The Distracted Preacher (16 page)

If, then, it is equally inexpedient to throw the liquor trade entirely open and to prohibit it, we are shut up to the policy of restriction or regulation. The rationale of this policy we take to be, that the trade has within certain limits a public use, and therefore a right to existence; but that, as it is very apt to overpass these limits, and in so doing to become a nuisance, every precaution must be taken to keep it within them. The objections to the present method of securing this end are many and weighty. The magistrates who grant the licences rarely act upon any fixed principle, and the assumed standard of the requirements of the population varies from district to district. The exercise of their authority is peculiarly liable to be suspected of yielding to influence and intrigue, and in some cases at least is actually determined by these ignoble forces. But the great evil—that which lies at the foundation of the present difficulty in dealing with the subject—is the practical perpetuity of the licence. It is of no use to point out that in form it is only granted for one year, and that it is given to the person and not to the house. A system of transfer has grown up, converting a licence into a valuable property which, under the transparent veil of ‘good-will,' is openly bought and sold. This transfer is so much a matter of course—it is so perfectly understood that a licence will not be forfeited except under very exceptional circumstances of offence—that one man of straw is boldly put up to succeed another in the management of a productive but disreputable business; and the personal responsibility to the law, which it is the very object of the licence to secure, is systematically evaded. But, in truth, a very large part of the present legislation, in regard to the regulation of the drink traffic, is a mere dead letter. Whether, as it stands, it needs to be more rigidly administered, or requires amendment in the direction of severity, is a question which we leave to those who are better acquainted with the state of the law than ourselves. But, to take only one fact, out of many that might be adduced, it is a disgrace to our civilization that in all our large towns public houses which are the known haunts of thieves and prostitutes, and which are reported as such in municipal police statistics, should be permitted to exist, and to carry on their gainful and disgraceful traffic with almost complete impunity.

But, in truth, the system of licences is surrounded with immense practical difficulties. For its effect is to create a lucrative monopoly. It is well understood in London and Liverpool and Manchester, that no trade is so profitable as this. It requires little or no capital beyond what is requisite for the purchase of the good-will; the brewer and the wine-merchant are accustomed—taking, of course, their own precautions—to give ample credit. A publican needs no education, not even any manual skill; but only a somewhat callous conscience, a not very tender heart, and a power of abstaining from his own drink: with these qualifications, pecuniary success is rapid and certain. But this is not all, nor the worst. Behind the keeper of the beer-house or the gin-palace, who is often a mere agent, stands a capitalist who has discovered that this trade can be profitably worked on the large scale; who pulls indeed all the strings, but whom the law never sees and never touches; who has large investments in house property, in plant, in breweries, in importation of spirits, and contrives to make them all cooperate in the production of an enormous revenue. Does one of his managers—the landlord of the house, in the eye of the law and of the public—draw down upon himself the animadversion of the police? He is replaced by another, to whom the licence is transferred, and all goes on merrily as before. The real publican may sit on the bench of magistrates, to administer ‘40s and costs' to the poor wretches on whose drunkenness he has grown rich; and when the licensing day comes round, retire gracefully in favour of friends and associates in whose hands his interests are safe. Beer is so potent a persuasive at municipal elections, that he finds the access to town councils, with its result of direct power and indirect influence, not difficult. There is a well-known brewing interest in the House of Commons itself, which commands votes and has the ear of Ministries; much more is there in every constituency a large phalanx of publicans, able to put strong pressure on the lowest stratum of voters, resolute in the defence of their own interests,and now led, more or less openly, by men of a larger knowledge of the world and a subtler policy than themselves. And the sum of the whole is, that here is an enormous vested interest in the immorality and degradation of the people, which withstands eager reformers and timid statesmen alike in their efforts to remove this great evil, and declares that not a step shall be taken in the direction of better things without an enormous compensation to itself.

This, then, is the great difficulty in the way of restriction, that by diminishing the number of licences you make each one of them more valuable, and concentrate, if you do not absolutely increase, the force of the vested interest which is arrayed against reform. And it lies with those who would take this step to propose some concurrent measure which shall prevent the monopoly (if monopoly there must be) from remaining in one hand, and shall divert a part of its profits to the public exchequer.

