that bitter jibe of Lord
Macaulay: 'The Puritans objected to bear-baiting not because of cruelty
to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.' The aim
of the social reformer must be the substitution of true joy and
happiness for what is spurious. The State must make provision for the
social instincts of the masses. 'What are wanted,' writes Sir Thomas
P. Whittaker, a member of the Royal Commission on Licensing, 'are
places of the nature of free clubs, where men may sit and smoke and
talk and play games or read the papers. They should be open to the
public free, with small charges for the use of cards and the {120}
billiard-tables.... People should be made to feel as much at their
ease in them as they are in our public parks. The cost of maintaining
such places would not be great, and the social, material, and moral
advantages that would result would render them an excellent
investment....' It is along this road deliverance must be sought.
There is no use sweeping out the house unless the house is to be
occupied by fairer and more wholesome tenants than those expelled.
V
There is one last serious aspect of this problem wherewith the
spiritual forces of the nation are faced, and that is the weakening of
the nation's soul which the new policy has entailed. Whosoever
considers the manner in which religion has lost its grip on the masses,
the passing away of all discipline, the decay of idealism, and the slow
but steady emptying of the churches, cannot but feel that the greatest
need of to-day is a revival of {121} religion. Unless the soul
controls the body, man atrophies and perishes. The Church for many
centuries has striven to garrison the nation's soul, and to bring the
body under discipline. But the Church no longer can bring its power
into play, for the churches are left deserted more or less. The
proportion of the industrial population who never enter a church's door
is vastly greater than is commonly supposed. Professor Cairns, a
careful and judicious observer, who would make no statement that could
not be verified, has declared that three out of five soldiers at the
front have had no connection with the Church. The toilers of our
cities are rapidly relapsing into that paganism out of which
Christianity rescued the world at the first. What the world needs is
God. It is only when the face of God is unveiled to the awe-filled
eyes of men that they can realise the foulness of moral degradation.
In the light of that holiness which marshals all the forces in {122}
the universe to war against sin, and in that light alone, does the soul
realise the awfulness of sin. When that realisation comes, then the
history of the world becomes mainly the history of sin--that dread
power which saps the vitality of nations, disintegrates empires, ruins
civilisations, and which brings upon proud capital cities the flaming
judgment of sword and fire. The function of the prophet is to keep
clear before the eyes of men the moral issues which are laden with life
or death. The mission of the Church is to replace the spurious and
fleeting joys of sin by the true and enduring joy of a life in unison
with God.
But the State renders the Church impotent and makes the revival of
religion in our day impossible. That may seem exaggerated, but it is
true. For the State has driven alcohol into the homes, and has
consigned not only the husband, but often the wife also, to the
degrading influence of alcohol not only on Saturday but on Sunday. In
vain does the call {123} to return to God sound in the ears of a
population sunk in the torpor of alcohol. No prophet can rouse such a
people. 'If a man, walking in a spirit of falsehood, do lie, saying,
"I will prophesy unto thee of wine and of strong drink, he shall even
be the prophet of this people."'[4] The Church is powerless against
thirty public-houses to the half-mile! Alcohol bars the door against
every movement for the social and spiritual uplift of the nation. If
the nation is to be saved, the nation must act. Arise, O Israel!
We must look at our population in a new light and see them not as
makers of munitions but as sons of God. The horribly cynical attitude
of our rulers is that which regards men merely as munition-makers.
They survey them only from the low ground of self-interest. It is not
in relation to the peril of the hour that this problem has to be faced,
but in relation to man's high calling as {124} the son of God. These
men and women are our brothers and sisters, bearing the image of God,
and created to be heirs of an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled.
Can we go on working their ruin, damning them body and soul? A race
that will not cleanse the fountains of its national life, that will not
remove from its midst the forces of degeneration, that shrinks from
that moral surgery which will alone save the body-politic--such a race
cannot hope to go on swaying the destinies of the world. But this is
our confidence, that through the horrors of war the nation will waken
to the deep issues of life and death, and that the forces of moral and
social renewal will advance a hundred years in one day. We can hear
the marshalling of the forces in our midst which will transform and
enrich the nation. There is arising the cry of the coming victory:
'The King shall follow Christ, and we the King.'
[1] In the _Record_, the official organ of the United Free Church of
Scotland, there appeared in the August number, 1916, a letter written
by a 'Special Constable' which gives a terrible word-picture of a slum
family:
'Let me give a personal experience of one of the multitude of family
tragedies directly due to drink which come under my notice. A family
of eight persons--four of them adults--occupied a single room in a slum
area.
'The eldest son, aged twenty-one years, was in the last stage of
consumption, and occupied the only bed in the room. On visiting the
house one morning, I found the lad lying on the floor, in a corner. He
had required to vacate the bed for his mother, and during the night
there had been born into these surroundings another of those immortal
souls who, in the words of Kingsley, "are damned from their birth."
'The following day the mother was sitting at the fireside, and was
never back in bed till the son died some days later. It is hardly
necessary to add that the mother, the infant, and another girl followed
him at short intervals. On the day of the mother's funeral the husband
got drunk and had to be locked up--the twentieth-century method of
remedying evils of this kind.'
[2] The distribution of licences in our cities is a crying evil. The
following are examples of the provision made in the wards of
Edinburgh:--
Number of Population to
Ward. Population. Licences. each Licence
Morningside 24,320 18 1351
Merchiston 24,436 21 1163
St. Giles' 24,277 118 205
St. Andrew's 11,166 87 128
In proportion to the poverty and misery of the population are the
licences increased. In the Cowgate of Edinburgh there are 12 licences,
and in the Canongate, 19. The same proportion applies to all our
cities.
[3] _The Drink Problem of To-day_, p. 182.
[4] Micah ii. 11.
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