Of any two hundred persons committed to the County Prison, probably one hundred and fifty owe their incarceration to drunkenness. Assault and battery, breach of the peace, misdemeanor, vagrancy, abuse and threats, disorderly conduct, and other charges which figure upon the commitments sent by the magistrate with the prisoner, are often only other terms for drunkenness and only varieties in the charge or slight additions to the offence; and even the higher offences against the law are frequently referable to, or connected with, intemperance in the use of intoxicating liquors; and it generally happens that when the prisoner is questioned with regard to the temptation to steal, to fight, or commit some other misdemeanor with which he stands charged, he replies that he knows nothing about such acts, he only took a drop too much, or was a “little tight;” he remembers a mass of things, yet nothing distinctly, and professes to feel greatly injured in being committed for a misdemeanor, when he had done nothing but get drunk; or that he should have been charged with assault and battery when he had only beaten his wife or struck the officer that arrested him; nor does he find it reconcilable with justice that he should be charged with abuse and threats for merely cursing the magistrate and offering to break his head at a moment of greater soberness. This vice of excessive drinking is then so intimately connected with the administration of justice, either as a motive or a stimulant for offences against the law, that it is deemed proper to consider it more closely in connection with prison discipline, in order that we may understand what are the duties of society in regard to its means and subjects, and thus we may also comprehend how entirely its suppression becomes a means of ameliorating the condition of public prisons. If we would lesson the evils of prisons, perhaps the most important step would be to diminish the number of prisoners. To strike from the list of offences that offence which is the parent, the assistant, and the offspring of so many more—would seem to be a great advance in the work of those who seek to denounce vice as well as to correct the vicious and criminal.

How drunkenness is to be diminished in our community, is a problem difficult of solution. Attempts have been made of various kinds, with various degrees of temporary success; but the appetites of one class and the cupidity of another, seem to baffle the efforts of the benevolent and counteract the enactments of legislatures. It may however tend towards an amendment, that something of the extent of the evil should be made public.

The means of intemperance are indeed public and its fruits abound, but very few stop to notice the extent of any habit that grows up gradually in a community and is consistent with general customs and taste, and only to be condemned for its excess, or only to be entirely condemned when its excess shows that the evils of abuse outweigh all advantages of moderate indulgence. Not many who read this report have thought to note the multiplied number of shops, saloons, taverns, hotels, casinos and cellars, whose maintenance is the profit on the sale of intoxicating liquors; yet these places present themselves all around us, and in certain parts of the city they are in such abundance as would lead one, a stranger to our domestic life, to suppose that the chief employment of the people was vending liquors, and the principle food was whiskey. Fifty grog shops and liquor stores are found for one bakery, so that Falstaff’s “penny for bread and a shilling for sack,” seems no longer an extravagant partiality for liquids over solids; and, if it should be said that many families bake their loaves instead of depending on the bakers for their daily bread, it may with equal truth be replied that thousands of those who reach Moyamensing Prison for drunkenness, maintain a household altar to intemperance, at which their neighbors also sacrifice (themselves and their character) in devotion to the social jug, from which drunkenness can be imbibed without the expense of a license or the payments of profits to the retailer.

Can such things be, and drunkenness not abound? Can so many places for the sale of liquor be maintained with gain to the proprietors merely upon the profit of getting people drunk without a terrible deterioration of public morals? It is proved by the revelations of our courts of justice, by the confession of prisoners and the statements of sufferers, that many of the keepers of these drinking places augment their profits by other crimes than that of intoxicating their fellow-men, by making indeed intoxication only a step towards almost every other species of criminality; and while the prison cells are crowded with the offenders and sufferers from these haunts of vice and crime, thousands leave unrevealed their sufferings and their losses rather than expose their weakness and vice in frequenting such resorts and yielding to the temptations of the place.

In presenting these remarks on the means and extent of intemperance, it is not to be inferred that the Philadelphia Society for alleviating the miseries of prisoners, is about to resolve itself into a temperance society, or create a committee to lessen the evil of intoxication. This society has its specific duties, which it endeavors to discharge fully and profitably; but if vices and woes cluster, virtue and peace also associate,—and if we would lessen any considerable evil we must seek to diminish its cause. This society has incidental association with almost all the benevolent and humane institutions of the city. The repentant, impure female is recommended to the Magdalen, the Rosine, or the Good Shepherd. The female vagrant or the thief, is conducted to the Howard Home or some other refuge with which the Committee or the Agent is in correspondence. The young are transferred from the cell of the prison to the care of the House of Refuge. Is it then less consistent with the objects of this society that it should put itself in harmonious action with those who would lessen the overwhelming vice of drunkenness by which the cells of our prison are crowded, not only by drunkenness, but by those who having by drunkenness forfeited the esteem of society and lost their own respect, sink into lower debasement and lose all distinction between vice and crime, and practice theft as the means and intoxication as the end of living.