This is not the place to sketch the outline of a Licensing Bill, nor are we disposed to accept the responsibility of so doing. It will be sufficient if we have indicated some of the difficulties which attend upon any of ‘the short and easy methods' of dealing with this problem. But at least we may state our opinion that a new licensing authority, commanding greater public confidence and proceeding upon more definite principles than the present, is urgently needed, and that the ratepayers are entitled to a voice either in its election or in the revision of its action; and in the next place, that all licences should be strictly personal, issued for only one year, and not capable of transfer. Whether it would be possible to lay such a tax upon this trade, as at once to make it less attractive to capital and a large contributory to the public revenue, we leave to abler politicians to decide; it is enough to notice here that at Gothenburg this has been accomplished. Shorter hours of business, and on Sundays an almost entire closing, with the prohibition of any drinking upon the premises, are matters upon which all reformers are agreed. And in order that legislation should not end in good intentions, a much more efficient inspection than any which now exists must be made of all licensed houses, and the law put in force with impartial strictness.

But will restriction in any shape diminish drunkenness? That it will to a certain extent, is admitted, we think, by that very large class of persons who are in favour of shorter hours. It cannot be necessary, they say, that public-houses should be open before a reasonable hour in the morning; and it is proved that a large percentage of drunkenness occurs in the last hour or two of trade at night. But what is the difference in principle between compelling the existing houses to trade for a shorter time and lessening their number? If one plan is efficient in diminishing drunkenness, why not the other? It is unreasonable to talk as if all drunkards belonged to the incorrigible class, as if no man ever got drunk who was not also a dipsomaniac. Many a poor fellow, very ready to fall and yet very willing to stand if he could, finds himself overpowered by the ubiquity of the temptation; he cannot get out of sight or hearing of it; occasion is always ready to inflame and gratify desire; no part of his daily path but offers this stumbling-block to his feet. This multiplication of more drinking-houses in our great cities is certainly the product of moral corruption, but not less certainly a perpetually corrupting agency: drinking habits make drinking-houses, and in return drinking-houses make drinking habits. No one can be more profoundly convinced than we are that legislation cannot do everything for the repression of this national vice ; but it is an extreme of opinion, in our view even more pernicious, to believe that it can do nothing.

At the same time we must confess that we have watched with regret so large a part of the zeal and strength of the old Temperance movement diverted from the work of reforming drunkards one by one, of spreading sobriety little by little, towards the production of a change in legislation which we believe to be unattainable, and which, if attained, would not produce the result desired. There are no royal or legislative roads to moral reform; nothing is so deceptive, because so full of apparent promise, as a ‘shortcut' to great changes in the habits of a nation. All that the collective wisdom of a people, as expressed in law, can do in regard to vices which cannot be treated as crimes, is to take away any unnecessary and overpowering temptation to their commission; so to modify circumstance as to make it clear that the responsibility for them rests upon the individual conscience; to give a fair chance of virtue to a coming generation. But at the same time it must be remembered that any attempt to protect men from sin by surrounding them with a hedge of prohibitions,—to take private morals, as it were, into the keeping of the State,—necessarily recoils upon itself. It is no triumph of legislation to have converted vice into crime. External protection is not the same thing as inward strength, and very often does not even tend to produce it. And therefore when legislation has done all that it can, we shall still have to fall back, for the result which we desire, upon the operation of indirect causes which are slowly raising the level of popular life, and upon that gradual progress of good from heart to heart which is the sure, though slowly working, method of Christianity. The old Teetotallers were, after all, more upon the right track than their successors of the United Kingdom Alliance; and even if the latter were to succeed in the attainment of their end (which we do not believe), the characteristic work of the former will still have to be done.

