Debauchery

“ 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? ”

“ To what purpose will it be, my lords, to deprive nine hardened profligates of a tenth part of the liquor which they now drink, which is the utmost that this duty will effect? If they have an opportunity of corrupting one by their solicitation and example, the difference between nine and ten acts of debauchery is of very small importance to mankind, or even to the persons who are thus restrained, since their forbearance of the utmost excesses is only the effect of their poverty, not of their virtue. ”

“ Amidst such a multitude, composed in a great measure of the low people of all nations, there must of course be much debauchery and low vice. But all the disgusting forms of vice, debauchery and drunkenness, are assorted together in their own place. ”

“ The point, the only point that is, in my opinion, now to be considered, is this: the people of this nation have for some time practised a most pernicious and hateful kind of debauchery; against which several laws have been already made, which experience has shown to be so far without effect, that the disorder has every year increased among them ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What will be the effects of unrestrained and licensed debauchery may be known, without the guilt of so dreadful an experiment, only by observing the present conduct of the people, even while they are hindered from the full enjoyment of their pleasures, by the terrours of a penal law. Whoever shall be so far touched with the interest of the publick, as to extend his inquiries to the lowest classes of the people, will find some diseased, and others vitiated ”

“ As they grow up, they show this degeneration by engaging in all kinds of licentious debauchery, and unnatural and perverted indulgences of appetite. In nine cases out of ten, they will spend the fortunes inherited from their parents in riotous debauchery, and [222] will eventually sink, if death does not overtake them, to the level of their fellow degenerates—those who have been brought into existence by poverty and debauchery, and who await them at the foot of the social ladder. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Oftentimes the direct influences of a person's occupation also make for evil. The messenger [Pg 100] boy, for instance, on the streets at all hours and in all sections, can hardly fail to see and hear much that no parent would want a child of fourteen, sixteen, or eighteen to know. Indeed, a great part of his employment at night comes from those indulging in debauchery, and it is his most profitable source of tips. ”

“ And, indeed, if modesty, and decency, and chastity, and, in one word, temperance, is only upheld by the fear of punishment or infamy, and not out of regard to their own sanctity, then what lengths will adultery and debauchery and lust shrink from proceeding to, if there is a hope either of escaping detection, or of obtaining impunity or licence? ”

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

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ The habitual harsh tone of command towards these men and women, whose labor is extorted from them without remorse, from youth to age, and whose hopeless existence seems to me sadder than suffering itself, affects me with an intolerable sense of impotent pity for them.... Then, too, the disrepute in which honest and honorable labor is held, by being thus practiced only by a degraded class, is most pernicious. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I owe this word mal-employment, in its contrasted use with unemployment, to William Kent, a member of Congress from the city of Chicago. In a recent interview, Mr. Kent gives it as his opinion that the sin of the day is waste—the expenditure of effort for naught or for positive ill. Of course, when we get down to details there is difficulty or even impossibility in deciding whether or not a given man is mal-employed—we may leave out of consideration here all persons engaged in criminal occupations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Crying for it and not getting it, seeking for labour as lost treasure and finding it not, until at last, all spirit and vigour worn out in the weary quest, the once willing worker becomes a broken-down drudge, sodden with wretchedness and despairing of all help in this world or in that which is to come. ”

“ 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 Great Problem of how to provide with suitable occupations those who, though perfectly willing to labor, were by unjust social conditions precluded from earning bread for themselves and those dependent on them, had reached the acute phase where the proverbial worm is said to turn—and it had turned with a vengeance! ”

“ 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. ”

“ In any case, and while that matter is being settled, we might recognise the dilemma into which those are thrust who cannot find work and are destitute.
They must beg or steal, and if they get into the way of doing either they are liable to become less fitted and less inclined for other occupations. ”

“ Constant employment in the field, no doubt, tended to arrest the action of the depraving influences which, in times of ease and luxury, began to relax the sanctions and taint the purity of Bedouin life. ”

“ Labour is considered so degrading, that any argument, based upon making labour compulsory on their part, has its weight. Even the beggar despises work. A sturdy beggar asked alms at a house at which I was lodging. As he appeared to be a man of great physical strength, he was advised to go to work, and thus provide for his wants. “Work!” said he, in disgust; “niggers do the work in this country”—and retired highly insulted. ”

“ Those are the things that make an employer a nervous wreck. He’s got to keep it going. I tell you there’s advantages in being a wage-slave and having the wages coming—”
“But, Mr. Fein, if it’s just as hard on the employers as it is on the employees, then the whole system is bad.” ”

“ Still there are hundreds to supply their places, for the ranks of the unemployed are continually recruited by the victims of dissipation, misfortune, or crime; and so the ball whirls ceaselessly round. ”

“ Vice, too, is increased in those who know that during the incapacity which may follow its exercise the workhouse door is open to them, and that food and shelter are to be had between the intervals of each debauch. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the mass of the labourers are like men feeling their way in the dark; they crave for guidance. As my informant, a young labourer, whose health had been ruined by the abject slavery of his great employers to bad customs of modern society, very touchingly put it, "They want some one to tell them whether their thoughts are right or not." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This fact affects human behavior and happiness profoundly, and the restoration of stimulation to labor is among the most important problems confronting society. The present industrial organization tends also to develop a type of human being as abnormal in its way as the opposite type of individual who gets the full amount of occupational stimulation by taking a line of interest destructive of social order,—the criminal or vagabond. ”

“ Duty-labour calls the days of fair sky and sunshine, and leaves him the gloomy hours of winter, when, with darkness without, and despair within, he may brood, as he digs, over the disproportioned fortunes of his tyrant and himself! ”

“ To those, also, who condemn all forms of mechanical and unproductive labour, it may seem unduly rigorous to have insisted so minutely on the exact performance of a task of so-called first class hard labour. ”