Socialism and the drink question

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Chapter I. The Problem Stated

The obvious evils of the drink traffic have raised the subject to the rank of a question of foremost political and social importance.

The results of no other social evil are so apparent. Gambling may reduce a family to starvation ; commercial speculation may lead to ruin ; capitalism, by low wages, may cause poverty and physical deterioration, and drive women to shame ; landlordism may be responsible for the ruin of agriculture and the degradation of the labourers to the position of serfs ; but the relation between cause and effect in these cases is not so obvious and immediate as between drink and the misery, poverty, ruin, crime, lunacy, disease, and death which the traffic brings in its train.

The evil effects of drinking cannot be hidden. They obtrude themselves upon our attention at every turn. The public house is everywhere. The reeling and brutalised victims of drink meet us in the streets ; the slum areas of our towns reek with its filthy odours. |

Drink pulls men down to the gutter from positions of honour and usefulness. The columns of our newspapers are filled with the stories of debaucheries, assaults, outrages, and murders done in drink. The time of our police courts is mainly occupied in hearing cases in which drink and the public-house figure ; our prisons have always thousands of inmates, sent there through drink ; our lunatic asylums are fed to a considerable extent by drink ; judges are unanimous in assigning to drink the responsibility for much of the crime they have to condemn ; doctors ascribe to drink much of the physical degeneration of the age, and regard it as one of the most potent causes of disease, physical and mental ; the educationalist and the social reformer find drink to be one of the chief hindrances in their path, for it enfeebles the physical strength of the workers, it saps their independence, it destroys their self-respect, it lowers their ideal of life, it makes them content in poverty and filth, it destroys their intelligence, it makes them the easy victims of every unscrupulous exploiter who seeks to batten upon them.

A person does not need to be a fanatical teetotaller to subscribe to the strongest indictment which can be framed against the drink traffic as one of the greatest curses which afflicted our country and mankind to-day. 'It is probably true that the flagrant and obvious evils which are associated with drink have

3 tended to give an exaggerated conception of the extent to which it is responsible, as a primary or isolated cause for the economic, physical, and moral condition of the people. The connection between drink and the apparent results is so close to the casual observer that it is little wonder the Drink Question should have been raised to the category of a special social evil — a first cause of many resultant evils, and therefore an evil capable of independent treatment. It will be one of the chief objects of this little work to endeavour to prove that the Drink Question is but one phase of the Social Problem ; that it cannot be completely solved apart from the treatment of the whole problem of the economic and social condition of the people ; that the Drink Evil is one of the forms — and perhaps, from many points of view, the gravest — of waste — economical, physical, mental, and moral — which is inherent in our present method of wealth production and ownership.

The importance of the Drink Question must appeal to the Socialist for the same reasons which the questions of landlordism, capitalism, competition, housing, education, appeal to him. The Socialist case for the collective control of land and wealth production, for the organisation of distribution, for better housing and better education, is based upon the social loss in material wealth, in knowledge, in efficiency, in comfort, in health, and

4 in morality which arises from the present system. The Drink Evil is perfectly analogous. One need not understand deeply the causes of the waste of commercial competition, nor of bad housing, nor of the ignorance of the masses, to appreciate the social loss of wealth, of health, and of knowledge arising therefrom. In like manner, leaving for the moment the question of the cause of drinking, the Socialist will admit the economic, physical and moral loss to society from the existence of the drink traffic.

As the economic aspects of the problem will demand extensive consideration at a later stage of our enquiry, we shall in this chapter consider briefly some of the physical, mental, and moral ravages of this form of Social Waste.

Drink and Crime.

