414

HOW RUM INCREASES VAGRANCY.

and poisonous influences of their parents, to the country, where they are provided for and educated by the Board.

Among the endless Reports of committees who have taken testimony, from thousands of Parochial Boards and of Officers of Unions, and of all sorts of poor-houses throughout the Three Kingdoms, it will not be disputed that three-quarters of all the pauper millions, men and women, and a still larger proportion of widows and orphans left by intemperate men, husbands and fathers, were brought to their destruction by Rum.

In

The Rev. G. Holt, chaplain to the Birmingham workhouses, testifies, that from his own experience he is fully convinced of the accuracy of a statement made by the late Governor, that of every one hundred persons admitted, ninety-nine were reduced to this state of humiliation and dependence through rum. speaking of mendicity, a vast evil which flows from the traffic in rum, first creating the necessity which compels the victims to beg, and then fosters the spirit of beggary, he says: "Observations made at thoroughfares leading into thirteen towns, ranging from Nottingham to Dover, show that in one Autumn day, 783 mendicants entered these towns. In two-thirds of the cities and towns of Britain, while these vagrants were passing through, others in equal numbers were also subsisting on the alms-giving of others. Multiplying these 783 by 2, and then by 300 begging days, then by all the cities and towns in the empire, and how frightful will it appear! As to the revenue of these mendicants, it was found that the average receipts were four and sixpence per day, besides broken victuals and clothes. Often the head of the vagrant family staid in the public house to enjoy himself socially, while his four or five children ranged the town, when the day happened to be a good one, and his supper was enriched by an extra pint or two of beer. Begging, it would seem, is the next profitable profession to thieving, since a begging family will on an average extort £80 per annum from the public. There are then in the very midst of us various wandering tribes -not lessening, but increasing-tribes who live in profligacy and intemperance and have a language, man

TESTIMONY OF EDINBURGH REVIEW.

415

ners and customs of their own. This population has its signs and freemasonry, its halting-places and public houses, and is engaged six days in extricating, by cajolery or dispossession, not less annually, than one million, five hundred thousand pounds out of the pockets of the public. They must pick up a deal of property besides, and prepare many young persons for stepping over this border line of beggary, into the adjacent territory of crime."

THE

XXXIV.

HE Edinburgh Review (October 1, 1851,) treating of the forlorn and neglected juvenile criminal who has been taught to regard crime as a misfortune only, and punishment as bad luck, puts in a claim for protection and sympathy: "Has society no share in the condemnation and guilt of this soul? Has the law-so prompt in punishing the child, but which leaves unchallenged the drunken and vicious cruel parent by whom the child was forced into the gulf of crime-nothing to answer for? Are not the authorities-who have contentedly allowed such haunts of infamy as he was bred in to continue in the very heart of our great towns, and whose indifference to the moral circumstance of the laboring poor has fostered these nurseries and schools of crime-part authors and abettors of the boy's depravity? Such questions open a fearful account with society!"

Sir Archibald Alison says of the Records of the Glasgow Refuge: "These highly curious annals of crime show, in the clearest manner, the fatal influence of the drinking of whisky upon the lowest classes. Upwards of two-thirds of all the boys (234) have been precipitated into crime through the habits of intoxication of one or both parents. The boys all state, that, till they were taken into the House of Refuge, they lived two-thirds of their time in the low public houses in the centre of Glasgow, and that their enjoyments there for they were all under the age of puberty-were drinking, smoking and swearing."

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416

BEER-HOUSES AND PROSTITUTION.

"There are in England alone," Dr. Lee says, "as many as 17,000 juvenile offenders. This is but the incipient diseasefor the vicious boy is but the father of dangerous men." Dickens finely says: "There is not one of these-not onebut sows a harvest that mankind must reap. From every seed of evil in this boy, a field of ruin is grown that shall be gathered in, and garnered up, and sown again in many places in the world, until regions are overspread with wickedness enough to raise the waters of another Deluge."

No wonder that hundreds of clergymen, of all denominations, and teachers and directors of parish schools, agree that, as long as distilled and fermented liquors are everywhere licensed and sold, it is a heartless and discouraging task to attempt to impart education, or improve the morals of the lower classes.

A

XXXV.

