MORE SPENT FOR RUM THAN RAILWAYS.

409

troy the great ends of life, to mar human happiness and curse the race; and he supposes that if prohibitory laws were constructed to stop only three-fourths of the present drinking, the direct annual national gain and saving would be one hundred million pounds sterling; a sum as great as was spent in seven years upon all the railways in the kingdom, in the very hey-day of railway projects from 1841 to 1847, inclusive—a sum so vast, that if saved annually for seven years, would blot out the national debt. If the diversion of such an amount of capital from ordinary channels, to the construction of railways, brought on so dreadful a financial crisis in England, who can realize the prodigious impulse to trade and commerce, to industry and art, to education and hopeful progress, that would follow the reform for which he pleads. He says, the history of the world could not supply its precedent, or parallel. The demand for labor would everywhere rise, and wages and profits relatively increase; food would become cheaper, because more plentiful; agriculture and trade in every department would flourish, and taxes greatly be reduced. Withal, nobody would suffer, save those who, under the present system, live upon the sufferings and the sins of others.

He continues: "The first consequence of the traffic amenable to law is drunkenness, or disorderly conduct arising from initial drunkenness, since neither law nor philosophy, nor logic,can discover any distinct definable line of demarcation. All that can be said with precision is, that he who gives his customer intoxicating drink prepares him for drunkenness, which is some indefinable farther stage on the same road; in all of which stages it exposes either the drinker, or his family, or his neighbor, to harm."

DR.

XXXI.

R. LEE inquires to what extent this vice prevails. He says: "More or less in all classes, and in every rank, in the Three Kingdoms. Among literary men, we have in our time known many examples. Several of the very first writers

410

RUM AMONG LITERARY MEN.

of the day are, or have been, victims of alcoholic or morphinic excitement. The past generation reveals a terrible catalogue - Porson, Byron, Hazlitt, Campbell, Coleridge, Lamb, Jeffries, Wilson, Hook, Hogg, Scott, Thom, Carlton, Maginn, Talfourd, Jerrold, and many others. At the Universities, both of Britain and Ireland, drinking and its kindred vices of dissipation and gambling are notoriously common.'

Of the Christian church, he thus speaks of the ravages of this insidious foe: "We have known not one minister, but scores, ruined by the syren alcohol." In the high ranks and circles which he names : "These things are very much hushed up; the convenient cab conveys the genteel inebriate to his home, or if there, the servants lead him quietly to bed, and thus the public do not even hear of these cases; but now and then, when the curtain is withdrawn, what a revelation of interior life there is! Literary writers often talk of the vast sobriety of certain classes. It is itself a proof of a wide-spread love of drink when we find men of station, and the conductors of the public press, wickedly endeavoring by every sophistical art, and by one-sided statistics, to lessen the odium which attaches to the vice of drunkenness itself, and to hide its real extent. They appear to express themselves under the feeling of the necessity of self-justification, which alone accounts for the scornful language they shower upon those social reformers who lament the evil, and seek its cure."

It is safe to say, that both in England and in the United States, the rule among literary men, statesmen and legislators, is intemperance and not abstinence.

The prevalence of drunkenness among ladies in the highest class, is only partially known. In April, 1863, Mrs. Wightman, in her letters to the Bishop of Litchfield, says: "Ladies and gentlemen in different parts of the kingdom have appealed to me for help on the part of themselves, or those dear to them. These instances of drunkenness have come to my knowledge from the educated classes of society; facts which I would not have believed, unless coming from the parties themselves."

RUIN AMONG THE EDUCATED CLASSES.

411

Dr. Lee states, that he can name one of the cathedral cities in the North of England, where, of the last twelve surgeons and physicians who have died, not two were sober men, and it is equally certain that the lives of half even of these were confessedly cut short, by intemperate habits. "The certificates of death assign only the approximate causes of death-the disease of which they died is recorded as congestion, erysipelas, apoplexy, paralysis, etc.-but what was the cause of that cause? Mostly habits of free drinking. A physician observed to a friend of ours the other day, that a large majority of the country practitioners come to their death through intemperance; and an eminent London physician had told him that, when summoned into the country for consultation, he very frequently found some error in treatment had been committed, in consequence of the vinous obfuscation of the medical attendant; but he could rarely recommend a change, since in most cases a change would have made no difference! Summing up the returns of Assurance Societies, and of the Registrar-General conjointly, excluding altogether the excess of mortality just indicated, one out of nineteen of the adult male population, between the ages of thirty and sixty, dies of drinking." What was the carnage of the Crimea, compared with this perpetual slaughter !