In the ten years ending 1905 the number of prosecutions for drunkenness in England and Wales was 2,068,725, or an average of over 200,000 a year. In 1906 there were over 100,000 arrests for drunkenness in Scotland. These figures by no means express fully the extent to which drink employs our policemen, police courts, and judges, and fills our gaols and convict prisons. In addition to these prosecutions for simple drunkenness, many of the cases of assaults were the outcome of drinking. " Drunkenness is no doubt the cause of many crimes, and is the accompaniment of many others."* This is the conclusion of Sir John Macdonell, Master of the Supreme Court, who edits the Report of Judicial Statistics. It is pointed out in his report that there are many persons drunk when taken into custody, but the charge of drunkenness is dropped because the persons are charged with more serious offences. In Manchester, in 1905, 8,734 persons were drunk when arrested ; but of this number only 7,626 were proceeded against for being drunk and disorderly in the street, the other 1,108 having a more serious charge made against them.

The figures of arrests for Drunkenness in one town (Liverpool) will help to convey an impression of the extent of the evil and the social waste of wealth and human life caused by it.

Arrests for Drunkenness in Liverpool^

APPREHENSIONS.

Sunday . .

Monday

Tuesday . .

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday . .

Saturday

. • •

•

Total

75IO

* Judicial statistics England and Wales, 1905, P« f Judicial statistics, 1906, pp. 29 and 30.

6 A tabk giving the ages of the persons arrested, also relating to Liverpool, is instructive.*

APPREHENSIONS.

AGE.

Under 16 i6to 21

Over 60

Police Court Magistrates, Judges, and Coroners, whose knowledge and experience entitle their opinions to respect, are unanimous in ascribing to, or associating drink with, much of the crime with which they have to deal.

Mr. Justice Granthamf says : — Now, apparently, all this is changed. I have lately been brought face to face for weeks with the conduct of publicans in the carrying on of their business, which has resulted in the most heartbreaking crimes it is possible to imagine — husbands murdering their wives, wives their husbands, fathers their sons, friends their own best friends — all through the maddening influence of excessive drinking.

Twelve murders, eighteen attempts at murder, and woundings without number that were just as likely to have ended in murder as far as the conduct of the criminal was concerned, have bfeen mine and my brother Judges' daily fare for the last four weeks in one circuit ; and, in almost every case, as appeared in

* Judicial statistics, 1906, pp. 29 and 30. f Letter to Croydon Licensed Victuallers.

evidence, drink was the cause— drink served by publicans and not at clubs, and drink proved to have been served in the public-house, where the man was openly drunk.

Such testimony might be quoted without limit, but two other shortly expressed opinions shall suffice. Lord Chief Justice Coleridge said : —

I can keep no terms with a vice that fills our gaols, that destroys the comfort of homes and the peace of families, and debases and brutalises the people of these islands.

Mr. Coroner Shepherd, of Gateshead, at an inquest he attended in June, 1907, said : —

This is the fourth suicide to-day, and three out of four of these are, there is no doubt, due to drink. Drink, as far as I can see, appears to be at the bottom of these cases of suicide.

DRINK, DISEASE AND DEATH.

The growing concensus of conviction in the medical profession that alcohol is an important cause of physical degeneration, and that it causes many diseases, and aggravates others is a very impressive fact of recent years.

The attacks by doctors upon drinking have become so general that the " trade " in the early part of 1907 felt it to be necessary to counteract the effect by endeavouring to obtain a manifesto that " the moderate use of alcoholic beverages is, for adults, usually beneficial/ ' signed by a number of well-known medical men.* The discreditable means

* Lancet, March 30th, 1907.

8 adopted to obtain the signatures were subsequently exposed, and many of the signatories deemed it necessary to explain that they had signed the document under a misapprehension.

