V. Regulation of Hours of Sale.—All the liquor-licensing States and Territories regulate the hours of opening and closing drinking places. They all agree in closing them during the small hours (that is, from midnight or one o'clock A. M. until about sunrise or an hour after). It is difficult to all what effect for good or ill these statutes can have upon either the decrease of drunkenness or the increase of revenue. Doubtless they are convenient for the public force of cities or the constabulary of the smaller towns, so that they may know when to be prepared for possible breaking of the public peace. But in no State, so far as we can discover, are they applied to Sunday, the day when, in large cities especially, and in the heated season, the inconvenience of hermetically closed ale and beer houses is most exasperating to the wayfarer, and intolerable and even (from a sanitary standpoint) dangerous to the wage-earning and poorer classes, packed in torrid and fetid tenements on the figment of a danger of "disturbing a public worship" (I say "figment" because no instance of a disturbance of public worship by the sale of liquor can be found in the history of this planet). Why in torrid weather the worthy poor man and his family who can not afford ice-boxes can not quench a natural and normal thirst, and so avoid contracting disease by drinking stale and impure water in the superheated apartments of city tenement houses where an average of three families to a window pane has been said to be the rule, I for one have never been able to comprehend. A good Sunday law, as in London, not allowing but compelling the opening of beer houses on certain hours on Sundays, would be a most desirable thing, especially in our great cities. The fact, too, that at present the streets of our American cities are woefully lacking in other sanitary conveniences, which are only supplied meagerly by an occasional drinking place, would appear an additional reason why a Sunday-opening law would be quite as convenient and quite as welcome as a Sunday-closing law. Such a law would have the effect of at least meeting public convenience, and might well be substituted for the present ridiculous closing laws. Into what legislative intellect it ever first entered to conceive that the cause of temperance would be assisted by closing liquor saloons seven hours out of the twenty-four (and those seven the hours when all Nature, drunk or sober, is asleep) it passes imagination to conjecture. Most Legislatures have followed the first one, however, and enacted such provisions.
VI. Refusal of Employment to Persons known to be Habitual Users of Liquor.—In two States—viz., New York and Ohio—clauses have been introduced forbidding the employment by railways and other common carriers of passengers, of persons known to be addicted to the use of intoxicants. In the latter State the common carrier must be notified that such person has been known to be intoxicated while in said carrier's "active" employment, in order to bind the carrier with knowledge. Such a provision as this may be criticised as the Czar of Russia's proposition for a universal disarmament is likely to be criticised—as admirable and millennial, but of no value if gradually adopted, and impossible of instant adoption. No public industry, not even the liquor industry, could cease and disappear in a day without throwing tens of thousands of wage-earners out of employment, and it would be hardship indeed if the family of the drinking man, the toiling wife, scheming to save a morsel of the weekly wages from the dram shop, should be forced to accept the alternative of no wages at all. The suggestion presents, again, a maze of presumption from which, once entered into, no practical exit would present itself. Supposing that no skilled laborer, no finisher, no engineer, no oiler, no fireman, etc., could be found who was a total abstainer for any one factory or railway service, let alone a hundred or a hundred thousand cases? Clearly this discussion could only be pursued as a curiosity (or, say, a fascinating speculation as to the effects of an industrial chaos). The first item in the recipe for making hare stew was to catch your hare. To run our commerce with totally abstaining employees we must find our totally abstaining employees. To pause to create them would bring commerce, and with it society, including the churches, the schools, and the Temperance Unions themselves, to a standstill like that of Joshua's moon in Ajalon! In connection with this employment question, however, a practical suggestion has been made. It is suggested that, as Saturday night is the workman's "night off" and the ensuing Sunday is his holiday, it might work well to make the weekly pay-day of a Monday instead of a Saturday. The experiment is worth a trial. The change could be made abruptly, and the bad half an hour to the workman would occur but once. Let him be handed his wages some Monday morning when the Saturday night's spree and the long Sunday's headache had been novel and conspicuous omissions. The necessity of good shape for Tuesday's stint would prevent a Monday night at the bar room, and the probability is that the wife and family might realize a substantial instead of a marginal proportion of the weekly wage. At any rate, compared with some of the suggestions made for remedying the drink evil, this is superbly sensible. Indeed, one who has not had occasion to examine these matters can have little idea of the absurdity to which otherwise perfectly sane persons will go in combating an evil with which they are very properly impressed, but to the consequences of an abrupt removal of which it has not occurred to them to pay any attention whatever; for example, the seriously proposed law against "treating"—that is, against inviting a friend to "take a drink" with him. Granted that the tippling habit is encouraged by the social instinct, and that the great peril of drunkenness comes (as an old New England farmer expressed it) "not from drinkin', but from drinkin' agin," a law to prevent treating, like a law forbidding a man from inviting his neighbor home to dinner, or his wife inviting the other man's wife over to luncheon, would be obliged to first find its lawgiver. But gentlemen who solve the liquor question are not apt to be particular to find a jurisdiction and a source for the laws they propose. It is interesting to note that in one State (Nevada) an anti-treating law was once actually passed, but repealed, "having proved impracticable" (at least, that is the official record of the reason for its repeal, no particulars being given).
