Stand Up, Ye Dead

by Norman Maclean

CHAPTER V

THE LORD OF THE SLUM

He stood at the corner of a terrace that opens off the steep street that leads from the heart of the high-perched city right down to the sea. With his right hand he gripped the paling, while he swayed gently from side to side. A big, burly, swarthy man with a close-cropped black beard, he sawed the air with his left hand, while he glanced with bleared eyes down the street. From the bottom of the steep a car came lumbering up, and a gleam of intelligence came into his eyes. He let go his hold on the paling, and made for the tram lines. He plainly wanted to board the car, but his feet moved in contrary directions, and on the pavement he described an arc. And he lurched back on the paling, gripping it this time with both hands, while the car with its freight of passengers went clanking past up the steep. There, with helpless limbs, with his head bowed on his breast, he held on to the paling, while the sunlight flooded the firth with molten silver—the product of an ancient civilisation and a thousand years of Christianity. In that remote era which ended in August 1914 we would have passed him there without so much as a feeling of surprise. But to-day we are as a man awakened from heavy slumber, stung by a sudden dart to a new realisation. And we saw not that one solitary man sunk in his sodden degradation, but the multitude which he represents, that multitude whose drunkenness means destruction to their brothers wrestling in the trenches with an unbeaten and ruthless foe. Two years ago the call went ringing through the Empire, and from the far North-West to the long wash of Australasian seas an indomitable race arose to war for the right. Statesmen and preachers summoned them to a holy war, and they came with transfigured eyes. But, alas! a holy war can only be waged by a holy nation. And as the eyes gaze at that figure swaying on the paling, and on the mind there flashes the realisation of what lies behind him, the heart can but cry in deepest awe: May God have mercy upon us!

I

There can come no moral resurrection for any except to those who realise the evil of which they are partakers. It is not in the spirit of Pharisaic censoriousness that we must judge that brawny workman swaying on the paling, and all that he represents. For these men are what we made them. It is the nation in its corporate capacity that shaped and moulded these lives after that pattern. If we had set ourselves expressly to produce this result, we could not have taken a surer way of attaining the end. We drove the people into the congested and foul tenements of narrow streets. Let the well-to-do classes try to realise the conditions of life to which men such as this have been doomed. Let them picture to themselves what life can be like in a one-roomed or two-roomed house in a crowded barracks. Imagine a man and wife with an infant and two or more children, and often a lodger, living in such a house. For them there is no change of air either day or night; their bodies cannot be cleaned nor their clothes washed; they are denied cleanliness in their whole environment; it is impossible to cook appetising food or to serve it in a pleasing manner; there is no escape for them from noise and squalor; they have no privacy either living or dying; and there is always the spectre of want hovering near.[[1]] What recompense has the State provided for them in their misery? What provision has been made that men and women may escape for a little to breathe a purer air and feel that they have part in a life richer than this? The State has not been wholly unmindful of them. It has provided for them the public-house, and, with paternal care, has multiplied these places of recreation and happiness where the mass of human misery is greatest. The State has been lavish in its provision. In the Cowgate of Edinburgh it has provided one public-house for every 200 of the population, though in the leisured and rich districts there is only one licence for every 1300 of the population;[[2]] in the Cowcaddens of Glasgow it has provided at the rate of thirty public-houses to the half-mile. It surrounds the poor and the miserable with an atmosphere reeking with alcohol. The trade in alcohol enfeebles the will, saps the resisting power, and then trades upon that enfeebled will. This is the door of escape from misery which the State provides. Who can blame the people for availing themselves of this national remedy for their woe pressed upon them by the State at every corner? If the drunkenness of masses of the population be a national weakness and a crying scandal, it is not their fault. It is the State that is responsible, and as citizens of the State we have each to bear our share of the responsibility and of the shame. It is no use decrying publicans and brewers, for these are only what we ourselves made them. Let us take ourselves to task and condemn our own folly and our own sin.