No one unacquainted with the life of a drunkard, but especially of an habitual female drunkard, can form a correct idea of the irrepressible thirst which the constant use of intoxicating liquors imposes. In a man it is usually a love of the taste of drink and the habit of social drinking; and the habit is often broken and the male drunkard restored. In woman the desire is for the effect of liquor, the feelings to which it gives rise; and the indulgence is more frequently solitary than social: and however strong the sense of wrong, however deep may be the regret for the folly when the evil moment of intoxication is over and the secondary results succeed, still it rarely happens that the repentance is deep or the amendment permanent. We do not know how many women have triumphed over a strong appetite for intoxicating liquors; thousands, of course, have solemnly but terribly wrestled with the deadly enemy and conquered; many thousands maintain “the irrepressible conflict” with various degrees of success; but the prison and the almshouse records show that with another class, mighty in number and important in interest, resistance is relinquished, shame forgotten, and the daughter, the wife and the mother confess themselves the captives of that one vice which sacrifices every female virtue to the gratification of rapacious appetite. This subject commends itself to the regard of the philanthropist, it calls for the attention of the magistrate, and it asks for some new legislation; what that legislation should be in detail, we do not pretend to say; our duty in the capacity in which we now act is done when we thus expose the evils whose existence and a part of whose terrible effects we discern in our prison visitations. We do not exaggerate the means nor the devotion to drunkenness in what we here state. The inducements to intoxication are double those which we have mentioned, and all vices and passions are made subservient to the work of selling liquor, while the effect of the poison sold is promotive of other vices. The accursed bottle is not confined to the house, the cellar, the dram shop, nor the saloon, it follows the miserable devotee to the police station, and the very van in which the drunkard is conveyed to the prison has its illicit bottle, so that if a single one of the inebriates should have failed of the necessary quantity for entire intoxication, or one should have recovered a gleam of reason, there should not be wanting the means of completing or restoring the work; and, it may be added, that it is with the utmost vigilance that the officers of the prison are enabled to keep intoxicating liquors from the cells. It is a melancholy fact that the husband endeavors to smuggle a contraband bottle into the cell where his wife is confined for drunkenness; and mothers while lamenting the hereditary misconduct of their daughters, seek to convey comfort to the young offender in the form of coffee strongly “laced” with whiskey. The right hand of fellowship extended through the aperture of the cell door, is the means of conveying a phial of brandy carefully deposited in the ample sleeve, and the affectionate friend that comes to sympathize with her incarcerated companion, exposes as she reaches forward to reciprocate a kiss, the forbidden bottle hidden in the bosom of her dress. It is then not only the appetite for whiskey against which opposition is to be made at our prison, but the deep sympathy which is manifested for those who suffer for a want of means and place to gratify that appetite.

Undoubtedly an immense saving in city expenditures would be made, to the relief of the tax-payer, if such an abuse of humanity could be corrected. And while we know that society would recognize at once any successful effort to suppress drunkenness, we feel that a moral desolation would be removed, could we cut down root and branch, the terrible Bahan Upas of our country, whose pestiferous branches destroy all vegetation beneath their ample shade, and spread misery and ruin throughout the circle of influences.

We dare not say however that, because almost all who are brought to the County Prison are habitual drunkards, that the entire abolition of intoxicating drinks would depopulate our prisons. The experience of the world is different. In Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, the frequenter of the prison is usually a drunkard. In Italy, especially in the South of Italy, drunkenness is almost unknown among the natives. Three years’ residence in the city of Naples failed to present to the narrator a single instance of a drunken Neapolitan, high or low, rich or poor; while frequent visitations to the prisons showed them amply populous. Perhaps there is in Italy some prevailing vice as productive of evil as drunkenness—perhaps drunkenness is in other countries the resort of the bad—of men and women who seek the gratification of a diseased appetite, not as a consequence or means of crime, but only to enjoy such gratifications as are consistent with and are punished by crime. The destruction of the Bahan Upas then may not restore herbage to the field; nay, to find a comparison nearer home, the stately pine is often cut down that culture and care may ensure a profitable crop for the soil which it has overshadowed, but a single season’s neglect shows that in the same earth there lies concealed the germ of other trees and shrubbery, and instead of the single overshadowing object, fifty smaller ones spring up to occupy the ground and prevent the growth of herbage. So the avoidance of a great leading vice does not without watchful care insure with certainty a growth of gentle virtues, some lesser passions, some yet uncultivated appetites that lie latent in the heart, spring into active growth, and become as dominant by their multitude as the ruling one did by its single power.

