XII. Our National Vice

slays at least 60,000, or, as others believe and affirm, 120,000, every year?

2. Or that lays the seed of a whole harvest of dis eases of the most fatal kind, and renders all other lighter diseases more acute, and perhaps even fatal in the end?

3. Or that causes at the least one-third of all the madness confined in our asylums?

4. Or that prompts, directly or indirectly, seventy-five per cent of all crime?

5. Or that produces an unseen and secret world of all kinds of moral evil, and of personal degradation which no police-court ever knows and no human eye can ever reach?

6. Or that, in the midst of our immense and multiplying wealth, produces not poverty, which is honour able, but pauperism, which is a degradation to a civil ised people?

7. Or that ruins men of every class and condition of life, from the highest to the lowest, men of every degree of culture and of education, of every honourable profession, public officials, military and naval officers and men, railway and household servants; and, what is worse than all, that ruins women of every class, from the most rude to the most refined?

8. Or that, above all other evils, is the most potent cause of destruction to the domestic life of all classes?

9. Or that has already wrecked, and is continually wrecking, the homes of our agricultural and factory workmen?

10. Or that has already been found to paralyse the productiveness of our industries in comparison with other countries, especially the United States?

11. Or, as we are officially informed, renders our commercial seamen less trustworthy on board ship?

12. Or that spreads these accumulating evils throughout the British Empire, and is blighting our fairest colonies?

13. Or that has destroyed, and is destroying, the indigenous races wheresoever the British Empire is in contact with them, so that from the hem of its garment there goes out not the virtue of civilisation and of Christianity, but of degradation and of death?

There is not one point in the above questions which cannot be shown by manifold evidence to meet in one, and one only, of our many vices. Of what one Tice, then, by which we are afflicted can all this be truly said? Is it not the language of soberness to say that if such a vice there be, it is not one vice only, but tho root of all vices? Mr. Gladstone has said, in words which have become a proverb, that the intemperance of the United Kingdom is the source of more evils than war, pestilence, and famine; and to this it must be added that the intemperance that reigns in our nation does not visit us periodically like war, but is year by year in permanent activity; that its havoc is not sporadic but universal; that it is not intermittent but continuous and incessant in its action. It is no rhetoric, therefore, nor exaggeration, nor fanaticism, to affirm that intemperance in intoxicating drink is a vice that stands head and shoulders above all the vices by which we are afflicted; and that, comparing the United King-dora, not only with the wine-growing countries of the-south, which are traditionally sober, but with the* nations of the north, such as Germany and Scandinavia, which are historically hard drinkers, we are pre eminent in this scandal and shame; and that intemperance in intoxicating drink may, in sad and sober truth, be called our national vice.

II. Let us pursue our search a little farther. If all these manifold evils spring from intemperance in intoxicating drink, from what does this pre-eminence of intemperance in intoxicating drink itself arise? Is it an epidemic, or an endemic? or a property of our British blood, or a national inheritance which has become inseparable from our race. No; its prevalence at this moment, and its extension year by year, is trace able to two causes.

As a nation, we were always mighty drinkers of ale, and the Statutes at large have endless ineffectual enact ments to repress the evil. We then began to be strong drinkers of wine, and both ale and wine flowed on in a deepening flood; but the mightiest evil which is now upon us had not as yet arisen. For the last three hundred years alcohol, which till then had been almost confined to scientific experiments and to certain trades, became not only a common drink, but an agent with which both ale and wine were medicated, giving to them new and intenser qualities of intoxication. The wines of Spain and Portugal are not only medicated for their transit, but for the English taste. It is true, indeed, that our national tradition of intemperance is an inheritance of more than a thousand years; and the history of our national shame may be seen summed up in a book called The Discipline of Drink. Evidence is there given how Kings and Parliaments strove to restrain the evil by legislation, and how Bishops and Councils both made and enforced severe penitential canons against the intemperate. For the last three hundred years these canons have had no application, and the legislative enactments have resulted in a system of licensing laws of which it will not be too severe a sentence to say that all their barriers have been overwhelmed and swept away in the swelling flood of intoxicating drink.

It is not to be denied that the vice of intemperance is an heirloom which cleaves to us like the shirt of Nessus.

