Alcohol, A Contradictory Social Staple

“ Men drink to excess very often to shake off depression, or to satisfy the restless thirst for agreeable excitement, and those motives are excluded in a cheerful community. A gloomy state of society, in which there are few innocent recreations, may be expected to abound in drunkenness, if opportunities are afforded. ”

“ No man to-day could be a drunkard and at the same time be respected.
Education, experience and common sense have done their work, and drunkenness is now left to self-indulgent fools, or to those whose lives are made dull by poverty, to whom alcohol affords the only escape from horrible monotony. ”

“ The aim of liquor, ladies and gentlemen, is to stay and lift the spirit, not to degrade it. Drinking at proper intervals ceased to be respectable at a fixed date in human progress—to be exact, at the moment when it was no longer a mere incident of personal or social recreation but had become a sociological and political issue, staggering drunkenly under a weary burden of most painful statistics."
"You are eminently right, Governor Dangerfield," said the governor of South Carolina, helping himself to the salted almonds ”

“ Society must always frown upon the morose and solitary drinker—the man who drinks merely for the purpose of injecting alcohol into his system. Drinking should be regarded only as a means, not as an end. It is not good in and for itself; it is good only as an aid toward loftier things. The great virtue of drinking, granting it virtue, is that it may ease the perilous and delicate ascent to human intercourse, or, to change the metaphor, alcohol is the best of social lubricants. ”

“ This effect is furthered by the free use of alcohol, which, in spite of its many bad qualities, is not to be despised as a promoter of sociability. We hear so much of the fights and brawls to which the unlicensed indulgence in spirituous drinks gives rise that we forget that mild intoxication puts the majority of men in a cheerful and friendly humour, and is calculated to promote the good fellowship of the company. ”

“ It is a most unfortunate thing that few temperance reformers have any personal acquaintance with public houses or with alcoholic drinking. For if they had they would know that a man is much more likely to brutalise himself if he is compelled to drink “perpendicularly” in a dirty, ugly, and gloomy bar than if he can sit down comfortably, talk to his friends, play cards and listen, perhaps, to a little music. That is why another phase of the L.C.C. “temperance” policy, the refusal of drink licenses to music halls, is so manifestly absurd. ”

“ At sumptuous social functions and at the parties of the poor, alcohol is freely consumed. It is served in the homes, cocktail lounges, night clubs, cafes, and the cheapest corner bars. No home of the well-to-do is fashionable unless it has the latest push wagon liquor service or a permanent, small, drinking mixing bar. Alcohol drinking seems to be the fad. The serving of alcoholic beverages is supposedly a sign of hospitality. ”

“ And since all human culture proceeds from the manners and forms of society and social intercourse, we would plainly see in such a history—what has often been divined and pointed out, but also frequently smiled at—that wine is most closely connected with the civilization of States and with the development of free human culture, and that the art of drinking at all times keeps step with this culture and development, and sinks or rises with them. For not at all times have men practiced this art with equal wisdom, nor yet even practiced it in like manner ”

“ Instead of "Drunkenness leads to poverty" or "Drunkenness leads to wretchedness" we must read it "Poverty leads to drunkenness" "Wretchedness leads to drunkenness." Instead of worrying lest the horrible inebriate go home and brain his family and smash his furniture, we must cry, "Poor man, he is out of employment," "Poor man, he has an unhappy home, a shrewish wife and bad children, and there was nothing left him but drink" "It is not his fault, it is the fault of that horrid liquor seller." And so on, as if the selling of liquor and not the besotting of one's self with liquor, were the crime ”

“ The time may not be yet come for a total prohibition of alcohol throughout the country. {115} Those who know anything of the intolerable conditions under which men and women live in the crowded, noisome tenements of our great cities, realise that these people must have some way of escape from their miserable environment. Total prohibition is the ideal to be kept steadily in view, but before that ideal can be realised the people must be prepared for it. The only way to prepare for the ideal is by a reconstruction of the social order. ”

“ Because the habit of drinking moderately is apt, among lower incomes, to go hand in hand with other habits injurious to business and fatal to integrity, positions of trust in industry seek men and women who have the habit of declining drink.
In the aggregate, milder forms of unhealthy living interfere with industrial efficiency even more than alcoholism. Many capable men and women, even those who have had thorough technical training, fail to win promotion because their persons are not clean, their breath offensive, their clothes suggestive of disorderly, uncleanly habits. ”

“ Despondent men drink for relief from self-consciousness, starving men for stimulation, while circumstances, fate, or the vicissitudes of life prompt many to resort to drink.
The man who works ten hours a day on a meager midday lunch of bread and cheese, must drink to beat out the day, and when the day is done, do you wonder that he seeks a stimulant? The comfortable, well-to-do, honest middle class drink but little, and if at all, very moderately. The world’s main consumers of alcohol are—the very poor for forgetfulness, the idle rich for pleasure. ”

“ On account of the manner in which alcohol unconsciously dulls the senses and blurs the judgment, these companies began long ago weeding out from their employ all men who were known to drink to excess; then they began to reject those who were likely to occasionally over-indulge, or take it too freely; and now, finally, many of them, particularly the railway and steamship companies, will not employ—except in the lowest and poorest paid classes of their service—and will not promote to any position which puts men in charge of human life and limb, those who use alcohol in any form or amount. ”

“ They had evidently given no thought to the function of civil government in dealing with the problem, nor did they perceive that the vice of drunkenness is an effect, quite as much as a cause, having its genesis in the unequal laws, in the domination of wealth over the poor, in the lack of general education, in inherited infirmities, physical and mental, in neglected household training; in a word, in untoward social conditions which must be radically dealt with before we can strike with effect at the root of the evil. ”

