Of any two hundred persons committed to the County Prison, probably one
hundred and fifty owe their incarceration to drunkenness. Assault and
battery, breach of the peace, misdemeanor, vagrancy, abuse and threats,
disorderly conduct, and other charges which figure upon the commitments
sent by the magistrate with the prisoner, are often only other terms for
drunkenness and only varieties in the _charge_ or slight additions to
the offence; and even the higher offences against the law are frequently
referable to, or connected with, intemperance in the use of intoxicating
liquors; and it generally happens that when the prisoner is questioned
with regard to the temptation to steal, to fight, or commit some other
misdemeanor with which he stands charged, he replies that he knows
nothing about such acts, he only took a drop too much, or was a “little
tight;” he remembers a mass of things, yet nothing distinctly, and
professes to feel greatly injured in being committed for a misdemeanor,
when he had done nothing but get drunk; or that he should have been
charged with assault and battery when he had only beaten his wife or
struck the officer that arrested him; nor does he find it reconcilable
with justice that he should be charged with abuse and threats for merely
cursing the magistrate and offering to break his head at a moment of
greater soberness. This vice of excessive drinking is then so intimately
connected with the administration of justice, either as a motive or a
stimulant for offences against the law, that it is deemed proper to
consider it more closely in connection with prison discipline, in order
that we may understand what are the duties of society in regard to its
means and subjects, and thus we may also comprehend how entirely its
suppression becomes a means of ameliorating the condition of public
prisons. If we would lesson the evils of prisons, perhaps the most
important step would be to diminish the number of prisoners. To strike
from the list of offences that offence which is the parent, the
assistant, and the offspring of so many more—would seem to be a great
advance in the work of those who seek to denounce vice as well as to
correct the vicious and criminal.
How drunkenness is to be diminished in our community, is a problem
difficult of solution. Attempts have been made of various kinds, with
various degrees of temporary success; but the appetites of one class and
the cupidity of another, seem to baffle the efforts of the benevolent
and counteract the enactments of legislatures. It may however tend
towards an amendment, that something of the extent of the evil should be
made public.
The means of intemperance are indeed public and its fruits abound, but
very few stop to notice the extent of any habit that grows up gradually
in a community and is consistent with general customs and taste, and
only to be condemned for its excess, or only to be entirely condemned
when its excess shows that the evils of abuse outweigh all advantages of
moderate indulgence. Not many who read this report have thought to note
the multiplied number of shops, saloons, taverns, hotels, casinos and
cellars, whose maintenance is the profit on the sale of intoxicating
liquors; yet these places present themselves all around us, and in
certain parts of the city they are in such abundance as would lead one,
a stranger to our domestic life, to suppose that the chief employment of
the people was vending liquors, and the principle food was whiskey.
Fifty grog shops and liquor stores are found for one bakery, so that
Falstaff’s “penny for bread and a shilling for sack,” seems no longer an
extravagant partiality for liquids over solids; and, if it should be
said that many families bake their loaves instead of depending on the
bakers for their daily bread, it may with equal truth be replied that
thousands of those who reach Moyamensing Prison for drunkenness,
maintain a household altar to intemperance, at which their neighbors
also sacrifice (themselves and their character) in devotion to the
social jug, from which drunkenness can be imbibed without the expense of
a license or the payments of profits to the retailer.
Can such things be, and drunkenness not abound? Can so many places for
the sale of liquor be maintained with gain to the proprietors merely
upon the profit of getting people drunk without a terrible deterioration
of public morals? It is proved by the revelations of our courts of
justice, by the confession of prisoners and the statements of sufferers,
that many of the keepers of these drinking places augment their profits
by other crimes than that of intoxicating their fellow-men, by making
indeed intoxication only a step towards almost every other species of
criminality; and while the prison cells are crowded with the offenders
and sufferers from these haunts of vice and crime, thousands leave
unrevealed their sufferings and their losses rather than expose their
weakness and vice in frequenting such resorts and yielding to the
temptations of the place.