We are not here concerned with the debatable question as to whether the " moderate " use of alcohol as an " article of diet for adults is beneficial." There will still remain room for differences of opinion on this point when there is agreement that the extent to which alcohol is consumed by a large portion of our adult population is destructive of physical health. Upon this latter point there can be no two opinions. The facts of everyday life put that beyond the region of controversy. : But a few statements and statistics may be cited to show the extent to which alcohol is responsible for degeneration, disease, and death, and therefore the loss of social wealth. The Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration which sat in 1903, after examining sixty-eight witnesses, reported that :—

The question of drink occupies a prominent place among the causes of degeneration. . . . The tendency of the evidence was to show that drinking habits among the women of the working classes are certainly growing with consequences extremely prejudicial to the care of the offspring, not to speak of the possibility of children being born permanently disabled. . . . The

Lunacy figures, which were dealt with by Dr. Jones, show a large, and, in some cases, an increasing number of admissions of both sexes which are due to drink,

9 and an increase of general paralysis among lunacy patients tells the same tale. ... A3 the result of the evidence laid before them, the committee are convinced that the abuse of alcoholic stimulants is a most potent and deadly agent of physical deterioration.

So far back as 1887, a Committee of the British Medical Association enquired into " The Connection of Disease with Habits of Intemperance.' ' The Committee stated its conclusions to be as follows : —

On the whole, then, in addition to the information that we obtain from these returns as to the alcoholic habits of the inhabitants of this country, and as tothe relative alcoholic habits of different occupationsand classes, we may not unfairly claim to have placed upon a basis of fact the following conclusions.

1. That habitual indulgence in alcoholic liquors^ beyond the most moderate amounts has a distinct/ tendency to shorten life, the average shortening^ being roughly proportional to the degree of indul- .' gence.

2. That of men who have passed the age of twenty-five, the strictly temperate, on the average, live at least ten years longer than those who become decidedly intemperate. (We have not in these returns the means of coming to any conclusion as to the relative duration oi life of total abstainers and habitually temperate drinkersof alcoholic liquors.)

A recently published work* deals at length with the pre-natal and after effects of alcohol upon children. It is shown that the alcohol factor in the parents has influence upon the children in four great classes of mental deterioration, namely, (1) idiocy and imbecility,

* Alcohol and the Human Body : Sir Victor Horsley and Dr. Mary Sturge.

(2) epilepsy, (3) feeble-mindedness, (4) mental deficiency as shown in school-work.

According to the authority of Drs. Shuttleworth and Fletcher-Beach, parental alcoholism is a factor in 16 per cent, of the cases under their care at the Royal Albert and Darenth Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles. Analysis of 2,380 of their histories shows that ■consanguinity, consumption, epilepsy, mental disease, etc., in parents, form other factors, the history of intemperance being associated with one or more of these in the percentage above stated.*

It is shown also that parental alcoholism disposes the offspring to epilepsy. Dr. W. C. Sullivan conducted an investigation which showed that of 219 children who had alcoholic mothers, 4.1 per cent, became epileptic, whereas in the general mass of the population the frequency of epilepsy averages below J per cent. Other writers have found that from 12 to 15 per cent, of the surviving offspring of alcoholics become epileptic.f

In view of the greater attention now being .given by educationalists to the treatment of the mentally deficient child, it is well to recognise the effect of alcohol as a factor in the causation of such deficiency. In 1901 a study of the mental deficiency of ordinary children was undertaken for the New York

* Alcoholism and the Human Body, p. 321. t Ibid, p. 322.

II Academy of Medicine by Dr. MacNicholl. Fifty-five thousand school children were examined. Of these 58 per cent, were below the required standard of intelligence, 17 per cent, being actual " dullards/ ' 25 per cent. " very deficient," and the other 16 per cent, merely deficient. The habits of the parents with regard to alcohol is reported in 20,147 cases : —

Children of drinking parents . . . . . . . . 6624

,, ,, reported dullards 5 3 p.c.

Children of abstaining parents . . . . ..13523

reported dullards 10 p.c.

The family histories of 3,7*1 children were traced through three generations. This was done in great detail with regard to the taking of alcohol. Of the children of abstaining parents and abstaining grandparents, only 4 per cent, were " dullards," whereas of the children of abstaining parents, but drinking grandparents, 78 per cent, were " dullards." Dividing the 3,711 children into two classes, the following results are noted : —

(1) Of those free from hereditary alcoholic

taint — 96 per cent, were proficient, 4 per cent, were dullards, 18 per cent, suffered from some neurosis

or organic disease.

