Debauch

“ The loss of health and the loss of character are the certain consequences; and the debauch of the evening is followed by pains and sickness in the morning, when that which was before poison, is administered as the cure! Practice becomes habitual, and thus a whole life is frequently wasted in debauchery ”

“ When they have done a successful job, they are in such a state of prostration that they immediately rush into the debaucheries they crave for; they get drunk on wine and spirits, and throw themselves madly into the arms of their women to recover composure by dint of exhausting their strength, and to forget their crime by forgetting their reason. ”

“ After the endurance of a week's delirium, madness, and unconsciousness, they generally find themselves, when robbed of the greater portion of their hard-got earnings, thrust upon the world penniless, wretched, dispirited, and sick, to seek employment and re-enact the same scenes of solitary penance and wild debauchery. ”

“ Here was the man of high birth, who, rich from his earliest youth, had given up his body to debauchery for the sake of extravagant enjoyment. And debauchery had destroyed the human being and made another after its own image. ”

“ What has been talk'd of some late actions at sea, of a kind unknown to our ancestors, gives me occasion to say, that debauchery sinks the courage of men; and when dissoluteness has eaten out the sense of true honour, bravery seldom stays long after it. ”

“ The ways of debauchery lead to absolute want, for the debauchee, impelled by his tormenting passions, will part with all his possessions in order to gratify his appetites, [84] until, unnerved and 'feckless,' incapable of any honest work, he is at his wits' end to obtain even the necessaries of life. ”

“ Debauchery of every sort became so systematic and aggravated that it found its professors, who earned a livelihood by serving as instructors of the youth of quality in the theory and practice of vice. ”

“ Why should a housekeeper be allowed to thieve? Why should slovenly and drunken servants exist? Why should a domestic staff be suffered in indulge in bouts of unconscionable debauchery during its leisure time? ”

“ Of these the excessive Misery of the Wretches themselves, oppressed with Want, and sunk in every Species of Debauchery, and the Loss of so many Lives to the Public, are obvious and immediate Consequences. ”

“ Besides, being educated in debauchery, and pampered in riot and luxury, they have no sense of the misfortunes of other men, nor tenderness for those who suffer them: They have no notion of miseries which they do not feel. ”

“ The vices of debauchery offend and disgust more (with many who are not altogether disinclined to the practice,) than the downright wickedness arising from the ambition and tyranny of the worst Monarchs that ever reigned; and prove that the moral virtues are of more value than anything. ”

“ Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied her more than great debauchery. ”

“ but of escape there are but three methods - two chimerical and a third real. The first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution. ”

“ In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required of all is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor, and is never excessive; ”

“ I've done their desire for a daily hire, and I die like a dog in a ditch. I have used the strength Thou hast given, Thou knowest I did not shirk; Threescore years of labor — Thine be the long day's work. And now, Big Master, I'm broken and bent and twisted and scarred, But I've held my job, and Thou knowest, and Thou will not judge me hard. Thou knowest my sins are many, and often I've played the fool — Whiskey and cards and women, they made me the devil's tool. ”

“ To leave my relations, my resources, while yet a child, in the midst of my apprenticeship, before I had learned enough of my business to obtain a subsistence; to run on inevitable misery and danger: to expose myself in that age of weakness and innocence to all the temptations of vice and despair ”

“ This resignation which makes each one among you, even the greatest, only an insignificant detail-worker upon the immense labor whose completion you contemplate at an infinite remove, and the very outlines of which you ignore,—this resignation is sublime, though supremely painful to the aspiring soul. The individual laborer for his part abstains from all hope of seeing the whole truth, and works for his generation and futurity. ”

“ To learn anew, after losing all caste, after dismissal from the army in disgrace and dishonor, to learn a bread-winning calling and to have to work like everybody in that despised throng of perspiring, vulgar toilers—surely, that was not at all to his taste. From infancy up he had been reared in disdain of labor—had acquired, one by one, tastes and habits of thought that seemed irreconcilable with a life of sober, plain living and thinking, with a life where his part would be that of a subordinate. ”

“ If I want to be a statesman—I may. If I want to become a judge—I may. If I should like to be a bishop—I may. If a great scholar—a great writer—I may. All, he says, is possible for me, if I choose to work—all—if I choose to work. Oh! Nell—isn't it—isn't it wonderful?" He dropped his voice, and his eyes glistened—his large dreamy eyes—and his cheeks glowed. "If I choose to work. As if I should not choose to work! Only those fellows who have got no such glorious prospects are lazy. Work? Why, I am mad to work. I grudge every hour. Work? ”

“ Job was not conscious to himself of any extraordinary guilt, and yet fell under extraordinary afflictions, v. 17, 18. Every man must expect the wind to blow upon him and ruffle him, but Job was broken with a tempest. Every man, in the midst of these thorns and briers, must expect to be scratched; but Job was wounded, and his wounds were multiplied. Every man must expect a cross daily, and to taste sometimes of the bitter cup; but poor Job's troubles came so thickly upon him that he had no breathing time, and he was filled with bitterness. ”

“ I began by taking the abuses in "discipline"—chiefly fines for being late and talking and "fooling" during work-hours. Many I abolished; others I reduced to merely nominal sums, even for the old wages received. A low, strong buzzing, distinctly favourable in character, greeted me at the conclusion of the list. ”

“ It is to them a new pleasure. Labor, in their minds, is indissolubly associated with servitude and the whip; and not to work, they have ever been taught to look upon as the badge and peculiar distinction of freedom. ”

“ The employer makes no effort to learn how they will live, meanwhile. "Am I my brother's keeper?"—the old cry, many times repeated in these latter days. How subtle, how alluring are the temptations that come in the weeks and months of idleness; how inexorable seems the choice held out to these helpless working girls—starvation or infamy. ”

