“The greatest city is that which has the greatest men and women. If it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the world.”—Walt Whitman.
As I put aside my pen in this my appeal for the Wandering Citizen, I see on my study table many letters, filled with questions. The following are the most frequently asked:
“Is not drink the principal cause of destitution?”
“Is the American police system brutal toward the homeless out-of-work man?”
“What of the impostor at the Municipal Emergency Home?”
Drink is not the primal cause of poverty. The first and all-important cause is industrial conditions. But the traffic in alcohol is the most powerful ally of our plutocratic industrial system—in perpetuating poverty.
Despondent men drink for relief from self-consciousness, starving men for stimulation, while circumstances, fate, or the vicissitudes of life prompt many to resort to drink.
The man who works ten hours a day on a meager midday lunch of bread and cheese, must drink to beat out the day, and when the day is done, do you wonder that he seeks a stimulant? The comfortable, well-to-do, honest middle class drink but little, and if at all, very moderately. The world’s main consumers of alcohol are—the very poor for forgetfulness, the idle rich for pleasure. Broken hearts are found both in the palace and hovel.
The saloon, that dissolvent of self-respect, character and chastity, mocking the intelligence of every community, leaving its trace and putting a brand of shame upon this our boasted enlightened era, we may not believe in as an institution. And yet, this same saloon is a refuge meaning as much to the wandering, homeless wage-earner, as did, in the old days, the shelter of the good monks to the storm-lost wanderer of the Alps, and until each city is honorable enough to give to the homeless poor man something in place of the saloon, it certainly ought not to be mean enough to take from him that agent of life-saving sustenance. One of the most brilliant newspaper writers that I met in my crusade told me that while down-and-out in Portland, Oregon, he lived for one week on what he snatched from the free lunch counter. In many places they have forced from the saloon the free lunch, the rest chairs, the tables and papers. They demand that they close at midnight or earlier, and all day Sunday. Take notice, where they are doing this, they are not opening their churches very fast as a substitute, and even if they did, there is very little to sustain life in a plaster-of-paris image or a stained-glass window.
The saloon, with its shelter, its warmth, and its free lunch, saving the life of the half-clad perishing man, holds a very strong argument for its existence. If the mayor of a city has not the power to create and provide clean, wholesome, public benefits for the wage-earner in time of need (who has a civic right), we should certainly demand that the saloon keeper be forced to serve free lunch, and keep his door open three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, and twenty-four hours every day, for it is a degree more respectable to sleep in a saloon than in a jail. The first saloon keeper to throw a man out, should be the first to be thrown out of business. Keep the saloons until every city is honorable and humane enough in its strife for civic beauty to create public privileges, adequate Municipal Emergency Homes, public drinking fountains and comfort stations. Then, with a clear conscience, we may legislate the enormous profit off of the impure concoctions, and when this is done, the dragon will have been given at least one effectual blow.