It was not enough that we provided the narcotic of drunkenness for the man, but we set ourselves to alleviate also the lot of the woman. There was a pressure of public opinion which prevented respectable women from frequenting public-houses. Provision had to be made for them. This provision was made in the legislation of Mr. Gladstone in 1860 and 1861 whereby grocers were licensed to sell alcohol. It is only fair to say that the purpose of the legislation was not to encourage the consumption of alcohol. In those days people were obsessed with the idea that by multiplying the opportunities for procuring alcohol, its consumption would decrease! The grocer's licence was to safeguard people from the public-house! The result has been the most disastrous of any legislation passed by sane statesmen. It enabled women to obtain alcohol in a respectable manner, sanctioned both by legislation and society, and to use it under conditions of privacy, unhampered by any restraint. The State enormously increased the facilities for drunkenness and strengthened the forces of temptation by the multiplying of tens of thousands of liquor-selling establishments. To these temptations the women in ever-increasing numbers succumbed. When war broke out, and the men mustered to the defence of their country, the women were left the comfort of alcohol. The result was an increase in the drunkenness of women, and a corresponding increase in child mortality.

Who can blame these women? With their husbands and sons summoned to wrestle with death, what wonder that 'feelings of faintness' overtook them, and that for those feelings they resorted to the only unfailing remedy they knew—alcohol! These women live their lives under conditions which make it impossible for them ever to be well. They climb up and down weary stairs endlessly. There is no escape from hopeless toil. The unhealthy conditions of life render them chronic invalids. In the grocer's shop the State provides for them the panacea. Here is exhilaration amid the worries of their drab existence, and escape from the anxieties which oppressed them. And in a little while they are slaves to the national remedy provided for them. Their husbands often come back on leave to find their homes ruined—the larder empty, the fire dying for lack of fuel, the children unkempt and ill-nourished. In many districts the allowances made by the State to the dependants of its fighting men were but a further State-endowment of the publican. It was for this that our soldiers bared their breasts to the foe and looked death in the face. This was the reward of their sacrifice, the guerdon of their wounds. In their absence the State provided for their wives the solace and stay of alcohol; but the State heeded not the fact that by so doing it ruined the home and destroyed the children. If there be condemnation, let the State be condemned; and from that condemnation for us, as its citizens, there can be no escape.

II

When we consider the results of the trade in alcohol, the wonder grows how it is that this State-regulated monopoly for the manufacturing of paupers, lunatics, and criminals has been suffered to continue so long. To it most of the evils which afflict the body-politic can be traced. It nullifies all efforts at social improvement. Philanthropic movements have poured out money like water to improve the condition of the people, but faster than slums can be cleared away or emptied, new slums are created and filled by the victims of alcohol. The funds of Guardians and of Parish Councils are mainly used to support those whom alcohol has impoverished. There is the authority of Mr. John Burns, the late President of the Local Government Board, for the statement that out of 100,000 applicants for poor relief at Wandsworth during a period of twenty years, only twelve were abstainers.... It not only fills our workhouses, it also crowds our jails. According to the late Lord Alverstone nine-tenths of the crime of this country was due to drink.... Insanity finds in it a fruitful source. Twenty per cent. of all the men and ten per cent. of all the women in a London County Council asylum—the Claybury Asylum—have become insane through alcohol.... The social evil is mainly due to alcohol. Under its influence women descend to vice. Half the infections of the social disease are traceable to the weakening of the will power by drink.... Evil though it be in itself, its evil goes far beyond itself, for it is the short-cut to all the other vices.... It is one of the great causes of the decline of the race in thus polluting the springs of life, poisoning and sterilising them; but, far more, it is responsible for an enormous share of the appalling infant mortality which destroys in many districts a fifth of the child life in the first year.... It lowers the vitality and makes the tissues more susceptible to attacks by the germs of disease, and thus greatly increases the deathrate.... It multiplies coffins and empties cradles.... Were this one monopoly abolished and the people delivered from the State-licensed temptations which are for ever inviting them to their ruin, almost all workhouses and jails would be closed and the nation delivered from the burden of pauperism and crime which weighs so heavily upon it. Yet the nation in the time of its greatest peril spends £180,000,000 a year upon the drink-traffic. This is the price which it pays for the lowering of its own vitality and for the weakening of its striking power. A government which connives at that cannot be a government that is waging war really in earnest. Shipping, food, coals, the railways, roads, and a host of men are in great measure sacrificed to a trade which weakens the nation in face of the enemy.

