CHAPTER VI

THE VICIOUS.

There are many vices and seven deadly sins. But of late years many of the seven have contrived to pass themselves off as virtues. Avarice, for instance; and Pride, when re-baptised thrift and selfrespect, have become the guardian angels of Christian civilisation; and as for Envy, it is the corner-stone upon which much of our competitive system is founded. There are still two vices which are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to remain undisguised, not even concealing from themselves the fact that they are vices and not virtues. One is drunkenness; the other fornication. The viciousness of these vices is so little disguised, even from those who habitually practise them, that there will be a protest against merely describing one of them by the right Biblical name. Why not say prostitution? For this reason: prostitution is a word applied to only one half of the vice, and that the most pitiable. Fornication hits both sinners alike. Prostitution applies only to the woman.

When, however, we cease to regard this vice from the point of view of morality and religion, and look at it solely as a factor in the social problem, the word prostitution is less objectionable. For the social burden of this vice is borne almost entirely by women. The male sinner does not, by the mere fact of his sin, find himself in a worse position in obtaining employment, in finding a home, or even in securing a wife. His wrong-doing only hits him in his purse, or, perhaps, in his health. His incontinence, excepting so far as it relates to the woman whose degradation it necessitates, does not add to the number of those for whom society has to provide. It is an immense addition to the infamy of this vice in man that its consequences have to be borne almost exclusively by woman.

The difficulty of dealing with drunkards and harlots is almost insurmountable. Were it not that I utterly repudiate as a funda

"NOT BORN BUT DAMNED INTO THE WORLD." 47

mental denial of the essential principle of the Chstian religion the popular pseudo-scientific doctrine that any man or woman is past saving by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, I would sometimes be disposed to despair when contemplating these victims of the Devil. The doctrine of Heredity and the suggestion of Irresponsibility come perilously near re-establishing, on scientific bases, the awful dogma of Reprobation which has cast so terrible a shadow over the Christian Church. For thousands upon thousands of these poor wretches are, as Bishop South truly said, "not so much born into this world as damned into it." The bastard of a harlot, born in a brothel, suckled on gin, and familiar from earliest infancy with all the bestialities of debauch, violated before she is twelve, and driven out into the streets by her mother a year or two later, what chance is there for such a girl in this world-I say nothing about the next? Yet such a case is not exceptional. There are many such differing in detail, but in essentials the same. And with boys it is almost as bad. There are thousands who were begotten when both parents were besotted with drink, whose mothers saturated themselves with alcohol every day of their pregnancy, who may be said to have sucked in a taste for strong drink with their mothers' milk, and who were surrounded from childhood with opportunities and incitements to drink. How can we marvel that the constitution thus disposed to intemperance finds the stimulus of drink indispensable? Even if they make a stand against it, the increasing pressure of exhaustion and of scanty food drives them back to the cup. Of these poor wretches, born slaves of the bottle, predestined to drunkenness from their mother's womb, there are who can say how many? Yet they are all men; all with what the Russian peasants call "a spark of God" in them, which can never be wholly obscured and destroyed while life exists, and if any social scheme is to be comprehensive and practical it must deal with these men. It must provide for the drunkard and the harlot as it provides for the improvident and the out-of-work. But who is sufficient for these things?

I will take the question of the drunkard, for the drink difficulty lies at the root of everything. Nine-tenths of our poverty, squalor, vice, and crime spring from this poisonous tap-root. Many of our social evils, which overshadow the land like so many upas trees, would dwindle away and die if they were not constantly watered with strong drink. There is universal agreement on that point; in fact, the

agreement as to the evils of intemperance is almost as universal as the conviction that politicians will do nothing practical to interfere with them. In Ireland, Mr. Justice Fitzgerald says that intemperance leads to nineteen-twentieths of the crime in that country, but no one proposes a Coercion Act to deal with that evil. In England, the judges all say the same thing. Of course it is a mistake to assume that a murder, for instance, would never be committed by sober men, because murderers in most cases prime themselves for their deadly work by a glass of Dutch courage. But the facility of securing a reinforcement of passion undoubtedly tends to render always dangerous, and sometimes irresistible, the temptation to violate the laws of God and man.

Mere lectures against the evil habit are, however, of no avail. We have to recognise, that the gin-palace, like many other evils, although a poisonous, is still a natural outgrowth of our social conditions. The tap-room in many cases is the poor man's only parlour. Many a man takes to beer, not from the love of beer, but from a natural craving for the light, warmth, company, and comfort which is thrown in along with the beer, and which he cannot get excepting by buying beer. Reformers will never get rid of the drink shop until they can outbid it in the subsidiary attractions which it offers to its customers. Then, again, let us never forget that the temptation to drink is strongest when want is sharpest and misery the most acute. A well-fed man is not driven to drink by the craving that torments the hungry; and the comfortable do not crave for the boon of forgetfulness. Gin is the only Lethe of the miserable. The foul and poisoned air of the dens in which thousands live predisposes to a longing for stimulant. Fresh air, with its oxygen and its ozone, being lacking, a man supplies the want with spirit. After a time the longing for drink becomes a mania. Life seems as insupportable without alcohol as without food. It is a disease often inherited, always developed by indulgence, but as clearly a disease as ophthalmia or stone.