“ By dint of strikes the workmen at last prevailed, and, in attempting to bring about a limitation in the amount of apprenticeship labor, brought about a result of quite another kind, and one far more disastrous than the evil sought to be remedied—the destruction of all the best and most important features of apprenticeship. ”

“ Unable to maintain his place among brother journeymen, or to render himself worthy of the average wages of his craft, the ill-taught mechanic falls out of regular employment, subsists precariously for a time on occasional jobs, and either, forming idle habits, becomes a vagabond tramper, or, getting into the toils of some rapacious task-master, becomes an enslaved sweater. ”

“ Do you get the best work out of the most skilled men in your employ by squeezing them down to half pay? Do you or I do our best work when he for whom we do it tries to get off with only partly paying for it? Is or is not the workman "worthy of his hire"? And will you name men whose lives are fuller of more important and more exacting, never-ceasing labor than our judiciary? When the fate of vast railroad properties, or of a mighty city even, hangs trembling in the hands of a mob ”

“ To stop the wages in the hands of the employer which an abandoned and depraved Mechanic would squander on his own ruin, and disburse it for him on the legitimate object of maintaining and properly educating his own offspring. ”

“ More than one aged, toil-spent laborer, broken at the loom in the service of his insatiable master, fell prone in the drifts and lay there till his thin life-current froze and his tired heart stopped. ”

“ What is there an employer can do to draw out the latent force in the men, evoke the divine, incalculable passion sleeping beneath in the machine-walled minds, the padlocked wills, the dull unmined desires of men? ”

“ This short and apparently informal ceremony is the most momentous in one’s future career, and though unaware of it at the time, I was not surprised later on at the importance attached to it by the experienced criminal. By it one’s future treatment is entirely guided, and the class of labour is carefully selected in accordance with its decision. A card, then and there signed by the surgeon, and which is always fixed on one’s cell door, decides one’s future vocation; and “Hard labour,” or “Light labour and bed,” bear a significance incredible to the uninitiated. ”

“ Probably not one of these men ever seriously dreamed that an event could occur that would, in the course of a few swift weeks, blot out the record of his life work, and deprive him of all opportunity for promotion, for pension, and even for employment. ”

“ The menace of the tramp class to the country seems to me to consist mainly in the example they set to the casual working man,—the man who is looking around for an excuse to quit work,—and in the fact that they frequently recruit their ranks with young boys. ”

“ I found you drunk in my birch, and it is well known that these are your customary habits. You are also a pauper. All property, everything that goes to support life, in these parts, of any amount, comes by the hard work of somebody,—either bone labor or brain labor,—the labor of those who now possess it, or of those from whom they inherited it. ”

“ When therefore, we see the corners of our streets beset after the night fall of each evening by crowds of idlers, we cannot but regret the carelessness of the master, and the danger of the apprentice. When every moment that is exempt from labor is devoted to studied idleness, among ignorant and depraved companions, we cannot wonder that worthless habits should ensue. ”

“ Checked by a justified pride from asking for re-employment in the army, I had the alternative either to continue the unworthy existence of a princely idler or—as an ordinary human being, to seek a new existence, a new profession. ”

“ Job, having driven his opponents from the field, carries his reply through a series of discourses in which he dwells in pathetic words upon his early prosperity, contrasting with it his present humiliation, and ends with a solemn repudiation of all the offences that might be suggested against him, and a challenge to God to appear and put His hand to the charge which He had against him and for which He afflicted him. ”

“ During his apprenticeship he was, as the youngest, treated with great injustice, and on one occasion his employer, for some expression of righteous resentment, threatened to chastise him, when the young woodsman, burning with indignation, raised the axe with which he was at work, and told him the attempt would cost him his life. ”

“ How spitefully he speaks of the impression it would make upon Job: "He will not only let fall his devotion, but turn it into an open defiance—not only think hardly of thee, but even curse thee to thy face." ”

“ Though in this removal they entail more constant and arduous occupation, they willingly embrace the labour, and leave the indolence of their vacated posts, to be enjoyed by some "old hand" whose mind has been broken by the depressing influence of constant punishment, and whose hopes have been blighted by a constant penal servitude. ”

“ The real unemployed, I believe, had very little share in all this: it was the work of the great army of roughs and thieves, who seized, owing to the very favourable nature of their opportunity, a day of licence. It is difficult to know whether the real want of work is now, or not, so very much greater than usual—in face of positive affirmations and negations; there is, at any rate, immense destitution. Every one here is growing poorer—from causes which, I fear, will continue. ”

“ Apprenticeship, with its wholesome rules, having decayed in everything but form, the lads who enter the shops are never properly instructed, but are made the drudges of the older workmen. What wonder that they acquire habits of idleness and carelessness that not only pursue them through the whole of their work, but, worse than this, corrupt and undermine their morals? ”

“ I cannot make you share the fate I have planned for myself. I must live henceforth without rank and fortune, and to begin this hard apprenticeship I must borrow from a friend the loaf I shall eat until I have earned one. ”

“ Taking these things into consideration, it is no wonder if Miss B. should find herself at the close of the year as poor as at the beginning. Neither is it surprising to find her under the painful necessity of following her occupation till her strength fails, and she is turned off just the same as a machine of wood and iron, to be replaced with some new comer. ”

“ We all crave occupation. "Imprisonment with hard labor" never seems to me so frightful as imprisonment and nothing to do, does. Did you ever hear the story of the man who spent years in a dark dungeon, idle, and then found some pins in his coat, which he spent years in losing, and crawling about and finding?
Well, I have got rid of a wee morsel of this weary day in writing this, and you will get rid of another morsel in reading it. ”