In presenting these remarks on the means and extent of intemperance, it
is not to be inferred that the Philadelphia Society for alleviating the
miseries of prisoners, is about to resolve itself into a temperance
society, or create a committee to lessen the evil of intoxication. This
society has its specific duties, which it endeavors to discharge fully
and profitably; but if vices and woes cluster, virtue and peace also
associate,—and if we would lessen any considerable evil we must seek to
diminish its cause. This society has incidental association with almost
all the benevolent and humane institutions of the city. The repentant,
impure female is recommended to the Magdalen, the Rosine, or the Good
Shepherd. The female vagrant or the thief, is conducted to the Howard
Home or some other refuge with which the Committee or the Agent is in
correspondence. The young are transferred from the cell of the prison to
the care of the House of Refuge. Is it then less consistent with the
objects of this society that it should put itself in harmonious action
with those who would lessen the overwhelming vice of drunkenness by
which the cells of our prison are crowded, not only by drunkenness, but
by those who having by drunkenness forfeited the esteem of society and
lost their own respect, sink into lower debasement and lose all
distinction between vice and crime, and practice theft as the means and
intoxication as the end of living.
No one unacquainted with the life of a drunkard, but especially of an
habitual female drunkard, can form a correct idea of the irrepressible
thirst which the constant use of intoxicating liquors imposes. In a man
it is usually a love of the _taste_ of drink and the habit of social
drinking; and the habit is often broken and the male drunkard restored.
In woman the desire is for the _effect_ of liquor, the feelings to which
it gives rise; and the indulgence is more frequently solitary than
social: and however strong the sense of wrong, however deep may be the
regret for the folly when the evil moment of intoxication is over and
the secondary results succeed, still it rarely happens that the
repentance is deep or the amendment permanent. We do not know how many
women have triumphed over a strong appetite for intoxicating liquors;
thousands, of course, have solemnly but terribly wrestled with the
deadly enemy and conquered; many thousands maintain “the irrepressible
conflict” with various degrees of success; but the prison and the
almshouse records show that with another class, mighty in number and
important in interest, resistance is relinquished, shame forgotten, and
the daughter, the wife and the mother confess themselves the captives of
that one vice which sacrifices every female virtue to the gratification
of rapacious appetite. This subject commends itself to the regard of the
philanthropist, it calls for the attention of the magistrate, and it
asks for some new legislation; what that legislation should be in
detail, we do not pretend to say; our duty in the capacity in which we
now act is done when we thus expose the evils whose existence and a part
of whose terrible effects we discern in our prison visitations. We do
not exaggerate the means nor the devotion to drunkenness in what we here
state. The inducements to intoxication are double those which we have
mentioned, and all vices and passions are made subservient to the work
of selling liquor, while the effect of the poison sold is promotive of
other vices. The accursed bottle is not confined to the house, the
cellar, the dram shop, nor the saloon, it follows the miserable devotee
to the police station, and the very van in which the drunkard is
conveyed to the prison has its illicit bottle, so that if a single one
of the inebriates should have failed of the necessary quantity for
entire intoxication, or one should have recovered a gleam of reason,
there should not be wanting the means of completing or restoring the
work; and, it may be added, that it is with the utmost vigilance that
the officers of the prison are enabled to keep intoxicating liquors from
the cells. It is a melancholy fact that the husband endeavors to smuggle
a contraband bottle into the cell where his wife is confined for
drunkenness; and mothers while lamenting the hereditary misconduct of
their daughters, seek to convey comfort to the young offender in the
form of coffee strongly “laced” with whiskey. The right hand of
fellowship extended through the aperture of the cell door, is the means
of conveying a phial of brandy carefully deposited in the ample sleeve,
and the affectionate friend that comes to sympathize with her
incarcerated companion, exposes as she reaches forward to reciprocate a
kiss, the forbidden bottle hidden in the bosom of her dress. It is then
not only the appetite for whiskey against which opposition is to be made
at our prison, but the deep sympathy which is manifested for those who
suffer for a want of means and place to gratify that appetite.
