National perils and hopes; a study based on current statistics and the observations of a cheerful reformer

Front matter

ffational Perils and Hopes

By Wilbur F. Crafts+Pfi.n m

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I. The Consumption Of Liquors, Murders And Divorces

Let us briefly study, in groups of three, these evils that have increased out of proportion to the population since 1864. The consumption of liquors, murders and divorces are properly grouped together, for the first is the chief cause of the second, and a more frequent cause than published statistics show, of the divorces, which are placed last in the group because it is really less harmful to society to destroy a life than to dissolve a family. If people were not so excessively individualistic, and so unduly considerate of the body even in estimating individual welfare; if "the general good" were indeed "the supreme law," the man or woman responsible for a divorce, whether wife or husband or paramour, would be regarded as a social leper quite as much as if he had destroyed a life instead of that which makes life worth living, both individually and socially.

THE CONSUMPTION OF LIQUOR.

This is a subject which requires a frank and fearless discussion. With three or four notable exceptions, temperance advocates have most unwisely ignored the fact, which might have served as the biggest of our fire bells to awake those that "are at ease in Zion," that the per capita consumption of liquors has increased steadily

SIXCE 1844, LIKE A RISING TIDE, EXCEPT IN YEARS

of financial depression. Again and again, and again, editors and orators have proclaimed, as if it were all over in the anti-alcohol war but the shouting, that there was a relative decrease in beer consumption, and an actual decrease in whiskey, in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1909, without an intimation that liquor consumption usually falls off in "panic" years about two gallons per capita, *

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*Per capita consumption of all kinds of intoxicating liquors, by Statistical Abstract:

GALLONS

1850 4.08

1860 6.43

1870 7.70

1880 10.08

1890 15.53

1893 18.20

1894 16.97

1895 16.57

1896 16.66

1897 16.50

1898 17.36

1900 17.68

1907 23.54

1908 23.01

1909 21.86

The decrease from 1907 to 1909 was only five-

hundredths of a gallon more than from 1893 to 1895, when the "hard times" were not accompanied by any "reform wave." The National Prohibitionist notes that in August, 1909, beer consumption increased 200,000 bar- (2,244,185). In October of that year beer fell off 200,000 barrels, but whiskey increased 1,500,000 gallons. The figures are encouraging, but they do not seem to the writer to indicate any very decisive ebb in the destroying tide that has been steadily rising for half a century. (2,244,185). In October of that year beer fell off 200,000 barrels, but whiskey increased 1,500,000 gallons. The figures are encouraging, but they do not seem to the writer to indicate any very decisive ebb in the destroying tide that has been steadily rising for half a century.

which would account for one hundred and eighty millions of gallons decrease before we can figure on the effect of the "reform wave." On November I, 1909, there had been a net gain of $3,000,000 in "infernal revenue" from distilled liquors in the four months of the fiscal year, and the beer revenue had also increased up to October, during which it had fallen off only $194,000 despite the reduction, since July 1, of 12,704 in the number of liquor dealers. This fact should be pondered by those who think a reduction of the number of liquor dealers necessarily means a reduction of liquor consumption and its consequences. Most decidedly is this not the case when in place of three small, illequipped "dives" there is a consolidation into one attractive "silver dollar saloon."

We cannot be sure there is in progress a reduction that looks like the approaching death of the liquor traffic until we see whether the statistics of the year ending June 30, 1910, show prosperity's usual unfeeling disregard for the Henry George school of reformers, who hold that poverty is the chief cause of intemperance and other sins, and that people wouldn't do much of anything wrong if they were well paid. Luxury has in all history been the prolific mother of vices, but the Henry George theory that "money answereth all things" morally has been "laughed out of court" in this period of the "great disclosures" of millionaire robbers, beside whose frauds on government and people, Robin Hood and Jesse James "look like thirty cents."

THE STRONGEST ARGUMENT AGAINST PROHIBITION.