All this should predispose us to charity and sympathy. While recognising that the primary responsibility must always rest upon the individual, we may fairly insist that society, which, by its habits, its customs, and its laws, has greased the slope down which these poor creatures slide to perdition, shall seriously take in hand their salvation.

How many are there who are, more or less, under the dominion of strong drink? Statistics abound, but they seldom tell us what

WANTED, A CENSUS OF DRUNKARDS.

49

we want to know. We know how many public-houses there are in the land, and how many arrests for drunkenness the police make in a year; but beyond that we know little. Everyone knows that for one man who is arrested for drunkenness there are at least tenand often twenty--who go home intoxicated. In London, for instance, there are 14,000 drink shops, and every year 20,000 persons are arrested for drunkenness. But who can for a moment believe that there are only 20,000, more or less, habitual drunkards in London? By habitual drunkard I do not mean one who is always drunk, but one who is so much under the dominion of the evil habit that he cannot be depended upon not to get drunk whenever the opportunity offers.

In the United Kingdom there are 190,000 public-houses, and every year there are 200,000 arrests for drunkenness. Of course, several of these arrests refer to the same person, who is locked up again and again. Were this not so, if we allowed six drunkards to each house as an average, or five habitual drunkards for one arrested for drunkenness, we should arrive at a total of a million adults who are more or less prisoners of the publican-as a matter of fact, Isaac Hoyle gives I in 12 of the adult population. This may be an excessive estimate, but, if we take half of a million, we shall not be accused of exaggeration. Of these some are in the last stage of confirmed dipsomania; others are but over the verge; but the procession tends ever downwards.

The loss which the maintenance of this huge standing army of a half of a million of men who are more or less always besotted men whose intemperance impairs their working power, consumes their earnings, and renders their homes wretched, has long been a familiar theme of the platform. But what can be done for them? Total abstinence is no doubt admirable, but how are you to get them to be totally abstinent? When a man is drowning in mid-ocean the one thing that is needful, no doubt, is that he should plant his feet firmly on terra firma. But how is he to get there? It is just what he cannot do. And so it is with the drunkards. If they are to be rescued there must be something more done for them than at present is attempted, unless, of course, we decide definitely to allow the iron laws of nature to work themselves out in their destruction. In that case it might be more merciful to facilitate the slow workings of natural law. There is no need of establishing a lethal chamber for drunkards like that into which the lost dogs of London are

D

driven, to die in peaceful sleep under the influence of carbonic oxide. The State would only need to go a little further than it goes at present in the way of supplying poison to the community. If, in addition to planting a flaming gin palace at each corner, free to all who enter, it were to supply free gin to all who have attained a certain recognised standard of inebriety, delirium tremens would soon reduce our drunken population to manageable proportions. I can imagine a cynical millionaire of the scientific philanthropic school making a clearance of all the drunkards in a district by the simple expedient of an unlimited allowance of alcohol. But that for us is out of the question. The problem of what to do with our half of a million drunkards remains to be solved, and few more difficult questions confront the social reformer.

The question of the harlots is, however, quite as insoluble by the ordinary methods. For these unfortunates no one who looks below the surface can fail to have the deepest sympathy. Some there are, no doubt, perhaps many, who-whether from inherited passion or from evil education-have deliberately embarked upon a life of vice, but with the majority it is not so. Even those who deliberately and of free choice adopt the profession of a prostitute, do so under the stress of temptations which few moralists seem to realise. Terrible as the fact is, there is no doubt it is a fact that there is no industrial career in which for a short time a beautiful girl can make as much money with as little trouble as the profession of a courtesan. The case recently tried at the Lewes assizes, in which the wife of an officer in the army admitted that while living as a kept mistress she had received as much as £4,000 a year, was no doubt very exceptional. Even the most successful adventuresses seldom make the income of a Cabinet Minister. But take women in professions and in businesses all round, and the number of young women who have received £500 in one year for the sale of their person is larger than the number of women of all ages who make a similar sum by honest industry. It is only the very few who draw these gilded prizes, and they only do it for a very short time. But it is the few prizes in every profession which allure the multitude, who think little of the many blanks. And speaking broadly, vice offers to every good-looking girl during the first bloom of her youth and beauty more money than she can earn by labour in any field of industry open to her sex. The penalty exacted afterwards is disease, degradation and death, but these things at first are hidden from her sight.