Yet however appalling may be the vice that is adopted by those who do not fall into the habit of drunkenness, there is always more hope of reclaiming the unfortunate male offender, whatever may be his vice, than there is of inducing the female inebriate to forsake the bottle. Larceny is committed to supply some want, not to gratify an imperious appetite; it leads to solitary confinement for a length of time, and the thief is easily persuaded to reflect, and often induced to amend. He understands, indeed, that his offence is directly against others, and that it provokes the injured to visit upon him the penalty of the violated law, and the anger of an offended society, that arms itself against him. The poor drunkard awakens from his debauchery, and finds a craving thirst for that which prostrated him, and feels that as he has done little or no direct wrong to others beyond his family, his offence is against himself, and the offended one in such a case easily pardons. If it is a female, it is not merely the love of liquor, in the use of which “increase of appetite grows by what it feeds on,” but it is that desire for the forgetfulness of sorrow, that love for the excitement of the nerves, that oblivion of the unhappy past, and that elevation above the miserable future which distinguishes her delirium of drunkenness from the effects of intoxication in man.

The impure female, in her rapid descent, is rarely unmindful of her degradation; and thousands are redeemed from vice by the kind interference of the humane; but when once she has found in the use of intoxicating liquor that paradise of the drunkard, she is rarely ever led by persuasion to return to reason and sobriety; nothing but forceful restraint will keep the wretched victim from the use of the means, and that restraint will not quench the thirst, nor diminish the desire, for the deceptive dreams of happiness.

Prevention! Prevention! domestic discipline, social care, and social censure, can alone diminish this evil, and free our community from that awful scourge—a drunken woman—and alleviate the miseries which are found in the cell of the inebriate prisoner.

It is not to be denied that there has been a great increase in the habit of using intoxicating liquors within a few years. It is a growing evil of terrible dimensions and appalling effects; and the worst part of the curse is its continued augmentation. How is this evil to be lessened? How is society to be saved from the terrible maelstrom, which seems to draw all to its eddying circle, and involves in ruin all that it embraces. It is not the business of this Society, perhaps, to resolve itself into a “temperance association;” but there are precedents in its proceedings for direct action in the matter, at least so far as concerns the prisons. We have asked, by solemn resolve, that the use of tobacco may be restrained in the cells; not, perhaps, merely because tobacco is in itself so injurious, but principally because the use of that narcotic creates a thirst, which seems to have no appeasement but in strong drink. To use a salutary and direct influence, then, in diminishing drunkenness, must a fortiori be within the plan of our Society.

But it may be said that while the use of tobacco has generally been among the admissible indulgence of prisoners, strong liquors have not been allowed. It is by no means certain that in other times the laboring prisoners were not allowed a regular, limited, supply of strong drink, but certainly not lately; yet as it is admitted that most of the criminal and vicious that are sent to our prisons owe their confinement to drunkenness, or at least make their condition worse by intoxication; and especially, as it is evident, that efforts to redeem from crime the released, are defeated by the facility with which intoxication may be had, it can scarcely be doubted that the Society is in the exercise of its legitimate powers, and in the discharge of its assumed duties, when it encourages all good efforts to lessen the prevailing sin and disgrace of the age, and lends its sanction to efforts directed to the diminution of the habit and the means of drunkenness.

How shall that be done? Shall this Society initiate a plan for promoting temperance, or shall it lend its hearty co-operation to some association that shall have for its principal object that which could only be a branch, a true, living branch, indeed, but only a branch of the duties of the Society for alleviating the miseries of prisons?

This Society can at least, and by the adoption of this Report, does, bear solemn testimony against the prevalence, the multiplication, and the existence of the magazines of mischief, where drunkenness is secured by the cost of the honor of the inebriate, and the disgrace of Society. Citizens who watch with most painful vigilance the action of the City Councils that enhance or diminish by a single per cent. the tax upon property, would consult their own interest more if they would look into this one cause of the increase of rates. But our business with the subject is in the interest of humanity. That is cheapest, at whatever cost, which produces the greatest good of the greatest number; and the good of the greatest number must depend on the promotion of sound morals.

With such a view of the prevalence of intemperance, and with such an avowal of the motives of humanity with which this Society regards all vices or crimes that go to make up the sum of the miseries of our public prisons, it may not be improper to state that among the institutions which humanity has yet to establish in Philadelphia, (it has already suggested it,) is a hospital or place of reception and treatment of inebriates. The prison punishes them, it does not cure; and few, excepting those who have seen the drunkard in the agonies of delirium tremens, or the terrors of mania a potu, can comprehend all the evils which the drunkard accumulates upon his own head, (the domestic misery which he insures, and the general scandal which he causes, may be otherwise considered,) but the personal suffering of the drunkard, after his committal for protracted debauch, is beyond description. It is not without some reason that the cells of the prison which are especially devoted to cases of delirium and mania are denominated “Purgatory,” though it would seem from the unutterable agonies and indescribable apprehension of the inmates that even if they should “go farther,” they would scarcely “fare worse.”

It is hoped, that when the national troubles that now occupy public attention, and draw upon the fiscal means of our citizens shall have ceased, there will be some effort in the direction of a “Hospital for Inebriates,” where proper moral and physical treatment may restore to families and society, those whose intemperate habits have alienated them from the affections of friends, or failing to restore them to reason and propriety, a home may be provided where they cannot by habitual indulgence, degrade themselves further, and by which families and friends may be spared the disgrace of a drunken inmate.