The reiterated statement that prohibition has not decreased the per capita consumption of liquors is the strongest argument of the aroused liquor dealers, who have spent more money in defensive literature in the last four years than in the previous forty. That should be both encouraging and arousing to our side, which is not making a like advance to meet the foe. But temperance editors and orators alike mostly ignore this most plausible and persuasive of all the arguments of their opponents, which really is not difficult to answer, and should be captured and used victoriously on our side.

Grant that from 1844 to 1907 the per capita consumption of liquors increased except in "hard times," despite the fact that several states and many towns outlawed saloons. We will grant more than that, namely, that the per capita consumption of liquors increased with the same exception, despite the organization of numerous temperance societies and the introduction of temperance lessons in the public schools and Sunday schools of the whole country.

Whatever the per capita increase in the consumption of liquors proves as to prohibition laws it proves equally as to total abstinence societies. "Prohibitory laws," exclaims the president of the Model License League, "so far from decreasing the consumption of liquors have actually increased it." By the same major premise he should argue that total abstinence societies have increased the use of intoxicants, especially as these are much more wide-spread than prohibitory laws.

As all the thirteen evils enumerated in the beginning of this chapter have increased faster than the population, he should also claim that prohibition of murder, adultery, lynchings, riots, bribery, Sunday work, foul shows, corrupt literature, prize fights, malfeasance, graft, and other wrongs has actually produced the increase in these evils.

Manifestly there is something crooked in the logic that produces such absurdities. It is a bad case of the fallacy, post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after, therefore because of). The liquor dealers' "strongest argument," on close inspection, proves as childish as the little boy's supposition that the railway train, which started after he tooted, started because of his toot. The proof of prohibition's good effects is in the reduction of crime in the communities where bars are outlawed, in comparing license with "no license" years, and in the contrast between towns and states under the opposing policies. Of these we shall speak later in discussing crime as related to the saloon.

But what is the explanation of this riddle that perplexes reformers at home and abroad, that the per capita consumption of liquors, down to 1907 at any rate, steadily increased even when the saloons were being steadily decreased? One explanation is that American wages were also increasing, enabling those who drink to buy more. Another explanation is that the hours allowed saloons for midnight robbery of their patrons were also increasing. It is one of the most amazing illustrations of being penny wise and dollar foolish to see chambers of commerce promoting catch-penny street fairs while making no protest at the all-night opening of saloons which is allowed, for example, all over Pennsylvania (save where a license judge interposes) under what claims to be "the best license law," but has been made by this permission for all-night saloons one of the very worst. It is not alone waste of money in drink that the opening of saloons after ten o'clock promotes, but direct robbery and murder. I have studied groups in saloons between ten and eleven at night in which every man was too drunk to know whether he was robbed in change by the bartender or in other ways by any sober thief awaiting his exit at the door. Where nothing more can be accomplished, saloons should be limited to daylight, and all gas and electric light fixtures prohibited. Business men on business grounds, if on no other, should at least refuse to allow saloons to remain open after other shops are closed, drawing from their customers the money due others for real "goods." The church is often reproached for its lack of business methods in the words of the proverb, "The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light," but I know of nothing more unbusinesslike in alt the world than the way boards of trade allow beer and opium sellers to kill the buying power and the buyers themselves in the new markets of the mission fields and in the home markets as well.

THE ENEMY'S FALLACY TURNED INTO A BUGLE CALL.

Good generalship on the temperance side will enable us to impress into our service these saloon advocates who proclaim that liquor consumption is increasing, as buglers to arouse the Church to move forward to the "firing line."

The steady increase in the consumption of liquor does not prove that prohibition is not efficient, but it does prove that prohibition is not sufficient. Every real general in the temperance army should see that it means that our anti-saloon campaigns must be supplemented by anti-alcohol campaigns, for which science has forged us in the twentieth centuy such weapons as reformers never had before.