The favourite argument in support of the liquor trade is the argument that upholds the liberty of the subject. In a free country people must be free to destroy themselves if they so wish, that others may be free to use alcohol without abusing it. If we are to aim at freedom, let us have a freedom worth while. At present the nation is not free to control or eliminate the greatest peril in our midst. We are entrusted with the administration of our schools and roads and gas and poor-rates, and we elect men who control these. But we elect nobody who controls alcohol. We have as citizens no say as to whether the grocer in the village will get a licence to corrupt our family life with alcohol, or whether the poor places be crowded with public-houses. That is in the hands of justices, and justices are created by a mysterious power behind politics. In a free country this power of planting down places for the sale of alcohol independently of the will of the people is an anachronism by which the poor are enslaved. When we speak of freedom let us consider this freedom—freedom for the children of the poor to grow up untempted. Let us remember that the race has now to depend mainly upon the poor for its continuation and for its virility. A nation that will doom the rising generation to the atmosphere of gin and whisky round its cradles, seals its own doom. The children brought up in its atmosphere will deem alcohol not only inevitable but also desirable. They will be 'happy in the mire because they are not conscious of the slough.' The true liberty of the subject cannot mean racial destruction.... Recently a woman in a mean street in London went to the public-house with a sick baby in her arms. 'While she was there it died, but she stayed on drinking and holding the dead baby.'[[3]] That dead baby in the arms of its alcoholic mother in a public-house visualises the grim and terrible situation. It is the personification of all the millions of baby lives throttled to death by alcohol—of a race sinking to decay in its grasp.

III

We must not, however, forget that the Government of this country, while the manhood of the race was perishing abroad, were not wholly indifferent to the welfare of childhood at home. When they found that ship-repairing and shipbuilding and the production of munitions were hampered and delayed by drunkenness, they adopted restrictions of various kinds. But in most cases these restrictions were worse than useless. The Government surrendered its powers in the matter of the greatest evil afflicting the nation, to a Board of Control. That authority meant well. It sought to limit the consumption of alcohol by limiting the hours of its sale. This Board forgot that a man can in five minutes buy enough whisky to keep him comfortably alcoholic for five months. To shut the public-house for certain hours meant for many the laying in of a store of whisky when formerly a few nips sufficed. But no regulations made by man since the day of the Bourbons equalled in sheer fatuity the decree that a man who wanted a gill of whisky could not get it unless he bought a quart? With a wage that passed his rosiest dreams, to secure the gill he of course bought the quart. No wonder the consumption of alcohol increased to £181,959,000 in 1915, as compared to £164,453,000 in 1914. This was the fruit of a policy which aimed at producing sobriety.

But there are some good results claimed by the Board of Control. The number of convictions for drunkenness decreased! But what was the price paid for this improvement in our streets? It was the greater corruption of the home. The drinking was driven out of the public-house into the house; the drunkard no longer offended the public gaze in the street, he carried his vice and degradation into the bosom of his family. Formerly his drunkenness was limited by certain hours; now his drunkenness was continuous while his store lasted. And he took care it lasted. If the streets were partially cleansed, the children were impregnated as never before by the atmosphere of alcohol, and the women were taught to share in the drunken orgy. To-day the claim is made that, at last, the consumption of alcohol is on the decline. When four millions of men are with the colours, fighting across the seas, it would be indeed marvellous if there was not a decline in the sale of alcohol at home!

IV

If some of the steps taken by the Central Control Board cannot commend themselves to temperance reformers, there have been other policies initiated by them which are undoubtedly in the right direction. The prohibition of the sale of ardent spirits within certain areas has inaugurated a new and beneficial national policy. The time may not be yet come for a total prohibition of alcohol throughout the country. Those who know anything of the intolerable conditions under which men and women live in the crowded, noisome tenements of our great cities, realise that these people must have some way of escape from their miserable environment. Total prohibition is the ideal to be kept steadily in view, but before that ideal can be realised the people must be prepared for it. The only way to prepare for the ideal is by a reconstruction of the social order. New and sanitary housing for the poor must precede the policy of total prohibition. But the time is fully ripe for a prohibition of ardent spirits during the war and during the period of demobilisation. And it is on this policy that the Board have launched forth. In the district of Annan and in wide stretches of the north of Scotland the sale of spirits is now prohibited. In a recent visit paid to the Hebrides, I found among the people a spirit of thankfulness that they have at last been delivered from a great evil. Drunkenness has vanished among them. A new era of prosperity has been inaugurated.