(2) Of those with hereditary alcoholic taint — 23 per cent, were proficient,

77 per cent, were dullards,

76 per cent, suffered from neurosis or organic disease.*

The terrible waste of child life is touching the public conscience. While sanitation and the growth of medical science have succeeded in reducing the general death-rate, the appalling mortality among infants has remained practically at the same rate for the last quarter of a century. There are many causes of this loss of infant life — bad housing, ignorance of mother, impure milk, poverty — but it is indisputable that drink contributes considerably to the mortality. The effects of alcoholism in the parent show themselves in many ways upon the children. Professor Bunge, of Bale, has carried out prolonged investigations into the causes of the failure of mothers to suckle their children, and he makes this startling declaration"^ : —

There are some cases, and these are not rare, where the mother, having been able to suckle, the daughter has not been able to do so. Here we are close to the causes of the incapacity, and shall find it in

THE FATHER, AND WE AT ONCE ENCOUNTER ALCOHOLISM.

In 78 per cent, of these cases, in my statistics, the father is an immoderate drinker. On the other hand, in families where mothers and daughters can suckle their infants, drunkenness is rare ; in other words, that the daughter of a drunkard is in a position to be able to properly suckle her infant in a rare case. The rule is that, if the father is a drunkard, the daughter loses her power of suckling.

* Medical Temperance Review, August, 1905. f Alcoholism and the Human Body, pp. 325-6.

The spending of any part of the too inadequate income of a working-class family upon drink deprives the mother, and, through her or directly, the child, of necessary food. The mother who drinks is careless and dirty, and her children are neglected. Overlaying of infants is a common cause of death. In London the mean annual number of deaths from overlaying is 612, and the majority of these cases occur on Saturday and Sunday nights — a fact which is obviously suggestive of the cause.

Sir William Broadbent has said: "The worst of it is that for every child that dies, a dozen others are damaged." These "damaged" infant lives grow up physically and mentally incapable of fighting the battle of life. They become the " unemployables " of the labour market, the loafers of our streets, the inmates of our hospitals and prisons, and, instead of being a benefit to the community, they waste its wealth upon their maintenance and propagate their own enfeebled species to be a burden on the next generation. Drink, as a factor in the physique of our population, is too influential to be ignored by the reformer.

Further confirmation of the ravages of Drink, of its influence in wasting human life, is given in the statistics published by the Registrar General and by facts in connection with the experienced Insurance and Friendly Societies.

In 1903 only 1,475 deaths of males and 1,075 of females were returned as caused by alcoholism, and 3,916 deaths from cirrhosis of the liver, a disease known to be nearly always due to drink. These figures, according to Dr. Newsholme,* greatly understate the real number of deaths due to these causes, as it is common for the doctor, out of regard for the feelings of the relatives, not to assign this as the cause of death. Cancer and consumption are responsible for 134 out of every 1,000 deaths recorded, and according to Dr. P. Bronardel, a great French physician, who spoke at the International Congress on Tuberculosis in London in 1902, "Alcoholism is in fact the most powerful factor in the propagation of tuberculosis . . . the returns of mortality from tuberculosis, and the drink bill of Prance exhibit a strange correspond-, ence." This view was supported by Dr. Koch, of Berlin, and Professor Sims Woodhead, of Cambridge.

The experience of certain Insurance and Friendly Societies which separate abstainers from non-abstainers is often quoted, but it will bear repetition.

* Elements of Vital Statistics.

MORTALITY EXPERIENCE OF FOUR INSURANCE COMPANIES.

General Section. (Non-Abstainess').

Ex-

Sected eaths

Actual Deaths

Percentage.

Abstainers' Section.

Expected Deaths

Actual Deaths

Percentage.

United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institution (period 41 years, 1866 to 1906)

Spectre Life Associa tion period of 20 years 1884 to 1906)

Scottish Temperance Association (period 20 years, 1883 to 1904

13952

13188

95-4

79.0

70.5

Abstainers' and General (period 23 years 1884 to 1906)

10889

71.2

53-9«

46.5

From the report of the Public Actuary of South Australia, Mr. H. Dillon Gouge, F.S.S., we give the following : —

Average Rates.