The social verdict, "No license," must be followed by the individual verdict, "No liquor," as President Eliot showed in 1908 in a most conclusive address, adapted to win other scholarly recruits to our cause, which would have been re-echoed at once in every pulpit in the land if the pastors had really appreciated their apostolic succession to the work of Him who was "manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil" ^John 3:8). After a vigorous campaign against the saloon as a loafing, treating, plotting resort of thieves and anarchists and grafters, in which the churches often show that they have a real social power, the forces usually disband as if the ultimate victory were won, though half or more of those who voted against the saloon think the harm was in the atmosphere of the place and in the adulterations, not in the alcohol, and will go right on buying their drinks through express offices or drug stores under the delusion that beer is a relatively harmless drink and alcohol a useful medicine, all unaware of the conclusive verdicts of scientists to the contrary, which it is an impeachment of the fidelity of any preacher to find unknown by anybody in his congregation. If he would tell them less of current doubts and more of these ethical facts he would show himself a wiser shepherd.

TEMPERANCE SOCIETIES CAN NOT WIN WITHOUT THE CHURCH.

That liquor consumption has steadily increased while one national society after another has been added to our temperance forces — the Sons of Temperance in 1843, the Good Templars in 1857, the National Temperance Society in 1865, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1872, the American Anti-Saloon League in 1893, the International Reform Bureau in 1896, and many more — does not prove that temperance societies have not been efficient, but it does prove that they are not sufficient. These are but a thin line of skirmishers, constituted from the one per cent of heroes in many churches, who, impatient at the steady retreat of the Church before the worst foes of God and man, have organized themselves into guerilla bands to fight as a rear guard until the main army can be aroused to turn about for the final decisive fight, which no other force can win. When the Church really becomes "the Church militant," it will speedily become, even in this world, "the Church triumphant."

In voters, in wealth, in social influence, the Church has more than "the balance of power." But so-called "church leaders" are often leaders of nothing but retreats. When gamblers or liquor dealers or white slavers come out against the Church in battle array, these trembling "leaders" cry : "The work of the Church must be inspirational. We must not meddle in politics. Let us pray." To which God replies, as to Joshua, who was praying when action was in order: "Get thee up; wherefore liest thou upon thy face ?"

I do not forget that several denominations have temperance committees. Of these I shall speak later. They count at this point only for the usual exceptions, especially as only one of them is doing any considerable work, and only two have any employed officers.

The theological professors, of all the people in the United States, should most lay to heart the fact that the consumption of liquors has been increasing right along with the per capita increase of church membership. It is an impeachment of pastors, and especially of their trainers, that the great increase of church members since 1850 has not meant a great decrease in the consumption of intoxicants. It will no longer be so when pastors are trained not alone to "save souls in heaven," but also to "save society if only to make a safe place for saved souls." "City problems" will be solved when preachers are trained not alone to make a sermon but to build on earth the City of God. No pastor who understands the second Psalm, in which God gives to his Son "the nations — the governments — for his inheritance" ; and the fourth chapter of Luke, where Jesus proclaims the full gospel of social justice; and the second great commandment, which means, in modern phrase, right relations among men, can fail to see that the "conversion" he is "called" to promote as a partner of God is twofold, well expressed in the Salvation Army's translation of the two great commandments : "Change the man, change the surroundings."

The first of these conversions is best accomplished by individual effort, but the second requires organized co-operation of all uplifting forces, in the city, the state, the nation and the world.

CRIME MOSTLY A SALOON PRODUCT.

Returning to the main line of our argument we face again the increased per capita consumption of liquors in close conjunction with the corresponding increase of crime. At the Twelfth International Congress on Alcoholism, held in London in 1909, the Chief Justice of England, Lord Alverstone, presiding at a union meeting of the many temperance societies of the military and civil services of the British government — let our judges and other ofiicials take note — gave 90 per cent as his estimate, from fifty years' observation as lawyer and judge, of the proportion of crime that is primarily due to intoxicants. Independently, Judge Wm. J. Pollard, of the police court in St. Louis, had previously named 85 per cent as his estimate, from a lower range of judicial observation. And in a paper sent to the congress by Lieut. Col. McHardy, based on study of 153 criminal cases in Edinburgh, 84 per cent was the exact result found. These strikingly concur with older statistics gathered by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor (26th Annual Report), from wider and more scientific examination of the criminals of a whole state, which showed that 94 per cent were "addicted to the use of liquor," and 82 per cent were "in liquor" at the time of committing the offense. What a travesty of justice to require judges to license in one term of court the business that shall furnish nine-tenths of the crime that shall be brought before them in all other terms !