Undoubtedly an immense saving in city expenditures would be made, to the
relief of the tax-payer, if such an abuse of humanity could be
corrected. And while we know that society would recognize at once any
successful effort to suppress drunkenness, we feel that a moral
desolation would be removed, could we cut down root and branch, the
terrible Bahan Upas of our country, whose pestiferous branches destroy
all vegetation beneath their ample shade, and spread misery and ruin
throughout the circle of influences.
We dare not say however that, because almost all who are brought to the
County Prison are habitual drunkards, that the entire _abolition_ of
intoxicating drinks would depopulate our prisons. The experience of the
world is different. In Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, the
frequenter of the prison is usually a drunkard. In Italy, especially in
the South of Italy, drunkenness is almost unknown among the natives.
Three years’ residence in the city of Naples failed to present to the
narrator a single instance of a drunken Neapolitan, high or low, rich or
poor; while frequent visitations to the prisons showed them amply
populous. Perhaps there is in Italy some prevailing vice as productive
of evil as drunkenness—perhaps drunkenness is in other countries the
resort of the bad—of men and women who seek the gratification of a
diseased appetite, not as a consequence or means of crime, but only to
enjoy such gratifications as are consistent with and are punished by
crime. The destruction of the Bahan Upas then may not restore herbage to
the field; nay, to find a comparison nearer home, the stately pine is
often cut down that culture and care may ensure a profitable crop for
the soil which it has overshadowed, but a single season’s neglect shows
that in the same earth there lies concealed the germ of other trees and
shrubbery, and instead of the single overshadowing object, fifty smaller
ones spring up to occupy the ground and prevent the growth of herbage.
So the avoidance of a great leading vice does not without watchful care
insure with certainty a growth of gentle virtues, some lesser passions,
some yet uncultivated appetites that lie latent in the heart, spring
into active growth, and become as dominant by their multitude as the
ruling one did by its single power.
Yet however appalling may be the vice that is adopted by those who do
not fall into the habit of drunkenness, there is always more hope of
reclaiming the unfortunate male offender, whatever may be his vice, than
there is of inducing the female inebriate to forsake the bottle. Larceny
is committed to supply some want, not to gratify an imperious appetite;
it leads to solitary confinement for a length of time, and the thief is
easily persuaded to reflect, and often induced to amend. He understands,
indeed, that his offence is directly against others, and that it
provokes the injured to visit upon him the penalty of the violated law,
and the anger of an offended society, that arms itself against him. The
poor drunkard awakens from his debauchery, and finds a craving thirst
for that which prostrated him, and feels that as he has done little or
no direct wrong to others beyond his family, his offence is against
himself, and the offended one in such a case easily pardons. If it is a
female, it is not merely the love of liquor, in the use of which
“increase of appetite grows by what it feeds on,” but it is that desire
for the forgetfulness of sorrow, that love for the excitement of the
nerves, that oblivion of the unhappy past, and that elevation above the
miserable future which distinguishes her delirium of drunkenness from
the effects of intoxication in man.
The impure female, in her rapid descent, is rarely unmindful of her
degradation; and thousands are redeemed from vice by the kind
interference of the humane; but when once she has found in the use of
intoxicating liquor that paradise of the drunkard, she is rarely ever
led by persuasion to return to reason and sobriety; nothing but forceful
restraint will keep the wretched victim from the use of the means, and
that restraint will not quench the thirst, nor diminish the desire, for
the deceptive dreams of happiness.
_Prevention! Prevention!_ domestic discipline, social care, and social
censure, can alone diminish this evil, and free our community from that
awful scourge—a drunken woman—and alleviate the miseries which are found
in the cell of the inebriate prisoner.