In a very singular passage of those “Speeches on the Liquor Traffic,” the title of which we have placed at the head of this article—a passage which betrays a complete ignorance of the fundamental moral relations of this question,—Mr. Trevelyan tells his hearers that education will not remove the evil of drunkenness, that emigration will not remove it, that religion will not remove it; but that the victory which these and all other indirect agencies are powerless to win, will be gained by legislative prohibition. Could any one have uttered so strange a statement, unless, in the concentration of his attention upon the sale of drink, he had altogether missed the deeper and more practical question—why men drink? The physical propensity to drinking inherited through many generations; the drinking habits of the people, fastened upon working men both by the usages and the corruptions of their trade; the absence of any counteracting force in the public opinion of their class; the unhealthy conditions of their life; homes dull, squalid, comfortless; the restrictions put upon rational amusement by Sabbatarian prejudice; the incapability of higher recreation after monotonous toil, of empty minds and untrained intellectual powers ; all these forces, subtly combined in various proportions, drive men to the publichouse. If the public-houses were all shut up, the predisposing causes to drunkenness would hardly be lessened, and would certainly, in some way or other, continue to produce their effect. And therefore it is that we can only have recourse to those slowly-working remedial agencies which Mr. Trevelyan dismisses with such easy scorn—education and religion. It is perfectly true that a lull and active mind is not an absolute specific against this particular form of base self-indulgence, and that the annals of literature need not be very deeply searched to find drunken scholars and jovial poets. But no one can deny that in proportion, as the working classes have their minds widened from the inevitable narrowness of their daily work and their domestic lot, to a more just conception of the possibilities of life, they will cease to acquiesce contentedly in much that now weighs them down; and that with better dwellings, shorter hours of labour, larger knowledge, freer access to nature and to books, the gaudy splendour of the bar-parlour and the crude satisfaction of a physical craving, will no longer furnish their sole ideal of enjoyment. The only way of effectually weaning men from coarse pleasures is to implant in them the possibility of finer ones. No mind is so open to the access of brutal physical temptation as one that in its narrowness and emptiness is little raised above the brutes.

And when education has in part accomplished its work, there will be better hope for religion. But it will have to be a religion, not of outworn dogmas, but of living truths; making its direct appeal to mind and conscience; not at war with the intellectual tendencies of the age, but ready to shew how they and it converge towards the one final goal of the reality of things ; a religion which goes upon the supposition that self-control is strength, and goodness the secret of happiness, and manliness essentially natural to man, and salvation a matter of to-day, and the kingdom of God, the reign of love and justice, here, no less than hereafter. Such forces as these rarely win rapid and conspicuous victories, except in those seasons of moral and spiritual excitement which recur but once in a thousand years; they are but the leaven hidden in the meal; they move slowly from heart to heart—here making a rough life a little sweeter, and there winning a strong will to the side of purity. But we cannot change or hasten God's methods; and only disappointment and shame can be the result of setting up for ourselves a new law of social progress. Even yet we are but slowly shaking off our barbarism: let us be content if, as the ages pass, the brute is gradually fading out of the man.

Article by John Charles Bucknill from the February, 1877 issue
of
The Contemporary Review

“Who shall be the Rectors of our daily Rioting? and what shall be done to inhibit the multitudes that frequent those houses where drunkenness is sold and harboured?” are questions put by Milton in his “Areopagitica,” which have since so greatly swollen in magnitude that they can no longer be answered in his manner, nor the encouragement of sobriety be left as he would have it, “without particular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour of every grown man.” The growth of this “national corruption” has been so great since his time that only despair of amendment could seat us on the stool of inaction with folded hands, acknowledging with him that “these things will be and must be;” or if this be so, we are compelled to feel that, how these things “shall be least hurtful, how least enticing, herein consists the grave and governing wisdom of a State.” It is strange that Milton should have drawn so much of his argument for the liberty of unlicensed printing from the supposed liberty of unlicensed drunkenness, seeing that the only law against drunkenness, pure and simple, which we still have, has been on the statute-book from the reign of James I. This statute, which imposes a fine of five shillings, neither more nor less, upon a drunken person, does certainly constitute the act of becoming drunk, however privately or quietly it may be done, into an offence against the law of the land. But notwithstanding the existence and the occasional application of this old statute, most modern writers on the philosophy of legislation have maintained that private drunkenness ought not to be the subject of legal repression. No one has written more forcibly on this point than Bentham himself, who in his “Principles of Morals and Legislation” declares that the primary mischief of drunkenness is “private and self-regarding,” and that its secondary mischief of example will not often amount to a danger worthy of notice.

“With what degree of success,” he asks, “would a legislator go about to extirpate drunkenness and fornication by dint of legal punishment? Not all the tortures which ingenuity could invent would compass it; and before he had made any progress worth regarding, such a mass of evil would be produced by the punishment as would exceed a thousandfold the utmost possible mischief of the offence. The great difficulty would be in the procuring evidence, an object which could not be attempted with any probability of success, without spreading dismay through every family, tearing the bonds of sympathy asunder, and rooting out the influence of all the social motives. All he can do, then, against offences of this nature with any prospect of advantage in the way of direct legislation, is to subject them, in cases of notoriety, to a slight censure, so as thereby to cover them with a slight shade of artificial disrepute.”

