Then came one who was the employé of a publican and grocer. He said:
“I work under a publican and grocer. I’m any man’s man. I stand with my fingers in my mouth at Ratcliff-cross watching, and have done it these last nine years. Half of us is afraid to come and speak to you. When I volunteered, the big-whiskered and fat-faced men (foremen) were looking at me and threatening me for coming to you. No matter, I care for nobody. Worse nor I am I can’t be. No more I can’t. I go to one publican’s to work 60 tons, and for that I get 4s., but 6s. is my rights. The remainder 2s. is left—I’m forced to leave it—for me to drink out on Sunday night. If I was in a fair house the publican would pay me 7s. 6d.; as it is I get 4s. and 2s. must be drunk,—it’s the rule at that house—he’s in opposition and works low. If I was at liberty it wasn’t to his house I’d go for a drink. The hardest-drinking man gets work first, and when a man’s drunk he doesn’t care what stuff he puts into his belly. Before we go to a job the four of us are expected to drink half-a-pint of rum or gin; the publicans expect it. If I was a teetotaler I must pay my whack and the other men may drink it, for the score against the ship is divided among the men equal.
“Suppose two foremen were to meet and have a drop of rum or brandy together, and a little talk about a ship’s ballast, that’s charged to us poor fellows—it’s stuck up to us—but we mustn’t say nothing, though we know we never had a sup of it; but if we say a word it’s all up—no more work.
“Once on a time I worked for a publican close by here, and when I came to the house I had nothing to drink. My oldest mate whispered to me as we were on our way from the London Dock, and told me to speak my mind, for he knew there was a false score chalked against the ship; and the others was afraid to say a word. Well, I did speak when I got into the house, and the foreman was there, and he asked me what business I had to speak more than another? There was 6s. charged to the score for drink that we never touched or ever saw,—not a sup of it. He—that’s the foreman—told me I shouldn’t go to finish the ship; I said I would, in spite of him. I told the missus I expected she wouldn’t give any more drink but what we had ourselves, or would get when we came home; and she said she wouldn’t; and that’s two years ago; but I haven’t had a job from them parties since.
“Suppose I get to the public-house for my money at six in the evening, I am forced to wait there till eleven, until I am drunk very often—drunk from vexation; stopt when I’m hungry after five or six hours’ work on the river, and not let take the money home to my wife and family, nor let have anything to eat, for I’m waiting for that money to get a bit of grub; but when I’m half drunk the hunger goes off just for a time. I must go and drink in a morning if my children go without breakfast, and starve all day till I come home at night. I can get nothing from my employers but drink. If I ask them for a shilling I can’t get it. I’ve finished my load of ballast without breaking my fast but on the beer we’re forced to take with us.
“I’ve found grocers better to work under than publicans,—there’s a great deal more honesty in them. They charge a middling fair price; but they’ll have tow-row out of it,—that’s dry money—so much a score. They’ll stop 6d. a score only for giving us a job. I can get as good sugar as I get of them at 4d. for 3½d.; but then the difference between the grocer and publican is, that the wife and family can have a bit of something to eat under the grocer, but not under the publican. All goes in drink with the publican; but we cannot carry drink home. When I go home drunk from the publican’s, I tumble on the floor, perhaps, and say, ‘Is there anything to eat for me?’ and my old woman says, ‘Where’s the money? give me that and I’ll give you something to eat.’ Then a man gets mad with vexation, and the wife and children runs away from him; they are glad to get away with their lives, they’re knocked about so. It makes a man mad with vexation to see a child hungry,—it kills me; but what the foreman gives me I must take; I dare never say no. If I get nothing—if all is gone in drink—I must go from him with a blithe face to my starving children, or I need never go back to him for another job.”
I shall now set forth as fully as possible the nature of the system by which the ballast-heaver is either forced by the fear of losing all chance of future employment, or induced by the hope of obtaining the preference of work from the publican, his employer, to spend at least one half of his earnings every week in intoxicating drinks. Let me, however, before proceeding directly to the subject of my present communication, again lay before the reader the conclusions which I lately drew from the Metropolitan Police returns for 1848, concerning the intemperance of the labouring classes of London. It is essential that I should first prove the fact, and show its necessary consequences. This done, the public will be more ready to perceive the cause, and to understand that until this and similar social evils are removed, it is worse than idle to talk of “the elevation of the masses,” and most unjust, to use the mildest term, to condemn the working men for sins into which they are positively forced. To preach about the virtues of teetotalism to the poor, and yet to allow a system to continue that compels them to be drunk before they can get work—not to say bread—is surely a mockery. If we would really have the industrious classes sober and temperate men, we must look first, it seems, to their employers. We have already seen that the intemperance of the coal-labourer is the fault of the employer, rather than the man; but we have only to go among the ballast-labourers to find the demoralization of the working man arising, not from any mere passive indifference, but from something like a positive conspiracy on the part of the master.
According to the criminal returns for the metropolis, there were 9197 males and 7264 females, making altogether a total of 16,461 individuals, charged with drunkenness in the year 1848. This makes one in every 110 individuals in London a drunkard—a proportion which, large as it seems, is still less than one-half what it was some ten or fifteen years back.
For the sake of comparison I subjoin, in the following page, a Table, taken from the Government Report on Drunkenness; being a return of the number of charges of drunkenness which have been entered upon the books of the Metropolitan Police in the years 1831, 1832, and 1833, with the number of officers employed in, and the locality of, each division: also the amount of population in each, according to the Parliamentary returns of 1831.