It is not to be denied that there has been a great increase in the habit
of using intoxicating liquors within a few years. It is a growing evil
of terrible dimensions and appalling effects; and the worst part of the
curse is its continued augmentation. How is this evil to be lessened?
How is society to be saved from the terrible maelstrom, which seems to
draw all to its eddying circle, and involves in ruin all that it
embraces. It is not the business of this Society, perhaps, to resolve
itself into a “temperance association;” but there are precedents in its
proceedings for direct action in the matter, at least so far as concerns
the prisons. We have asked, by solemn resolve, that the use of tobacco
may be restrained in the cells; not, perhaps, merely because tobacco is
in itself so injurious, but principally because the use of that narcotic
creates a thirst, which seems to have no appeasement but in strong
drink. To use a salutary and direct influence, then, in diminishing
drunkenness, must _a fortiori_ be within the plan of our Society.
But it may be said that while the use of tobacco has generally been
among the admissible indulgence of prisoners, strong liquors have not
been allowed. It is by no means certain that in other times the laboring
prisoners were not allowed a regular, limited, supply of strong drink,
but certainly not lately; yet as it is admitted that most of the
criminal and vicious that are sent to our prisons owe their confinement
to drunkenness, or at least make their condition worse by intoxication;
and especially, as it is evident, that efforts to redeem from crime the
released, are defeated by the facility with which intoxication may be
had, it can scarcely be doubted that the Society is in the exercise of
its legitimate powers, and in the discharge of its assumed duties, when
it encourages all good efforts to lessen the prevailing sin and disgrace
of the age, and lends its sanction to efforts directed to the diminution
of the habit and the means of drunkenness.
How shall that be done? Shall this Society initiate a plan for promoting
temperance, or shall it lend its hearty co-operation to some association
that shall have for its principal object that which could only be a
branch, a true, living branch, indeed, but only a branch of the duties
of the Society for alleviating the miseries of prisons?
This Society can at least, and by the adoption of this Report, does,
bear solemn testimony against the prevalence, the multiplication, and
the existence of the magazines of mischief, where drunkenness is secured
by the cost of the honor of the inebriate, and the disgrace of Society.
Citizens who watch with most painful vigilance the action of the City
Councils that enhance or diminish by a _single per cent._ the tax upon
property, would consult their own interest more if they would look into
this one cause of the increase of rates. But our business with the
subject is in the interest of humanity. That is cheapest, at whatever
cost, which produces the greatest good of the greatest number; and the
good of the greatest number must depend on the promotion of sound
morals.
With such a view of the prevalence of intemperance, and with such an
avowal of the motives of humanity with which this Society regards all
vices or crimes that go to make up the sum of the miseries of our public
prisons, it may not be improper to state that among the institutions
which humanity has yet to establish in Philadelphia, (it has already
suggested it,) is a hospital or place of reception and treatment of
inebriates. The prison punishes them, it does not cure; and few,
excepting those who have seen the drunkard in the agonies of _delirium
tremens_, or the terrors of _mania a potu_, can comprehend all the evils
which the drunkard accumulates upon his own head, (the domestic misery
which he insures, and the general scandal which he causes, may be
otherwise considered,) but the personal suffering of the drunkard, after
his committal for protracted debauch, is beyond description. It is not
without some reason that the cells of the prison which are especially
devoted to cases of _delirium_ and _mania_ are denominated “Purgatory,”
though it would seem from the unutterable agonies and indescribable
apprehension of the inmates that even if they should “go farther,” they
would scarcely “fare worse.”
It is hoped, that when the national troubles that now occupy public
attention, and draw upon the fiscal means of our citizens shall have
ceased, there will be some effort in the direction of a “Hospital for
Inebriates,” where proper moral and physical treatment may restore to
families and society, those whose intemperate habits have alienated them
from the affections of friends, or failing to restore them to reason and
propriety, a home may be provided where they cannot by habitual
indulgence, degrade themselves further, and by which families and
friends may be spared the disgrace of a drunken inmate.
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