BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M.D.

CHAPTER IV.—THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE.

If we consider the manifold afflictions which in the after years of so many millions of our fellowmen outweigh the happiness of childhood, we can hardly wonder that several great thinkers have expressed a serious doubt if earthly existence is on the whole a blessing. Yet for those who hold that the progress of science and education will ultimately remove that doubt, it is a consoling reflection that the greatest of all earthly evils are avoidable ones. The earthquake of Lisbon[2] killed sixty thousand persons who could not possibly have foreseen their fate. In 1282 an irruption of the Zuyder Sea overwhelmed sixty-five towns whose inhabitants had not five minutes’ time to effect their escape. But what are such calamities compared with the havoc of wanton wars, or the ravages of consumption and other diseases that are the direct consequences of outrageous sins against the physical laws of God? The cruelty of man to man causes more misery than the rage of wild beasts and all the hostile elements of Nature, but the heaviest of all evils in our great burden of self-inflicted woe is undoubtedly the curse of the poison vice. The alcohol habit is a concentration of all scourges. In the poor island of Ireland alone one hundred and forty million bushels of bread-corn and potatoes are yearly sent to the distillery. The shipment of the grain, its conversion into a health-destroying drug, the distribution and sale of the poison, are carried on under the protection of a so-called civilized government. Waste is not an adequate word for that monstrous folly. If the grain farmers of Laputa[3] should organize an expedition to the sea-coast, and under the auspices of the legal authorities equip an apparatus for flinging a hundred million sacks of grain into the ocean, the contents of those sacks would be lost, and there would be an end of it. The sea would swallow the cargo. The distillery swallows the grain, but disgorges it in the form of a liquid fire that spreads its flames over the land and scorches the bodies and souls of men till the smoke of the torment arises from a million homesteads. We might marvel at the extravagance of the Laputans, but what should we say if the priests of a pastoral nation were to slaughter thousands of herds on the altar of a national idol, and in conformity with an established custom let the carcasses rot in the open fields till the progress of putrefaction filled the land with horror and pestilence; if moreover, among the crowd of victims we should recognize the milch cows of thousands of poor families whose children were wan with hunger, and if furthermore the intelligent rulers of that nation should supervise the ceremonies of the sacrifice, distribute the carcasses and calmly collect statistics to ascertain the percentage of the resultant mortality?

The LOSS OF LIFE caused by the ravages of the alcohol plague equals the result of a perennial war. The most belligerent nation of modern times, the Russians, with the perpetual skirmishes on their eastern frontier, and their periodical campaigns against their southern neighbors, lose in battle a yearly average of 7,000 men. The average longevity of the Caucasian nations is nearly 38 years. Of their picked men about 45 years. The average age of a soldier is now-a-days about 25 years. The death of 7,000 soldiers represents therefore a national loss of 7,000 times the difference between 25 and 45 years, i. e., a total waste of 140,000 years. Medical statistics show that in the United States alone the direct consequences of intoxication cost every year the lives of six thousand persons, most of them reckless young drunkards, who thus anticipate the natural term of their lives by about twenty years. But at the very least, two per cent. of our population is addicted to the constant use of some form of alcoholic liquors. Prof. Neison, of the British General Life Insurance Company, estimates that rum-drinkers shorten their lives by seven years, beer-drinkers by five and one-half, and “mixed drinkers” by nine and one-half years. For the city of London, Sir H. Thompson computes that drinkers of all classes shorten their lives by six years. But let us be quite sure to keep within the limits of facts applying to all conditions of life, and assume a minimum of four years. A total of 4,120,000 years for the population of the United States is therefore a moderate estimate of the annual life waste by the consequences of the poison vice! In other words, in a country of by no means exceptionally hard drinkers, alcohol destroys yearly thirty times as much life as the warfare of the most warlike nation on earth. The first year of the war for the preservation of the Union and the suppression of slavery cost us 82,000 lives. When the death list had reached a total of 100,000 the clamors for peace became so importunate that the representatives of our nation were several times on the point of abandoning the cause of the most righteous war ever waged. Yet the far larger life waste on the altar of the Poison-Moloch continues year after year, and for a small bribe not a few of our prominent politicians seem willing to perpetuate that curse to the end of time. Among all the nations of the Christian world, with the only exception of the Syrian Maronites,[4] the poison vice has shortened the average longevity of the working classes by at least five years. Political economists have calculated the consequent loss of productive force, but there is another consideration which is too often overlooked. The progress of degeneration has reduced our life term so far below the normal average that the highest purposes of individual existence are generally defeated. Our lives are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before the harvest time; before the laborer’s task is half done he is overtaken by the night when no man can work. The secret of longevity would, indeed, solve the chief riddle of existence, for the children of toil could then hope to reach the goal of the visible compensation which, on earth at least, is now reserved for the exceptional favorites of fortune. That hope is diminished by everything that tends still further to reduce our shortened span of life, and beside increasing the burdens of existence, the poison vice therefore directly decreases the possibility of its rewards.