Mortality per cent

Sickness Weeks.

Abstainers' Society Average . . Non- Abstainers' Society Average

0*689 1*381

1*248 2*317

* Expected Deaths under H.M. Table of the Institute of Actuaries.

t No figures published.

i6

These figures become the more striking when it is remembered that in the " non-abstainers " societies are many who are in fact abstainers.

The experience of our own country bears out the same conclusions.

On July 17th, 1896, the House of Commons ordered to be printed a special Report on the Sickness and Mortality experienced by the Registered Friendly Societies in the United Kingdom. When the mortality per cent, for all the Friendly Societies is compared with the figures for the Independent Order of Rechabites — an abstainers' society — it is seen that the latter society has a very great advantage.

Lunacy.

Drink, according to the Report of the Commissioners of Lunacy, is one of the chief causes of insanity. The figures for 1904 assign intemperance as the cause of insanity in 227 per cent, of the male admissions during five years, and 9-4 of the female ; the rates for private patients being, males 167, females 8*6 ; and for pauper patients, males 23*6, and females, 9*6. That drink and insanity are closely associated is shown by Dr. Jones,* the eminent authority on insanity, who records the fact that no less than 42 per cent, of all periodic inebriates relate a history of

* Evidence before Physical Deterioration Committee, Appendix XVI.

17 either drink, insanity, or epilepsy in their ancestors.

To sum up our indictment of the drink traffic in relation to social waste we submit the foregoing facts to prove that the traffic is largely responsible for murder, suicide, immorality, and petty crimes ; it is poisoning the bodies of the children before they are born ; it sends thousands to the grave before they have learned to lisp ; it gives to tens of thousands who survive a shattered constitution and weakened will ; it pre-disposes them to every form of illness ; it is destroying the capacity for motherhood, and weakening the natural instinct of the mother. It wastes all this human life, and it involves an incalculable loss of social wealth through physical inefficiency, mental incapacity, and loss of self-respecting ambition. It wastes the value of lost time and expense through sickness, and the maintenance of prisons, police courts, homes, and asylums due to drink. Drink is, in fact, one of the most destructive evils, destroying mind and body, which curses the human race.

B

IS

Chapter II. The Temperance Movement

The origin of the beer drinking customs of the British people is lost in antiquity. Pytheus, the Greek navigator, who visited Britain 330 B.C., tells in his journal that the inhabitants of these islands drank, instead of wine, a fermented liquor made from barley, which they called " curmi."

" In the latter part of the fifteenth century English beer had gained a reputation on the continent and was much exported from England to Flanders. Wherever brewed, it was the favourite beverage of the people, who drank it without stint. ' Barley,' says a physician of this period, ' is the Englishman's vine.' It was a complaint heard more than once that more corn was malted than was eaten for food ; for the English, like the other nations of northern Europe, were known as great drunkards."*

In the eighteenth century drunkenness among the upper classes of English Society was universal. The reading of the literature

* Denton's England in the Fifteenth Century, p. 204.

19 of that time leaves one in wonder at the amazing drinking capabilities of the wellr known people of that period. Nor was this drinking apparently considered at all reprehensible, but rather an accomplishment for admiration. Addison, Steele, Goldsmith, Parnell, Churchill, were all notoriously drunken, and Lord Bolingbroke, when in office, sat up whole nights drinking, and in the morning, would bind a wet napkin round his forehead and hasten away to his office. In the latter part of the eighteenth century English Society was soaked in drink, the heir-apparent leading the pace. Among the men of this period, Brinsley Sheridan, William Pitt, Lord Chancellor Eldon, Lord Stowell, and Professor Porson, could each empty the contents of six bottles at a sitting, and repeatedly did so ! Sir Gilbert Elliott, writing in 1787 expresses his inability to conceive how the men of business and the great orators of the House of Commons continued to reconcile their inordinate consumption of liquor with their Parliamentary duties.