"no license" means less crime.

Here it is appropriate to recall that the closing of public bars usually reduces crime about two-thirds, even though anyone can import liquors for his own use under any form of prohibition, and more or less liquor is always sold illegally in such cases, as nearly every other law is more or less violated. Pages of statistics to show that closing bars reduces crime might be quoted from "The World Book of Temperance" and other reliable sources, but a few representative examples will be sufficient for this brief discussion. The number of criminal drunks in the state of New Hampshire during the last year of a very inferior form of prohibition, badly enforced, was 473. In the four succeeding years, under a new license law, the criminal drunks rose in number to 853, 1,337, 1,657, and 2,181, respectively, a fivefold increase in four years of so-called "restrictive" legislation. The difference in the arrests for drunkenness between license and no license years in the same Massachusetts cities (this and above statistics from the Anti-Saloon Year Book) were as follows — the first figures in each case for "no license" years, the second showing the increase when licenses were restored: Brockton, 455-1,627; Waltham, 179-634; Taunton, 482-1,202; Chelsea, 398-1,246; Newburyport, 150-673; Lowell, 2,304-4,077; Salem, 503- 1,432; Woburn, 204-842; Fitchburg, 359-1,160. The number of arrests for drunkenness are from two to five times as great under license, and it should be remembered that police officers would naturally be more lenient under a license regime, and also that "no- license" in such local application often means only that a nickel trolley ride of half an hour is necessary to get to a saloon in the next town. Even in England where they are good walkers, keeping Bessbrook free of a bar, though there was one a mile away, decreased crime by decreasing the facilities to drink.

Back of the court reform that President Taft has made the distinctive "Taft policy," and back of the juvenile court, which is the best court reform already realized, lies the temperance reform — of which bar associations and penologists are usually shy — whose full accomplishment would cut off at least three-fourths of the sad business of courts and prisons. It is playing "Hamlet" with Hamlet and three of the four murders left out to discuss either court reform or prison reform without a full and frank discussion of the saloon as the nest of crime.

EVILS IN WHICH WE BEAT THE WORLD.

In enumerating the thirteen evils that have unquestionably increased since 1864. I named, instead of crime in general, the chief personal crime, murder, in order to avoid useless controversy with the willful, professional optimist, who, when told that there are more prisoners per capita in our jails than in any former decade, catches like a drowning man at a straw and cries, "You have counted some longterm prisoners twice." There are really not many who are counted twice in any comparison by decades, for judges and pardon boards and petitioners for pardons in most cases have far more pity for the weeping prisoner and his wife and children than for the absent and indefinite public. To avoid this controversy, however, I have not even cited the number of murderers, but the number of murders, which are about nine thousand a year, not counting the manslaughter of automobiles and football.

These Chicago Tribune figures are too small by so many murders as do not get into the papers, which may be fairly supposed to be a considerable number from the hundreds of letters that come to the police whenever an unknown corpse is found, from those whose friends have long been "missing," some of whom have no doubt been killed. Our nine thousand murders a year mostly occur between the hours \ of eight in the evening and five in the morning, at the rate of one murder every tzventy minutes. Surely if justice were more sure-footed and swift this bloody record would no longer continue to grow redder year by year. Dr. Andrew D. White, former president of Cornell and ex-ambassador to Germany and Russia, sees grave danger in the prevalence of crime, especially murder. In 1910 he said that homicide is 43 times greater in the United States than in Canada, while it is seven times greater than in Belgium, which is considered the worst country in Europe. The average American criminal, he stated, serves but seven years of a life sentence, and only one out of 74 murderers is convicted. The number of felonious homicides per year per million population for various countries he gave as follows :

Canada 3, Germany 4 to 5, England and Wales 10 to 11, France 12 to 15, Belgium 15, United States over 129. These figures are based on an average taken for eight years. In answer to the argument that punishment of crime does not stop the crime, he gave instances of so-called epidemics of murder, which were stopped at once by the hanging of several found guilty. Dr. White has little sympathy for what he calls the pseudo-scientific theory that crime is a disease. "The truth of the matter," he says, "is that crime is crime and disease is disease."