Yet that result is almost insured by the LOSS OF HEALTH which all experienced physiologists admit to be the inevitable consequence of the stimulant habit. Every known disease of the human system is aggravated by intemperance. The morbid diathesis, as physicians call a predisposition to organic disorders, finds an ally in alcohol that enables it to defy the expurgative efforts of Nature. A consumptive toper will fail to derive any benefit from a change of climate. A dram-drinking dyspeptic can not be cured by outdoor exercise. The influence of alcoholic tonics tends to aggravate nervous disorders into mental derangements. But even the soundest constitution is not proof against the bane of that influence. Before the end of the first year habitual drinkers lose that spontaneous gayety which constitutes the happiness of perfect health as well as of childhood. The system becomes dependent upon the treacherous aid of artificial stimulants, and the lack of vital vigor soon begins to tell upon every part of the organism. Alcohol counteracts the benefit of all the hygienic advantages of climate and habit, and it is doubtful if the effect of its continued influence could be equaled by the intentional introduction of contagious diseases. A medical expert might collect the most incurable patients in the leper slums of Shanghai, in the lazarettos[5] of Naples and the fever hospitals of Vera Cruz, and distribute them in the cities of another country; yet a year after the dissemination of such diseases the hygienic condition of a temperate nation would be better than that of a drunkard nation after a year of the strictest quarantine protection. In the sanitary history of the Caucasian nations alcohol has proved a worse plague than the Black Death.

The WASTE OF LAND and the WASTE OF LABOR must be considered together, in order to comprehend the total amount of the loss which the fourteen most civilized nations inflict on themselves by the unspeakable folly of devoting from 20 to 25 per cent. of their fertile area to the production of stimulating poisons. If the land thus abused were simply neglected, if it were abandoned to the weeds and tares, the laborers who now cultivate it in the interest of hell might employ their time in assisting their friends and help them to cultivate better or larger crops on the soil of the adjoining lands. If they should prefer to emigrate, their abandoned fields might be cultivated by their neighbors. Even children in the intervals of their play might plant cherry stones, and help the soil to contribute to the welfare of the community. As it is, it contributes only to the development of diseases, vices and crimes. The productions of the land, the toil of the husbandmen, are not only utterly lost, but become a curse to the population of the country. Starving Ireland devotes a third of her arable lands to the production of distillery crops. Spain begs with one hand and with the other flings two-fifths of her produce to the poison vender. The statistics of the last census show that distilleries devour every year 34,300,000 acres of our total farm produce; breweries, 9,600,000; wine cellars, cider mills (not to mention tobacco factories), about five millions more!

The old settlers of western Arkansas still remember the excitement caused by occasional raids of predatory Indians who used to cross the Texas border and devastate the farms of the frontiersmen. Near Arkadelphia they once burned three hundred acres of ripe corn, and half a dozen counties joined in the pursuit of the marauders. Imagine the blazing indignation, the mass meetings, the general uprising of an outraged people, if the Mormons should take it in their heads to burn three million acres of our grain crop. Yet the distillers not only burn up more than the tenfold amount, but fan the flames to kindle a soul and body consuming conflagration, and shriek about infringements of their privileges if a bold hand here and there succeeds in snatching a brand from the burning.