เ

FTER showing, from various testimony, that the sin of prostitution is mainly caused by beer-houses, wine-vaults, public houses, saloons and casinos, now multiplied throughout the land, being all hot-beds of licentiousness and seminaries of seduction, Dr. Lee says: "Well might Mr. Kay, the traveling Batchelor of the University of Cambridge, remark, after a comparison of England with the Continent, We have often, and I concede with great reason, cried shame upon France for granting licenses to the brothels of her towns ;* but, by our present system of licensing beer-houses, we are, in reality, giving the sanction of laws to, and encouraging the establishment of, the worst possible species of brothels for the demoralization of the poorer classes of society.'

The Prison Reports, and the testimony of the Poor-Law

* It is impossible to distinguish the two distinct parts of the continental system as concerns this matter of licenses. The first system totally prohibits the public trade of prostitution; the second is the licensing of certain parties (banished to a district by themselves) to secure surveillance over them, and the power of medical examination, as a protection to the innocent, not as an encouragement to the vicious.

ONE REMEDY-PROHIBITORY LEGISLATION.

417

Commissioners' Reports, show the presence of abandoned women in the ale-shops and gin palaces throughout England; and it has been demonstrated, over and over again, that of the criminal-rolls of the Three Kingdoms, by far the major part is filled up by the black and bloody record of RUM.

The brief record I have given above affords abundant justification for that strong statement in a recent number of the Westminster Review: "Drunkenness is the curse of Englanda curse so great, that it far eclipses every other calamity under which we suffer. It is impossible to exaggerate the evils of drunkenness. It is more wasting in its ravages, more terrible in its results, more untiring in its destruction, than either famine, pestilence or war. They have their seasons of repose; but this gives no respite, for its dread machinery works night and day, and multiplies with each succeeding age."

There is but one remedy for this all-pervading evil—PROHIBITORY LEGISLATION by PARLIAMENT. Vast as were the evils of the Corn Laws in their direct production of famine, the evils of Rum are inconceivably greater. Hunger, from insufficient or innutritious food, was proved to be everywhere among the laboring classes a producing cause of drunkenness, for hunger and trouble drive men and women to drink quicker than all other causes combined. It may seem almost a hopeless task, to reach the conscience and the judgment of the British Parliament far enough to sweep away the protection given to the manufacture and the sale of alcoholic drinks. The Corn Laws were swept away in a single day; but since all power rests in the Imperial Parliament, to that Parliament the Reformers have gone, and, under their now efficient organization, the British Temperance Alliance have directed their mightiest efforts. There are two great interests, however, to be overcome in effecting this reform; while only one obstacle lay between the Reformers and the Corn Laws. The first is the enormous revenue which the British government derives from its excise duty on alcoholic liquors. It is well known that it is the poorest economy for the empire to raise its revenue at

418

THE TWO OBSTACLES TO REFORM.

the expense of the lives, the morals, the health and the productive power of its people. Every pound which goes into the English revenue from excise or license on liquors, costs the British people more than fifty times the same taxation in any other shape. If Mr. Bright could have the framing of a new revenue bill, in which a great radical reform should be made by legislation in this respect, the burden even of the national debt itself would weigh like a feather in the scale against the terrific curse which now rests upon the Empire.

But the second, and most formidable obstacle to overcome, is the vast interest of capital at stake in the manufacture. I have proved, from unquestionable testimony, that the Three Kingdoms pay for alcoholic liquors upwards of five hundred millions of dollars a year, embracing but a few of the incalculable evils which accompany their use.

XXXVI.

I

HAVE shown how utterly impossible it is for the Gospel of Jesus Christ to make headway against such awful odds. I have proved that England can lay no fair claim to the possession of anything worthy the name of civilization for the masses of her people that no legislation for relieving distress can ever make up for the terrible deficit; and I have, moreover, proved that, so far from the main current of deterioration in the condition of the British people having been arrested, it is, on the whole, gaining momentum every year; and this it will continue to do until the whole system of tyranny and crime which makes up the British government shall be substantially reformed, or suddenly overwhelmed, like American slavery, in the wreck of a mighty revolution.

English statesmen ought to learn something from our own history; something from the history of other nations. The first grand lesson is, that when evils are left so long that no judicious or gradual remedy can be applied, they have to cure