But these evils might perhaps have been brought by legislative and moral authority within some control were it not for two causes which have lifted it to its fatal pre-eminence. The first cause is the enormous capital of one hundred and thirty or one hundred and forty millions which is annually employed in the supply and sale and distribution of intoxicating drink; and the other, the complicity of Government in raising more than thirty millions of revenue from the same trade.

For the sake of brevity, the capital employed in the Drink trade may be called a monopoly, held in the hands of some hundreds of distillers and wine merchants, some thousands of brewers and publicans, and all these, with their servants, covering the whole country, and numbering altogether nearly half a million of persons.

It is obviously the interest uf these capitalists to drive onward their trade with all possible activity and expansion. The greater the demand the better for them; the greater the supply the greater the multiplication of the places and facilities of sale. They do not intend to make the population of the United Kingdom drunk, but in the prosperity of their trade the facilities of drunkenness are necessarily multiplied, and the increase of drunkenness is inevitable. The statistics of the police in cities and boroughs, and throughout the country, are often quoted to show that intemperance is not upon the increase; but such statistics really prove nothing. They exhibit only what may be called criminal intemperance, that is, drunkenness coupled with contravention of the law. The police are instructed not to interfere with man or woman, however drunk, if they are quiet, and their feet can carry them home. They are charged only to arrest those that are " danger: ously drunk " or " helplessly drunk.'' Such statistics are absolutely valueless in the inquiry we have before us, namely, as to the extent of the moral, personal, domestic, private, and public vice of intemperance. It is enough to call attention to the fact of the steady increase, far exceeding the ratio of the increase in the population, both in the places where intoxicating drink is sold and in the capital which is employed in the trade. In the year 1829 the places of sale were about fifty thousand; they are now nearly two hundred thou sand, that is fourfold, but the population has hardly doubled. Eighteen years ago, that is about the year 1868, the capital employed was estimated at eighty-two millions. In 1880 it was estimated at a hundred and thirty-eight millions. Some years ago, in the time of commercial prosperity and of high wages, the amount was estimated at between a hundred and forty and a hundred and fifty millions. Among all the trades in this country there is only one that always prospers. Every trade at this moment is depressed, but the Drink trade is always increasing; fresh capital is always ready, and the commercial interests of the great capitalists in this monopoly must always prompt them, by all efforts, to take advantage of every opening to increase their profits. On one side are ranged the interests of this monopoly, the capital of which exceeds the capital employed in our great staples of iron, or cotton, or cloth; on the other are ranged the welfare of the people of the United Kingdom, the sobriety of our race, the order and well-being of homes, without which no commonwealth can long endure, for the political order rests upon the social, and the social order rests upon the domestic, life of men. This is a great controversy and a vital issue. It is on its trial before the supreme tribunal of the public opinion and of the popular will of the nation; and for the last thirty years the public opinion and the popular will has been rising and spreading, resolved to try this issue against the powerful and growing Drink trade in behalf of the life and homes of the people.

Much more ought to be said on this first cause of the evils under which we suffer; but it is necessary to pass to the second cause — namely, the complicity of our Government in raising one-third of its revenue from the trade in intoxicating drinks. It is the most prosperous trade, and therefore the most readily taxable. The rich do not complain of it, and the intemperate pay no heed to price. It has also a virtuous aspect, which is, nevertheless, illusory— namely, that by raising the price of drink the facilities of intemperance are diminished. It is certain that the most ascetic Chancellor of the Exchequer will go on resting in confidence on the tax on intoxicating drink. His interest in its prosperity is only second to the interest of the great monopoly. It has been found in India that the taxes on drink and the taxes on opium are the readiest means of relieving the revenue; and the natives have in vain petitioned the Government to withdraw from this complicity, pleading that so long as it is the interest of the Government to raise the revenue by such taxes, the consumption and the sale of intoxicating drink and drugs will always increase. The same, and more profoundly, must be the belief of her Majesty's lieges in the United Kingdom.

III. Unless what has hitherto been said can be refuted, our intemperance is not only the national vice but a national danger. It is precisely in our great industrial cities and centres that the vice of drunkenness is most rife; and it needs little reflection to foresee what would be the condition of those centres if, as some years ago, our great industries were to fail. When men and homes are suffering there is little reasoning. Hunger has no logic, but it has a burning thirst. The safety of the commercial world is being sacrificed to swell the profits of the Drink trade. But the safety of the Commonwealth is above both, and ought to interpose its mandate.