This policy, which has been made effective in the places where it has been put in force, ought to be at once applied generally. It is grotesque to endeavour to promote sobriety in patches, shut in by geographical boundaries. It has not been applied in the places which need it most. In the common lodging-houses and farmed-out houses of the Grassmarket and West Port of Edinburgh there were found, by a recent census, a population of 1383 persons of whom 518 were engaged in war-work, It is futile to expect that these workers, living in an atmosphere reeking with alcohol, can render the State the best service they are capable of. And to these places come, every week-end, workers from the naval base and soldiers on leave. And these workers and these soldiers pass their brief holiday in that alcoholic atmosphere. The result can only be deleterious to them and to the State.

There are more sailors and soldiers to be found in the poor places of Edinburgh and Glasgow than in all the villages of the West of Scotland put together. Why should the few be protected from the sale of ardent spirits and the many left to be victims of temptation? There is only one remedy—the general application to the country of that policy which is now restricted to favoured areas. There must be equal treatment for the whole country and an equal chance given to all who are serving the State.

The time to make that policy effective is now. While the nation is in the midst of the great conflict for its existence, the people will gladly welcome any restrictions which will strengthen the State in its hour of need. The heart of the nation is prepared for sacrifice. But when the danger is passed, the mood will change. It will not be so easy then to make drastic changes in the habits of the people. And the time when restrictions will be most necessary will be when the army is demobilised. If restrictions are not imposed now, it will be impossible to impose them then.

There is a growing feeling that the quickest road to the desired end may be found in the nationalisation of the liquor trade. Many would shrink from this policy if they thought that the State would become a permanent species of glorified publican. But the end in view is the transformation of the liquor trade. Only the State can achieve that. The State, with full control, can make the public-houses centres of recreation, with the temptation of spirits removed. And the way will be clear for mending or ending, as experience will prove which is the better policy. The true reformer will care far more for the reform than for the means by which it is to be achieved. If the reform can best be realised through State-ownership, then the sooner it comes the better.

If the remedy for the evils wrought by drunkenness does not, and cannot, lie along the road of supplying more facilities for the sale of alcohol, we must at the same time never forget that the craving for alcohol is a craving for a fuller life—for life lit up by colour and social joy. Those who meet that hunger for a richer life with nothing but a dreary 'don't,' with no remedy save that of the surgical operation, expose themselves to jibes such as that bitter jibe of Lord Macaulay: 'The Puritans objected to bear-baiting not because of cruelty to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.' The aim of the social reformer must be the substitution of true joy and happiness for what is spurious. The State must make provision for the social instincts of the masses. 'What are wanted,' writes Sir Thomas P. Whittaker, a member of the Royal Commission on Licensing, 'are places of the nature of free clubs, where men may sit and smoke and talk and play games or read the papers. They should be open to the public free, with small charges for the use of cards and the billiard-tables.... People should be made to feel as much at their ease in them as they are in our public parks. The cost of maintaining such places would not be great, and the social, material, and moral advantages that would result would render them an excellent investment....' It is along this road deliverance must be sought. There is no use sweeping out the house unless the house is to be occupied by fairer and more wholesome tenants than those expelled.