The drunkenness of the upper classes — of royalty, aristocracy, and clergy — set the example to the masses. All the vices of the poor — even to their Toryism — have come down to them from the classes above. It was in the Reign of George I. that the habit of gin drinking took root, and " small as is the place which the fact occupies in English history, it was probably, if we considered all the consequences which have flowed from it, the most momentous event of the eighteenth century — incomparably more so than any event in the purely political or military annals of the country."* The masses of those days put as much enthusiasm into following the example of the upper classes as their descendants of to-day give to the aristocratic vices of gambling and immorality Distilleries increased in number and taverns were opened everywhere to satisfy and encourage this new popular demand.

When the Industrial Revolution came at the end of that century the masses were helpless before it. They were ignorant, without political power, and without understanding of the meaning of the great economic changes going on. They xvete easy victims of the free play of competition under which the robust, clear headed men of the age worked the new possibilities of wealth production for their own individual gain. Inhuman conditions of labour, the destruction of the home industries, the driving of the people into the towns, the employment of children and women in the mines and factories, the breaking up of the home, the degradation of the standard of the working class life by the sweeping away of the labour protection statutes, the crushing taxation of the poor,

* Lecky History of England in the iSth Century, p. 479.

the general ignorance of sanitary laws, the absence of any real municipal government, the general state of industrial and social chaos from which only a few found it possible to emerge successfully were pre-eminently a state of things calculated to feed the existing appetite for drink. The masses of the people in the industrial towns, physically enervated by their working and social conditions, turned more and more to drink as the only means within their knowledge of drowning their misery.

It is significant of some connection between the increase of drunkenness, or the recognition of the social evil of drunkenness, and the industrial condition of the people, that it was not until one generation had come under the influence of the factory system that the drink question came to be considered so serious as to demand organised effort to combat its ravages. The first Temperance Society was formed in England in 1830, and since then there has been a sustained and widespread temperance work carried on in this country, which for the enthusiasm and devotion of those who have taken part in it has scarcely been equalled, and never surpassed, by any reform movement of the nineteenth century.

The growth of temperance sentiment since 1830 has been remarkable. When the working men of Preston started their Teetotal Society they had no support from clergy, ministers, or doctors. In 1837 there were but 100 abstinent ministers of religion ; there was no ecclesiastical dignitary favourable to the movement. There were but half-a-dozen known medical men who were abstainers, and every member of Parliament was a nonteetotaller. To-day there are 2,213 branches of the Church of England Temperance Society/ and two Archbishops, sixteen home and more colonial Bishops, and lesser dignitaries by the score are professed abstainers. The Nonconformist ministers are, to a great extent, not only personally abstainers, but are active in temperance work. There is a British Medical Temperance Association, including a number of University professors; and recently 14,718 medical men presented a petition to the Government of the day praying for temperance teaching in the schools. The Army and the Navy have their Temperance Societies, with which many thousands of men are associated. The House of Commons has come under the influence of the extending temperance sentiment, and, to the old members of the House, the present Parliament's most remarkable feature is the large number of abstaining members and the temperance of the general body. Of the men elected on the 9th November, 1907, to occupy the honoured position of Mayor no less than 64 are proud to be known as total abstainers, and the abstaining Provosts of Scottish burghs number 46. The temperance

23 bodies calculate that there are 3,000,000 adult persons in the country who are abstainers, and in the juvenile Bands of Hope, of which there are 22,000 societies, there are 3,000,000 children enrolled.

These figures of the extent to which temperance sentiment and abstinence from drink prevail amongst all classes in the community are striking evidence of the public recognition of the drink evil, and of the need for counteracting its ravages by personal example and associated effort. Instead of the teetotaller being an object for pity or contempt, as was the case seventy years ago, the prevailing public sentiment is one of condemnation of drunkenness and respect for the total abstainer.