The WASTE OF REMEDIAL EXPENDITURE must be considered under a separate head, for beside squandering their own resources, the votaries of the poison fiend waste those of their neighbors, who have to devise means for mitigating the resulting mischief. The care of drunkards, i. e., of persons picked up in the streets in a state of life-endangering intoxication, costs our hospitals a yearly sum of $5,000,000. A list of the various diseases which can be traced to the direct or indirect influence of intemperance would require the enumeration of nearly all known disorders of the human organism, but, though drunkards become a burden to their families oftener than to the charitable institutions of the community, it has been ascertained that they constitute 30 per cent. of the inmates of such establishments as county infirmaries, charity hospitals, almshouses, poorhouses and lunatic asylums. Prisons proper, that is, institutions for the cure of moral disorders, are filled with patients where derelictions in forty out of a hundred cases have been committed either under the immediate influence of intoxicating liquors, or as a consequence of such direct results of intemperance as loss of property, loss of credit, loss of moral or mental integrity. In 1870 the prisons of the United States cost the nation a yearly sum of $87,000,000. By this time their cost probably amounts to a full hundred millions. The magistrates of our city courts have to waste half their time on the trial of drunkards. On the blackboards of our metropolitan station houses “D. D. C.” after the name of a prisoner means So-and-So locked up for drunkenness and disorderly conduct; they have to abbreviate the specification of that offense to save a little space for other memoranda. If the indirect consequences of the poison vice could be traced through all their ramifications, it would be found that the suppression of that vice would relieve our cities from a burden equivalent to a full half of all their municipal taxes.

The MORAL LOSS is not confined to the direct influence of the brutalizing poison. The liquor traffic defiles all participants of a transaction which involves a sin against Nature, a crime against society and posterity, and an outrage against the moral instincts of the veriest savage, for more than five thousand years ago the lawgivers of the Bactrian nomads[6] recorded their protest against the vice of intoxication. A drunkard who flees from the prohibitory laws of his native place can not escape the voice of an inner monitor. The liquor dealer who points to his license is not the less conscious that he is an enemy of mankind, and that his servants eat the wages of a soul and body corrupting vice. The lawgiver who can be bribed to connive at that vice not only sins against the laws of political economy, but against Nature and the first principles of natural ethics, and forfeits his claim to the respect of the community. Faith in the sanctity of the law, in the wisdom and integrity of the legislator, is the very corner-stone of public morals, but that faith is incompatible with a system of legalized crime, and the lawgiver who consents to sanction the outrage of the poison traffic undermines the basis of his authority, and thereby the authority of the law itself. It is wholly certain that larceny and perjury combined do not damage the state the hundredth part as much as the curse of the poison vice; yet what should we think of the moral status of a legislative assembly devising a plan to increase the national revenues by granting license to pickpockets and professional false witnesses? Imagine a Titus Oates[7] offering his services on the public streets, and a chief justice compelling the courts to recognize the legality of his business, and protect him in the enjoyment of its emoluments! Imagine Jack Sheppard[8] filching the weekly wages of a half-witted working man, and flaunting a government license if the wife of his victim should demand the restitution of the plunder. The absurdity of such an arrangement might seem too glaring to imagine its possibility. Yet for the same reason posterity may refuse to credit the records of our liquor system; for, translated into plain speech, the contract between the state and the rum vender means even this: “On condition of receiving a share in the yearly profits of your business, I herewith grant you the right to poison your fellow-citizens.”

The LOSS OF WEALTH, which some of the foregoing considerations will enable us to estimate, has increased with the progress of our national development in a way which in many respects has made that progress a curse instead of a blessing. Thirty-five years ago our brethren in Maine had a hard fight against the champions of the liquor traffic, but they had to deal with whiskey alone. Since then our foreign immigrants have introduced ale, lager beer, and French high wines, and threaten to introduce absinthe[9] and opium. The poison vice has assumed the magnitude of a pandemic plague. According to the statistics of the Treasury Department, the alcohol drinkers of the United States spent during the last ten years a yearly average of $370,000,000 for whiskey, $53,000,000 for other distilled liquors, $56,000,000 for wine, and $140,000,000 for ale and beer. Together, $624,000,000 a year. Under the head of liquors evading the revenue tax, Prof. W. Hoyle, of Manchester, adds 20 per cent. for Great Britain, Commissioner Halliday 15 per cent. for the United States, and Dr. Bowditch 18 per cent. for the state of Massachusetts alone. Let us assume the minimum of 15 per cent. The total direct cost of the poison vice (without including tobacco and other narcotic stimulants) is therefore $705,000,000 a year. The indirect cost eludes computation, except under the three following heads: 1. The loss of productive capacity, as revealed in the difference between the yearly earnings of a manufacturing community under the protection of prohibitory laws or under the influence of the license system. 2. The inebriate percentage of patients in our public hospitals, and of convicts in our prisons. 3. The loss sustained by the employers of agents, trustees, clerks, etc., addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors. The aggregate of these indirect losses we will assume to be only $350,000,000 a year, though several political economists compute it as equal to the direct cost. Our estimate does not include the amount of rum-begotten distress relieved by private charity, nor the rum percentage of undetected crime, nor yet the wholly incalculable value of the benefactions, reforms and improvements prevented by the use of intoxicating liquors among the upper classes. We can therefore be quite sure of understating the truth if we estimate the aggregate cost of the poison vice at $1,055,000,000 a year—a yearly sum equivalent to the cost value of all our public libraries, our church property, school property, steamboats, bridges, and telegraphs taken together.