XXXII.

HE amount of ruin wrought by drinking among the educated

THE

classes is infinitely greater than the pro-rata of their numbers. The indulgences of clergymen of all ranks, of literary, scientific and public men, and of large proprietors of manufactories, spread a fearful influence over the middle, and above all the laboring classes. Drunkards in the upper ranks of society flatter themselves that their drinking vices can be concealed from the multitude. This is true of all drinkers, but especially of the educated classes; but for the drunkard to conceal his habit is a sheer impossibility; like murder, drunkenness will out. I have known throughout the Three Kingdoms, as

412

TRADESMEN, CRAFTSMEN AND YEOMANRY.

well as in the United States, of multitudes of instances among moral teachers, where the knowledge of this vice paralyzed all their influence; while temperance can never be expected to prevail, and never does, among any large body of mechanics, or other laborers, where their masters, bosses and proprietors, are drinking men. Thus one literary man corrupts a wide circle swayed by the wand of his genius; one priest poisons the poor of his congregation, and proprietors and capitalists spread ruin among the families of their employées.

In descending from these small classes to the bulk of the people to the nation in fact, for whose elevation in social life the laws should be made and all efforts should be put forthDr. Lee examines into "intemperance among our tradesmen, mechanics, craftsmen; our yeomanry and peasantry, once our Country's pride-all that mass technically entitled the lower classes. We can speak for the habits of one large town, and one of the most moral in the kingdom. You may go into the houses of the neighborhood, into the shops and houses of the tradesmen, and from 8 to 12 o'clock you would find a room, sometimes two, crowded with these men, debating local or general politics, discussing current events, or private character, but invariably drinking spirits; and the great majority go home, not certainly before 12 o'clock,' half sea's over,' or the worse for liquor. We could go through the history of dozens of such individuals personally known to us, and show the effects of this system in the neglect of domestic life, in the lowering of the moral tone, and in the sure generation of a craving for the drink itself, in injured health, in tainted character, in inattention to business; often in bankruptcy, and in some instances, in the climax of suicide."

XXXIII.

HE London Daily News, in a leader on drunkenness, states: "We have in our eye one small country town where there

TH

are schools, a college, a mechanic's institute, and a temperance

DRUNKENNESS AMONG LABORING CLASSES.

413

society, but where in seven years there have died five inn or public-house keepers, five or six shopkeepers, or master workmen, and artisans and laborers in proportion; and such broad hints abound over the whole country." Dr. Lee says: "There were handed in to a recent Parliamentary committee, the statistics of drunkenness in various towns, which proved that it is certain that two millions of persons are constantly suffering from police-recognized drunkenness alone, not to speak of private drinking, which is four times as great and ten times as bad in its effects on domestic life!"

In different parts of the Three Kingdoms, of recent canvasses for Sabbath-closing of drinking houses, or for total prohibition, Dr. Verner White states, that out of 15,721 forms, collected from the houses at Islington, Liverpool, 11,611 were for total closing. Those that received the canvassers most favorably, who signed most readily, are the working classes. The wives of the mechanics and laborers are almost unanimous, and most are enthusiastic.

Among hundreds of witnesses examined by the Parliamentary Commission of 1854, Sir Peter Fairbanks, the experienced Leeds machinist, says of his own workmen on pay-day: "Out of one hundred men, all of whom would probably have taken their quart of porter or ale, a third will go home in a state of drunkenness-drunkenness to a state of imbecility." Numerous witnesses prove that there prevails about the same state of things in every manufacturing town in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Counsellor James Grey, Chairman of the Edinburgh Parochial Board, says, that at least two-thirds of the enrolled paupers and those who receive occasional relief are brought to poverty by their own intemperance. It is more difficult, he says, to ascertain who are reduced to that condition by the drunkenness of relatives; but I know that upwards of one hundred orphans are now provided for by the parish, whose parents brought themselves to a premature grave by dissipation; and a still greater number of children have been removed from the custody