In his “Essay on Liberty,” John Stuart Mill argues this point still more keenly and thoroughly, upon the principle that “no person ought to be punished simply for being drunk;” and he very clearly indicates the conditions and complications which might render punishment for drunkenness justifiable, such as the neglect of public duty, the inability to pay debts or to support and educate a family, and the act of “ making himself drunk in a person whom drunkenness excites to do harm to others.”

Milton, Bentham, and Mill, then, agree in this, that simple drunkenness ought to be subjected not to the political but to the social sanction, and that “all the legislator can hope to do is to increase the efficacy of private ethics.” This to a great extent has been done among the cultured classes by the growth of the sentiment that intemperance is dishonouring and shameful, and among the masses it is being done by the steady increase and influence in this country of temperance societies, which already number three millions of members, affording a large, practical and promising answer to Mill's demand for a supplement to the unavoidable imperfections of law, if not in the form of a “powerful police,” against this vice, at least in that of a watchful, pervading, and persuasive opinion.

If “no person ought to be punished simply for being drunk,” the persistent demand which we hear for a new law under which men may be subjected to long periods of imprisonment because they are in the habit of doing that which ought not to be made an offence is only intelligible on the supposition that the repetition of the vice constitutes a disease. This indeed is the real justification for the proposed enactment which the Parliamentary Committee on Habitual Drunkards of 1872 put forward in their Report. They say: “Occasional drunkenness may, and very frequently does, become confirmed and habitual, and soon passes into the condition of a
disease
uncontrollable by the individual, unless indeed some extraneous influence, either punitive or curative, is brought into play.”

This proposition, however, that confirmed and habitual drunkenness
passes into
the condition of a disease, is a much more limited and cautious one than that which is propounded by the professional advocates of what are called by the euphonious name of Inebriate Asylums. With them habitual drunkenness is itself a disease, caused in some curious physico-metaphysical manner, by what they call paralysis of the will, and manifested by supposed want of control over the conduct. This opinion was frankly expressed in the paper read by Dr. Bodington before the last annual meeting of the British Medical Association, and it is to be found pretty generally announced in the abundant medical literature on the subject. Dr. Bodington says: “The confusion between drunkenness as a
disease
and drunkenness as a
vice
must be cleared up. For my part I look upon all habitual drunkenness as a disease, and I would boldly call it all
dipsomania.
It is in its character as a disease that we as physicians are entitled to deal with it I would sink the notion of its being a mere vicious propensity. When fully developed there are not two kinds of habitual drunkenness. The cases are one and all cases of
dipsomania,
of irresistible, uncontrollable,
morbid impulse
to drink stimulants.”

A still more remarkable instance of the extreme position which has been taken on this question has been afforded in the proceedings of the American Association for the
Cure
of Inebriates. At the first meeting of this Association a declaration was issued in which the dogma was solemnly propounded that “intemperance is a disease,” and various papers were subsequently read by Dr. Parrish the president, and others, to explain and maintain this prime article of faith. At the fifth meeting of the Association, Dr. R. P. Harris, the physician to the Franklin
Reformatory
for Inebriates at Philadelphia, was bold or incautious enough to present a report, in which were certain expressions more in conformity with the name of his Institution than with the Creed of his associates. “He regarded drunkenness as a habit, sin, or crime, and did not speak of cases being
cured,
as in a hospital, but
reformed”
The Association denounced this heresy on the ground that the truth of intemperance being a disease was the base of their organization, failing which their very name would be “a fraud upon the community;” and their Publication Committee was instructed “to return the report to its author, with a request that it be modified so as to conform with the Declaration of the Association, with power to publish such parts of it as they may deem proper.” The Committee published the
revised report
entire. America is not quite “The land where, girt by friends or foes, a man may speak the thing he will.”

The majority there has a power of excommunication much more active than any which pope or priest ever possessed, and he who questions the dogma of disease among doctors must be liable to the penalty. A dogma put at the head of a declaration too! Why one might almost as well question that great dogma with which the constitution itself commences, “Forasmuch as all men are equal!” It is unfortunately a fact that if you write an assertion of this kind in very large letters, it is often accepted by the world without doubt or question, until belief in it becomes habitual and uncontrollable, and according to those marks a kind of disease; so that belief in the morbid nature of intemperance may itself become morbid, if its passionate, inveterate, and uncontrollable nature is equally admitted as the true characteristic of this condition.