V

There is one last serious aspect of this problem wherewith the spiritual forces of the nation are faced, and that is the weakening of the nation's soul which the new policy has entailed. Whosoever considers the manner in which religion has lost its grip on the masses, the passing away of all discipline, the decay of idealism, and the slow but steady emptying of the churches, cannot but feel that the greatest need of to-day is a revival of religion. Unless the soul controls the body, man atrophies and perishes. The Church for many centuries has striven to garrison the nation's soul, and to bring the body under discipline. But the Church no longer can bring its power into play, for the churches are left deserted more or less. The proportion of the industrial population who never enter a church's door is vastly greater than is commonly supposed. Professor Cairns, a careful and judicious observer, who would make no statement that could not be verified, has declared that three out of five soldiers at the front have had no connection with the Church. The toilers of our cities are rapidly relapsing into that paganism out of which Christianity rescued the world at the first. What the world needs is God. It is only when the face of God is unveiled to the awe-filled eyes of men that they can realise the foulness of moral degradation. In the light of that holiness which marshals all the forces in the universe to war against sin, and in that light alone, does the soul realise the awfulness of sin. When that realisation comes, then the history of the world becomes mainly the history of sin—that dread power which saps the vitality of nations, disintegrates empires, ruins civilisations, and which brings upon proud capital cities the flaming judgment of sword and fire. The function of the prophet is to keep clear before the eyes of men the moral issues which are laden with life or death. The mission of the Church is to replace the spurious and fleeting joys of sin by the true and enduring joy of a life in unison with God.

But the State renders the Church impotent and makes the revival of religion in our day impossible. That may seem exaggerated, but it is true. For the State has driven alcohol into the homes, and has consigned not only the husband, but often the wife also, to the degrading influence of alcohol not only on Saturday but on Sunday. In vain does the call to return to God sound in the ears of a population sunk in the torpor of alcohol. No prophet can rouse such a people. 'If a man, walking in a spirit of falsehood, do lie, saying, "I will prophesy unto thee of wine and of strong drink, he shall even be the prophet of this people."'[[4]] The Church is powerless against thirty public-houses to the half-mile! Alcohol bars the door against every movement for the social and spiritual uplift of the nation. If the nation is to be saved, the nation must act. Arise, O Israel!

We must look at our population in a new light and see them not as makers of munitions but as sons of God. The horribly cynical attitude of our rulers is that which regards men merely as munition-makers. They survey them only from the low ground of self-interest. It is not in relation to the peril of the hour that this problem has to be faced, but in relation to man's high calling as the son of God. These men and women are our brothers and sisters, bearing the image of God, and created to be heirs of an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled. Can we go on working their ruin, damning them body and soul? A race that will not cleanse the fountains of its national life, that will not remove from its midst the forces of degeneration, that shrinks from that moral surgery which will alone save the body-politic—such a race cannot hope to go on swaying the destinies of the world. But this is our confidence, that through the horrors of war the nation will waken to the deep issues of life and death, and that the forces of moral and social renewal will advance a hundred years in one day. We can hear the marshalling of the forces in our midst which will transform and enrich the nation. There is arising the cry of the coming victory:

'The King shall follow Christ, and we the King.'

[[1]] In the Record, the official organ of the United Free Church of Scotland, there appeared in the August number, 1916, a letter written by a 'Special Constable' which gives a terrible word-picture of a slum family:

'Let me give a personal experience of one of the multitude of family tragedies directly due to drink which come under my notice. A family of eight persons—four of them adults—occupied a single room in a slum area.

'The eldest son, aged twenty-one years, was in the last stage of consumption, and occupied the only bed in the room. On visiting the house one morning, I found the lad lying on the floor, in a corner. He had required to vacate the bed for his mother, and during the night there had been born into these surroundings another of those immortal souls who, in the words of Kingsley, "are damned from their birth."

'The following day the mother was sitting at the fireside, and was never back in bed till the son died some days later. It is hardly necessary to add that the mother, the infant, and another girl followed him at short intervals. On the day of the mother's funeral the husband got drunk and had to be locked up—the twentieth-century method of remedying evils of this kind.'

[[2]] The distribution of licences in our cities is a crying evil. The following are examples of the provision made in the wards of Edinburgh:—

Number of Population to
Ward. Population. Licences. each Licence
Morningside 24,320 18 1351
Merchiston 24,436 21 1163
St. Giles' 24,277 118 205
St. Andrew's 11,166 87 128

In proportion to the poverty and misery of the population are the licences increased. In the Cowgate of Edinburgh there are 12 licences, and in the Canongate, 19. The same proportion applies to all our cities.

[[3]] The Drink Problem of To-day, p. 182.

[[4]] Micah ii. 11.