Hitherto the capitalists of the Drink trade and their friends, both political and interested, have swayed the elections, the House of Commons, and the Government. But in proportion as the suffrage has been extended to the people, men who know the needs and desires of the people have been sent to Parliament. The people have long lost confidence in licensing authorities. They wish to protect themselves. The friends and advocates of the Drink trade have posed as the friends of the people. They have assumed to speak in the name of the people, and to plead their cause. We have been told that the people need and wish for public-houses. It is strange, then, that the most popular House of Commons should contain nearly three hundred members pledged to Local Option; and about half of them in favour of a direct local veto. It is surely intolerable that public-houses should be put down in the midst of the homes of our working men without their consent. It is they who suffer. It is they who pay for the evils of drink. It is their homes that are wrecked, their fami lies and children that are ruined. Every motive of justice prescribes that they should be locally and personally consulted, and that they should be able by a free vote to speak for themselves, and to protect their own homes.

Our national vice will never be corrected from above.

Governments, magistrates, and police have laboured, or seemed to labour, for these three hundred years to diminish or to control the spread of intemperance. They are too remote to influence the millions of the people. The coercive power of the police defeats itself. What is wanted is not a mechanical repression, but a dynamical power which can only be found elsewhere. It has never been found in the upper classes of society. They are too far removed from the life of the people to be conscious of the immensity of the evils which exist below their own level in life; or they are directly interested as capitalists, or as possessors of house property; or they are prejudiced by the imprudence and exaggeration of certain persons, and will neither see nor listen; or they are too delicate to touch so vulgar a subject; or they are refined free livers themselves; or they are thoughtless of the wreck of souls; or though never intoxicated they are sometimes not sober; or they belong to the pessimum genus otiosiorum of idlers, triflers, and jokers, who, if they are ever serious, lament the evils of in temperance, and then mischievously obstruct the labours of more earnest men who are striving to save men, women, and children from the havoc of drink. It is a sad truth that, though in our upper classes there is an ardent and faithful minority labouring against our national vice, there is a vast majority, either too deeply interested or too little in earnest, to help those whom, consciously or unconsciously, they are persistently hin dering. It is such as these who were forward some years ago in opposing Sir Wilfrid Lawson, because his Bill, as they said, was only a permissive Bill, and not an Imperial and universally coercive Bill. They well knew that before such an universal coercive Bill could be carried the end of the world would come. And if it had been carried it would have been a dead letter, for nothing could have enforced it short of martial law. Nevertheless, men of this kind were wont to declaim eloquently on the impossibility of making a nation sober by Acts of Parliament, and arguing that sobriety can only be attained by moral means.

We heartily accept this half-truth; and it is precisely because we believe that our national vice can Only be cured by a spontaneous, national, and moral movement, that we affirm that the only adequate power for its cor rection must come not from above, but from below. It is in the people themselves alone, who have been so long beset by the multiplying facilities for intemperance, by the ubiquitous activity of the Drink trade, by the almost irresistible attractions of gin -palaces; it is only in the spontaneous action of the people, rising with their high moral sense in reaction against the system which has so long made their homes desolate and their lives intolerable, that an adequate remedy can be found. We have already seen that in the measure in which the electoral suffrage has been extended, the people have returned to Parliament men pledged for Local Option. A still more luminous proof of this fact may be found in our Colo nies, in which popular self-government exists in its fullest and healthiest form. Already in the Dominion of Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand, the young and popular Legislatures have closed the public-houses on Sunday, and are giving powers of Local Option to the people. It is impossible not to foresee that the example of the Colonies will react upon the mother country. Already Scotland and Ireland have Sunday Closing Acts. In spite of every form of evasion and opposition, the Sunday Closing Act in Wales holds its ground. Yorkshire, Durham, and Cornwall, with a singular unanimity, have forced upon Parliament the Sunday closing movement. For the last six or seven years their Bills have been blocked, talked out, and contemptuously rejected. But this will not be for ever. There is an onward movement in the public opinion and in the moral sense of this country which renders it in evitable that before long the people will obtain from Parliament a local vote in the matter of public-houses, as they already possess it in the matter of education.

Some years ago the Pall Mall Gazette, in treating of the suffrage of women, avowed its belief that, if women could vote, the Permissive Bill would be carried at once. Nothing can be more certain; for as our national vice wrecks the domestic life of the people, it is upon the women of the United Kingdom that the full and fierce misery springing from intemperance falls in its dire intensity.