Prohibition would put a stop to one half of that prodigious waste. We will not delude ourselves with the hope that the deep-rooted habit of the stimulant vice could at once be wholly eradicated by any legislative measures whatever. For years to come 20 per cent. of the aggregate would undoubtedly be devoured by liquor venders finding means to elude the vigilance of the law. Fifteen per cent. would be spent on other vices. Fifteen per cent. more would probably be wasted for frivolous purposes—innocent, as compared with the crime of the poison traffic, but still on the whole amounting to a loss of national resources. The waste of the remaining fifty per cent. could be prevented by prohibition. In ten years the saving of that sum and its application to useful purposes would transform the moral and physical condition of our country. With five billion dollars we could construct ten bridges over every one of our hundred largest rivers. We could build an international railroad of a gauge that would enable the denizens of snow-bound New England to reach the tropics in twenty-four hours. We could realize Professor Lexow’s project of providing every large city with a system of free municipal railways connecting the centers of commerce with the suburban homes of the workingmen. We could make those suburbs attractive enough to drain the population of the slums. We could counteract the temptations of the grog-shops by providing the poor with healthier means of recreation; city parks with free baths, competitive gymnastics and zoÖlogical attractions for the summer season, and reading rooms with picture galleries and musical entertainments for the long winter evenings. We could employ home missionaries enough for a direct appeal to every fallen or tempted soul in the country. We could cover our hillsides with orchards and line our highways with shade trees; we could plant forest trees enough to redeem thousands of square miles in the barren uplands of the West. Each township in the country could have a free school, each village a free public library; we could help the sick by teaching them to avoid the causes of disease; we could prevent rather than punish crime; we could teach our homeless vagrants the lessons of self-support, and found asylum colonies for the lost children of our great cities. And moreover, we could increase the savings of the next decade by the endowment of a National Reform College, with a corps of competent sanitarians and political economists, for the training of temperance teachers, with local lecturers, traveling lecturers, and free lecture halls in every larger city of the country.

Only thus prohibition could be brought to answer its whole purpose, for we should remember that the practical efficiency of all government laws depends on the consensus of the governed. Without the coÖperation of the teacher the mandates of the legislator fall short of their aim. But it is equally certain that in the field of social ethics the teacher can not dispense with the aid of the legislator, and that our lawgivers can not much longer afford to ignore that truth, for the penalty of the neglect already amounts to the equivalent of the average yearly income of seven million working people. In the South a million men, women and children of farm laborers earn less than a hundred millions a year, i. e., $500 for every family of five persons. In the manufacturing districts of the North they would earn less than $200,000,000. We can therefore again be wholly certain of not overstating the truth, if we assert that in the United States alone the poison vice devours every year the aggregate earnings of more than fourteen hundred thousand families. In one dollar bank-notes of the United States Treasury, one billion dollars could be pasted together into a paper strip that would reach up to the moon. Stacked up in bundles, they would form a paper pile a hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and fifty feet high.

If the equivalent of so many creature-comforts could be employed for the benefit of the poor, it would almost realize the dreams of a Golden Age. But even if we could save it from the hands of the poison vender by burning it on the public streets, all friends of mankind would hail the conflagration as the gladdest bonfire that ever cheered the hearts of men. For its flames would save more human lives than the perpetual peace of the millennium; it would prevent more crimes than the civilization of all the savages that infest the prairies of our border states and the slums of our large cities. Nay, it would save us from evils for which mankind has thus far discovered no remedy, for intemperance robs us of blessings which human skill is unable to restore.