VI
Current passivity has, however, a reverse side. To many persons a recognition of the changing conditions brings demoralization or despair. All are not won by the lure of “success.” To an increasing number the dangling prize in the distance is but a mirage, and oppressed by a sense of the bankruptcy of life they seek an oblivious relief. There is a drift toward the twin dissipations of drink and gambling, and there is an increase of suicide. The greater drink consumption is a matter of common observation, and it is amply attested by statistics. Mr. J. Holt Schooling’s figures in a recent issue of the Fortnightly Review show an increased consumption in the United States of 20 per cent for the years 1896-1900, as against the years 1886-90. The percentage of increase is slightly less than that of those industrially exploited nations, Germany and France, but considerably more than that of Great Britain and Ireland. The annual figures published in the World Almanac for 1902 give more pertinent lessons. The unsettled and troublous year, 1893, witnessed an enormous increase in drink consumption; but the succeeding hard times of 1894 and 1895, when drink-money was increasingly hard to obtain, induced a greater sobriety. With 1896 drinking became more general, or at least more energetic; and except for a slight falling off in 1899, the consumption of liquors and wines has risen steadily, reaching the enormous total of 1,349,176,033 gallons in 1900. Much of this gain is confined to beer, the cheapest of alcoholic beverages; but there has also been a phenomenal increase in the consumption of spirits. From 71,051,877 gallons consumed in 1896 there has been a steady annual rise to the total of 97,248,382 gallons in 1900, a gain of 36.8 per cent.
The recent increase of petty gambling is still more noticeable. Playing for high stakes, a custom common enough in the late years of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth, has long been given over or transferred to the domain of “business.” But what is colloquially known as “tin-horn” gambling has advanced, these last five years, by leaps and bounds. Doubtless the high precedent of our national Monte Carlos, the stock exchanges, is ample cause for much of it; but other causes are also in operation. With those persons that hearken to, but heed not, the seigniorial exhortation to bestir themselves and conquer “success,” petty gambling is an expression of unbelief. They know that the prizes advertised in the great industrial game are not to be won; they see nothing ahead but a dull routine of poorly remunerated labor, and they turn to gambling partly for recreation and partly for profit. With those, on the other hand, who not only hearken but heed, gambling is merely the application of their ambitious plans to the branch of industry which promises, however vainly, the most immediate returns.
Faro, keno, and roulette may have suffered some decline in favor. If so, statutes and the police, instead of a growing aversion to gambling, must be held responsible. It is one of those conventional puzzles which none can explain, that it is possible in our cities to restrict table and wheel gambling, but seemingly impossible to restrict certain other forms. Poker, for instance, maintains its hold, unawed by statute and unhampered by authority; while policy and race-betting, the special refuges of the desperately poor and the desperately fatuous, win new and lasting converts day by day. Indeed, the growth of race-betting is one of the striking phenomena of our time. It has become a habit, a disease; and its confirmed victims are held in as slavish a thraldom as are the victims of opium and hasheesh. One need not penetrate to a pool-room or journey to a race-track to discover evidences of its general diffusion. He may hear of it on every side, and he may find definitive proof in the daily journals. In nearly all of these the space given to the reports of races, the lists of betting odds and accounts of great winnings, is generous; and in some three or four of the metropolitan dailies the subject rises to the rank of a specialty. The flaunting advertisements of the “tipsters” in one of these newspapers rival in extent of space used and opulence of bargains offered, the announcements of the dry-goods merchants. The glittering lures dangled before the multitude by the seigniors seem trivial by comparison. Uncertain, and at best remote, they prove no match for the near-at-hand prizes to be won in gambling; and as a consequence tens of thousands pin their hope of “success” in this world to a series of fortunate winnings.
The meaning of the increase of suicide is clouded by a number of factors, and it is impossible to ascribe the tendency to one cause alone. Were we to accept the explanation of the pulpit, we should see in it the awful consequences of the decline of faith. Pathologists, however, while not denying this influence, enumerate many others. Racial and temperamental factors, drink and vice, are all concerned in the matter, and even climates and seasons are influential. But whatever the effect of these may be, the intensifying struggle for life these last few years, and what appears to many minds a darkening outlook for the future, must be acknowledged as powerful agents in increasing the rate of self-destruction. The rate is highest in the great industrial centres, where the struggle is fiercest, where the richest stakes are won and lost, where luxury is most flaunting and poverty most galling; and it is least where the struggle is in some measure relaxed. The recent census shows for the decade an increased rate per 100,000 of population from 8.8 to 9.9 in the States where registration of deaths is required, from 11 to 12.7 in registration cities, and from 10.3 to 11.8 for the entire registration record. There are a few anomalies in the figures which are difficult of explanation; the workaday cities of Fall River and Allegheny have low rates of suicide, the residence city of Los Angeles a high rate, while San Francisco reveals the abnormal rate of 49 per 100,000. With all allowances, however, the rule holds good: the more distinctly industrial and commercial cities have remarkably high rates, the less distinctly industrial and commercial cities remarkably low rates. In the first group are Chicago, with a rate of 21.8; Milwaukee, 21; St. Louis, 19.1; Boston, 14.4; Cincinnati, 13.5; New York, 13.1; Philadelphia, 12.2; Baltimore, 12; Pittsburg, 9.3. In the second group may be instanced Atlanta, with a rate of 6.6; Denver, 6; Albany, 3.2; Hartford, 1.3; Richmond, 1.2. These suicides are the unfit, say the complacent philosophers of the day, and are quite as well off dead as alive; but they prove at least that some slight qualification is needed to Professor Sumner’s optimistic generalization that “an air of contentment and enthusiastic cheerfulness ... characterizes our society.” The winners in the race are doubtless enthusiastically cheerful, and the great mass that keeps steadily on, fed by the delusion of ultimate “success,” are at least cheerful without enthusiasm; but back of these are the losers and the many who have seen the hollowness of the world’s promise, whose outlook upon life is one of intensifying despair.