Many evils we seek to lay at the door of our immigrants, but in the roll of our murderers Americans have their full proportion, and this is also one of the nine evils in which we "beat the world." Our full "nine" in this "base" contest stands as follows : murders, divorces, lynchings, labor riots, municipal corruption, yellow literature, brutal sports, judicial maladministration, general lawlessness.

DIVORCES INCREASING THREE TIMES AS FAST AS THE POPULATION.

Marriage being regarded by one church as a sac rament and by all as a sacred rite, it might be supposed that all churches would sedulously guard it against both contemporaneous and consecutive polygamy. Mormonism, a hierarchy as heathen as Jezebel's priests of Astarte, dominates so much of Rocky Mountain politics that it may decide some close national election unless a way is found to disfranchise all men and women who "live their religion" in defiance of law and civilization.

But the consecutive polygamy of unwarranted divorce is as much more perilous than Mormonism to the body politic as blood poisoning is more dangerous to the individual than a local ulcer. And yet, until well into the twentieth century, only one denomination that allows any divorce really constrained its preachers to refuse re-marriage to parties divorced on other than the one ground that Christ is generally understood to have approved. Through that one denomination a union divorce committee of the American churches has been organized, with Bishop Doane of Albany as chairman, which has had a most favorable influence both in church and state.

In no white nation of Christendom are so many families wrecked by divorce as in the United States. Japan alone of civilized powers outruns us in this, with one divorce to every three marriages. It is almost as bad in Cleveland and vicinity, the "Western Reserve," colonized from Connecticut, and in Kansas City, with one divorce to every five marriages in both, not counting the "grace widows," deserted without legal permission, for whom reformers should devise some redress, hunting to the ends of the earth all husbands who desert their wives and children, and compelling them to work for their support under state supervision, if such support cannot be collected by some other process of law.

Every preacher should prepare himself to present, with the confidence of abundant knowledge, this subject of divorce, on which even church members, especially women, often hold shallow views that are based on the marital infelicities of their own friends, with no due regard to the general good, which often requires the sacrifice of individual pleasure or preference.

The United States Government, through its Census Bureau, collected and collated the divorce statistics of the whole country for forty years from 1867, during which period the divorces increased three times as fast as the population, the increase being nearly uniform from year to year and from decade to decade. In 1906, the number of divorces was 72,062. At the rate of increase shown, the number in 1909 would be fully 75,000, that is, about 250 a day, not counting Sundays and holidays when no court sits.

PROHIBITION NOT A PANACEA.

The largest percentage of divorces to population is found in the following states : Washington, Montana, Colorado, Indiana and Arkansas. "Not a prohibition state in the black list," exclaims the one-idea reformer, who believes that closing liquor bars will banish about all our social ills. Nay, for Kansas is close to the rear, being one of the worst seven states in this divorce vice; and North and South Dakota, and even Maine, have all ranked high in prohibition and low in divorces. These last three named have improved somewhat of late — South Dakota in spite of a relapse to license. They are still far short of the front rank, where stand two license commonwealths, New York and the District of Columbia, the only ones that have adopted the law of Christ on divorce.

When the city of Worcester, with 142,000 population, by its own local vote became the largest prohibition city in the world, the loafers driven from the saloons crowded the peanut galleries of the lowest vaudeville shows, which a narrow view of reform left unmolested to furnish a worse intoxication through the eye than had previously been taken through the mouth.