Before making any attempt to examine the real nature of habitual intemperance in drink, it will be fair and right to mention, for the purpose of exception, those instances in which drink has produced common bodily disease, and those in which disease has been the occasion of the drunkenness. Cases of the first kind, in which the mental faculties are not involved, are perhaps the heaviest portion of the curse which strong drink lays upon us; but they do not and cannot enter into this argument.

But that strong drink does often cause disease of the nervous system, with disturbance of its mental functions, and also that such diseases of the mind, arising from other causes, do also give rise to the passion for drink, are facts which can admit of no doubt. Every medical man is more or less conversant with them, and medical men who have made mental diseases a special study are well able to recognise them. The history of such cases, their heredity, periodicity, the intermixture of their mental symptoms with other nervous disorders and defects, the peculiarities of the mental symptoms themselves in certain forms of emotional disturbance and of intellectual aberration and decay, are very well known to physicians who have made madness their study. The number of such cases, enormously exaggerated as they often are, is yet large enough in lunatic asylums and in private practice to afford abundance of experience as to the marks of all those conditions which can truly be called insane drunkenness, or drunken insanity; and they may well be left to the observation and treatment of the specialist physicians who understand them.

There is, however, another class of cases, fortunately a very small one, but of extreme- difficulty to understand. Perhaps also it is fortunate that ignorance of their nature does not seem much to matter, since the physicians who have met with them pronounce them to be absolutely incurable. I refer to those cases for which the learned terms
oinomania
and
dipsomania
were originally invented before the latter term was filched from science to designate vulgar drunkenness. In a somewhat large experience, I have myself never yet met with an undoubted instance of pure
dipsomania;
and I observe that very few examples are on record in medical literature, and that these are copied by one author from another in a manner which sufficiently testifies their rarity. The evidence, however, of credible observers is perhaps sufficient to establish the fact of their occasional occurrence. Dipsomania is described as a form of moral insanity manifesting itself in a passion for strong drink, not for its own sake, or for the sensations which it produces, but for the gratification of a morbid impulse. As the kleptomaniac steals not for the sake of possessing the thing he steals, and the homicidal maniac destroys life not for the purpose of making any person cease to live, so the dipsomaniac drinks, not because he likes drink, or likes to get drunk, but because he has an uncontrollable and morbid impulse to swallow intoxicating liquor. To constitute a pure case of dipsomania all other manifestations of unsoundness of mind ought to be eliminated, for if they exist the case is simply one of insanity with one prominent symptom. All other marks of a vicious disposition ought also to be absent, for if they exist, the dipsomaniac is simply a drunkard able to make superfine excuses. To be up to the pattern, he ought to be thoroughly sane and eminently virtuous. For my own part, I suspect that he deviates from the pattern sometimes in the warp and sometimes in the woof, and sometimes in both. However, I am ready to discuss him whenever he appears again, like the great bustard in Norfolk, and I only mention him here in order that he may not suffer the indignity of being mixed up in an argument about vulgar drunkards who are as common among us as sparrows in the hedgerows.

We come then, by process of exclusion, to simple habitual drunkenness, apart from any other symptom of mental disease than the passionate and irrational indulgence of a noxious habit. Is this a disease or a vice, and ought we to direct our efforts to its cure or to its reform? To many people the answer will be very simple, seeing that they will consider disease as a condition of the material, and vice as an affection of the immaterial element of our nature; but such is not my view, and I shall endeavour to consider both terms of the question by the same physiological method. And here it is needful to premise that as there is no such thing as a disease in itself, so there is no such thing as a vice in itself. Doctors have fallen into the habit of realizing and classifying diseases as if they were all composed of various
materies morbi
and were actual things ; nay, sometimes, they almost personify them as in the old trope of “the pestilence which walketh in darkness,” and moralists have done quite as much for vice. But the idea of a disease, be it ever so specific, can only be a mental creation generalizing diseased bodies, and of a vice the same, generalizing vicious beings. Reality ever attaches to the individual; and here let it attach, say to John Jones, and the question be whether said John Jones, being often drunk, is diseased or vicious?

I think it must be admitted that when said John Jones is actually drunk his organism is in a state of disease,
pro tanto,
as the same must be admitted of him when he has eaten more than he can easily digest, or when he is exhausted by debauchery, or actually suffering disturbance of healthy function from any other sensual excess; for any condition of the organism by which its healthy functions are disturbed, and which, if indefinitely prolonged and increased, would tend to their suspension and even to death, must be called a diseased condition.