“ There are persons who maintain the thesis that poverty is not the principal cause of alcoholism among the working classes. As a proof they say that the laborers who earn the least (farm hands among others) are not those who drink the most, and that an increase in wages often brings about a higher consumption of alcohol. ”

“ With the continually increasing development of capitalism King Alcohol began his triumphal march, which has continued without any great obstacle to the present day. Alcoholism has its deeper causes in the material [373] intellectual and moral poverty created by the economic system now in force. It is with reason that Professor Gruber has said: “We cannot shut our eyes to the truth that alcohol is not without basis in our present order of society. Without it life would long ago have become unendurable for the suffering part of the population.” ”

“ One of the principal factors is the difficulty of earning a living for one’s family, and also—and especially—care, the eternal care for the morrow, which fastens upon the life of the working-man like a bur, and which, as work becomes more rare, drives him to desperation. This is the principal cause of alcoholism. Remove this care and men will drink much less alcohol, for then the heart can open itself to joy instead of deadening itself, as is at present almost a necessity. ”

“ Some spend more money on beer than they do on food. The evidences of drink in the homes are apparent on all sides; and not only do national customs and national tastes and usages make for drunkenness, but the undeniable fact that the liquor interests are the only American institutions which effectively reach the great mass of the non-English speaking immigrants. Where else does the stranger find opportunity for recreation at his very hand? ”

“ They want other people to stop drinking because they want other people to stop. So they make laws that are violated, and get pledges that are broken and try to legislate or preach or coax or scare away a habit that must, in any successful outcome, be stopped by the individual, and not because of any law or threat or terror or cajolery. ”

“ Why do we see everywhere governments taking measures of more or less efficacy against alcoholism and at the same time contributing, directly or indirectly, to the increase in the production of alcoholic drinks?
The reason is, that nothing is more difficult for our civilisation than to impose a limit on anything. Its impetus carries it too far in everything. It is almost a law of its constitution. We have, to a great extent, lost the sense of just measure, because we have weakened or destroyed nearly all the authorities and moral forces which used to make the limits respected. ”

“ It is very easy to select from the meager facts now available convincing proofs both that prohibition does not prohibit and that high license leads to increased drunkenness. The consequence is that the movements to control, restrict, or prohibit the use of alcohol are emotional, not rational.
[349] It is impossible to keep emotion, sensation, sentiment, at white heat. Most extremists worship legislation and do not try to keep interest alive by telling every week or every month new facts about the week or the month before. ”

“ We are no longer instructed that mad people are so depraved that God has visited a special judgment on them, and that starvation and beatings are the fittest methods of restoring the lost reason. The drunkard is regarded in the light of a victim of alcoholism, often, rather than as a responsible member of the community. ”

“ The National Council on Alcoholism has defined 'alcoholic' as 'a person who is powerless to stop drinking and whose drinking seriously alters his normal living pattern.' The American Medical Association has defined alcoholics as 'those excessive drinkers whose dependence on alcohol has attained such a degree that it shows a noticeable disturbance or interference with their bodily or mental health, their interpersonal relations, and their satisfactory social and economic functioning.'↑ It ranks among the top four public health problems of the country. ”

“ While the desire for alcohol is increasing with the complexity of society, it is actually true that drunkenness is decreasing and it is possibly true that the number of total abstainers is increasing. These things are determined by custom, by individual environment and education and by the power of self control. But the steady increase in the desire for alcohol is shown not merely in the steady increase in its consumption but still more in the fact that it increases in the face of public and private sentiment, legal statute and social effort. ”

“ At the present moment the British people are not in the least persuaded that the evils of alcohol for a minority of the population cannot be dealt with effectively without resorting to the very drastic expedient of forbidding its consumption by the majority who use it in moderation. Are they likely to be convinced? That depends on the failure or success of all other expedients to exterminate the evil of alcoholism.
That brings me to another explanation. America reached prohibition by the path of experiment. ”

“ Science and hygiene have at last [Pg 600] shown beyond all question that alcohol, whether in large or smaller doses, exerts a damaging effect upon both mind and body. It lessens physical and mental efficiency, shortens life, and encourages social disorder. In spite of this fact and, what is still more amazing, in spite of the colossal effort now being put forth to suppress by legislative means the traffic in liquor, the per capita consumption of alcoholic drinks in the United States increases from year to year. ”

“ The man or woman taken before a magistrate as the result of alcoholic over-indulgence offers a peculiarly perplexing problem. Society has placed itself in a highly inconsistent position as regards its relation to alcohol. It permits a man to pay it for the privilege to sell alcohol to any one who asks for it, the only restriction being that he may not sell it to a person who already has “had too much.” ”

“ But once let every liquor law be expunged from the statute-books of our American States and the temperance reformer would disappear, the benign influences of the city would spread to the country, liquor drinking being no longer a matter of courtesy or self-respect, but an indifferent matter of taste, would decrease, as it always has decreased in the civilized communities when let alone and to itself. The horror of liquor would disappear, and only the horror of the drunkard would remain. ”

“ But any man who justifies Prohibition on the ground that drinking is an evil, no matter how temperate, is either a man of narrow and stupid mind or is utterly blind to the value of human liberty. The ardent old-time Prohibitionist--the man who thinks, however mistakenly, that the abolition of intoxicating drinks means the salvation of mankind--counts the impairment of liberty as a small matter in comparison with his world-saving reform ”

“ One has only to work among inebriates, no matter to what class of society they belong, to know that fear of interfering with the liberty of a subject who has no real liberty, in that he is a slave habitually or periodically to the drink craze, results in the interference with the liberty of all those who have to put up with his irresponsible behavior under the influence of alcohol and other narcotic drugs. ”