A PROPER ORGANIZATION FOR SOCIAL BETTERMENT WOULD PROVIDE FOR FIGHTING INTEMPERANCE, IM- PURITY, GAMBLING AND SUNDAY DISSIPATION AS FOUR SIDES OF ONE FROWNING FORTRESS, THAT IS FIRING FROM ALL SIDES ON EVERY HOME, EVERY CHURCH, EVERY HONEST BUSINESS, AND SHOULD THEREFORE BE ATTACKED ON ALL SIDES BY ALL GOOD CITIZENS IN THE NAME OF CONSCIENCE AND OF COM- MERCE.

If more reasons are needed for a broadening of temperance societies to include kindred evils in their attack, or for a broadening of the ideas at least of temperance specialists that they may see that temperance is but the main division of a great army of social reform, I have 559,185,000 additional reasons, which I shall now proceed to give, for not believing that prohibition, even with total abstinence added, will produce a social millennium. I refer to the millions of Hindus, Buddhists and Mohammedans, who, except as white men have corrupted a few of them, have been under the absolute prohibition of their religions for centuries, with none of our exceptions for drug stores or "original packages," and yet, right along with the most perfect prohibition and the most absolute abstinence the world has known, have flourished impurity, polygamy, slavery and tyranny. Manifestly prohibition is not what a Kansas doctor, in one of its hotels, claimed in his sign to be, "A specialist in all chronic diseases." Abstinence has been of vast benefit to these peoples, saving them from a deeper poverty and degradation than they now suffer, and Britain has been foolish as well as wicked to break down this great virtue for paltry license fees that hurt politically and commercially as well as morally. But no one, in the light of this age-long experiment upon millions of people, can reasonably hold the view that to "get right" on prohibition is to get rid of about all our social wrongs. As some can lead a division but not an army, so there are many who can do their best work for God and man by devoting themselves to one reform; but the Church of God as a whole, in every city and in every nation and in the world at large should be organized to attack the whole "far-flung battle line" that fights unitedly the world over under the mighty triumvirate of appetite, lust and greed.

DESERTION NOT A SCRIPTURAL OR REASONABLE GROUND OF DIVORCE.

It should arouse Presbyterians to find in the government report on divorce that "desertion," which the Confession adds to the one ground of divorce that Christ gave, is the most frequent and the most abused excuse for divorce. Apparently, because Paul said to Christians newly converted from heathenism that if their mates left them on that account they should let them go, the "Westminster divines" leaped to the conclusion that they were free to get married again despite Christ's plain word to the contrary ; that is, a permission for voluntary separation is treated as a permission for absolute divorce. This Presbyterian error hinders the divorce reform plan of the churches' union divorce committee, and keeps in the rear rank on this reform the denomination which, as I shall show, leads all in the land in recognizing temperance and labor reform as branches of missionary work. It seems -impossible to get even a discussion of needed sociological revision of the creed in this vital matter. When the Reform Bureau was promoting a divorce bill for the District of Columbia, which embodied the law of Christ, with re-marriage allowed only in cases of adultery and only to the innocent party, the writer appealed to the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian ministers' meetings of Philadelphia to endorse it. The Methodists and Baptists did so unanimously, and the Presbyterian preachers heard the same appeal with manifest signs of general approval, but it was recalled that the Confession allowed absolute divorce for desertion, and the bill was committed to a committee for quiet burial — a case where the "dead hand" kept a great church out of a successful battle to crown

Christ by making his law the law of the nation's Capital.

THE REMEDIES FOR LAX DIVORCE.

The remedy for divorce must include more than law, and must go deeper than law, starting with reverent sex lessons taught by experts in the schools. It is too delicate a subject for bunglers, even though they be parents, and it is worse than useless to urge every parent to unveil the sacred mysteries of sex. It is like work on a costly vase where every touch must be one of masterful psychology. When young people of marriageable age are so taught, and cease to talk of marriage as "midway between a joke and a crime/' we shall have reached the deep roots of the divorce evil. The law is also our schoolmaster, as the Bible reminds us, and the mightiest lesson on the sacredness of marriage for old and young is the law of Christ on the statute books, proclaiming that marriage is more than an experimental contract — a sacred union that can be dissolved only by death, or by that criminal lust that murders love.