VII. The Personal Damage Law.—that is, the holding of a seller of liquor to a person known to be dangerous when in drink responsible for damage caused by his intoxication. This principle has now become ingrafted in the laws of seventeen of the United States, sometimes coupled with high license and local option and sometimes not. It is really only an application of the principle of the common law that a man must so use his own as not to injure his neighbor; that communities had the same right to hold a supplier of intoxicants to a violent drinker as a criminal as it had to punish the keeper of a dangerous beast (of a biting dog, for example, knowing it to be such—i. e., if the animal has once bitten a human being or killed a domestic animal kept for revenue, as a cow or a sheep). This civil damage law has been made statutory in many ways. In Ohio the seller is held indefinitely for the "expenses of any one who takes charge of the intoxicated person" after notice to the seller not to sell to that person. In Michigan the damages may be exemplary. In Vermont, if the drunkard is imprisoned the seller must pay two dollars per day to his wife or minor children in addition to suffering an imprisonment. In New Hampshire and Nebraska, and in several other States, a person arrested for drunkenness is given his liberty if he will disclose the name of the person who sold him the liquor on which he became intoxicated. In most of the other States (as in New York) the damages are not limited except by the facts of such case. In New York, too, the preliminary notice is insisted on. In other States (as Idaho) the seller's damage is the loss of his license, if notice not to sell has been properly served upon him. In Arkansas the liquor seller as a condition of his license must give a bond to pay all damages awarded. In Nebraska the seller must give a bond to support all widows and orphans, and pay all legal expenses of prosecution as well as all damage resulting from any intoxication induced by or traceable to his sales.
VIII. Encourage the Use of Light Wines and Beers.—The suggestion has often been made that this would undoubtedly solve at one swoop a respectable proportion of the problem. The practical difficulty would be to institute the reform in any but the cities and larger towns. Everybody has remarked that, to see the true and distinguished squalor of drunkenness, one must seek the villages, sparsely settled communities, the rural districts whence come the "come-ons," the willing victims of the green-goods men, anxious to cheat their Government (and so, one might say, at least a shade less estimable than the sharper who only proposes to cheat a fellow-citizen). It seems to me that the reason for this difference lies distinctly in the fact that the countryman, who will gratify his appetite for drink, has no choice but the concoction of ardent spirits, high wines, or whatever it is which the local publican sets before him. To him the word "wine" suggests a luxury beyond his venture or his purse. And so for the price at which, in a large city, he could obtain half a bottle, or even a bottle, of wholesome red wine, the consumption of which at a settling would do no possible harm, he throws into his stomach a glass of biting poison, and, horrible to relate, another and another; whereas the whole bottle, or at least the half bottle, probably shared with a neighbor, would have satisfied his craving without ruining his digestion or stealing away his brains. This clause of our discussion runs largely into our IX. But meanwhile here are some figures which may startle prohibitionists as completely as did the figures given in these pages four years ago, which went to prove that habitual drunkards lived longer than total abstainers. (These figures have been strenuously denied in declamation and denouncement. I have yet to learn that any attempt has been made by industry in collection of counter-figures to demonstrate their fallacy.[4]) But here are certain other figures: It appears by the official report of Dr. Nagle to the Health Department of the city of New York for the first thirty-one weeks of the year 1893 (the city then prior to the consolidation or to the present "Raines" law) that in the community (as it then was of 1,765,645 inhabitants) out of 29,080 deaths only twenty-nine were directly traceable to the use of liquor. And this in a community where 10,749 liquor saloons were in operation from sunrise to midnight daily, not to mention the use of wines and liquors in hundreds of hotels and clubs and of wines and malt liquors on tens of thousands of private tables. These figures are startling, and read quite as extravagantly as those quite to the reverse conclusion with which the prohibitionists are wont to appall us. But they are from the official sources, and, unlike the awful figures which show a larger mortality from the use of liquor alone than the mortality from all known causes (liquor included), can be verified by taking the trouble to consult the files of the (New York) City Record. As for the part which drinking wine has to do with this official summary, I may mention the difficulty of approximating to the sales of what may be properly called "light wines." But I have been able to ascertain (as some indication of it, perhaps) that in the fifty-two weeks of this same year (1893) there were consumed in the same city 265,414 cases of champagne! So it would appear that even champagne is a mitigant, rather than an aggravator, of at least the public horrors of drunkenness.
I am not unconscious of the fluent answer to these figures. It will be of course urged by the prohibitionist that they only show deaths the "direct" cause of dram-drinking. But such answer is correspondingly unsafe. For, since death, albeit normal to us all comes from some cause (notably from old age, for example), a better formula would be that, since many deaths are caused by old age, and as old age is caused by living too long, we should be careful not to live too long. Hence, as life is prolonged by eating, as well as shortened by drinking (granting that contention), to abstain from the use of food is the only course of wisdom!
This encouragement to the drinking of light wines has, so far, only positively found its way into the statute-books of the one essentially wine-growing State, California, though in other States it has made its limited appearance. Nor does there seem to be any reason why every State should not include in its laws such a provision, for example, as that of Oregon (certainly not known as per se a "wine-growing State" at present), which provides that "owners of vineyards may sell their products without license"; or of Utah, which, however, adds to a similar provision that the sale must be in quantities not less than five gallons. Even Kansas provides that wine or cider, grown by the maker for his own use or to be sold for communion purposes, is not within the prohibitions. However, as in most of the States, the price of a license to sell only wines, or wines and beers, is less than the price of a license to sell ardent spirits, it may fairly be said that an encouragement to drinking wines in preference to distilled liquors has become parcel of the public policy in most communities. In Georgia the sellers of wines who are also manufacturers thereof are exempted from paying any license. The State of Michigan is justly proud of its Dairy and Food Commission, which provides for the examination and secures the purity not only of fruits, butter, milk, cheese, but of buckwheat flour, jellies, canned goods, lard, vinegar, coffee, sirups and molasses, chocolate, cocoanuts, baking powder, flavoring extracts, mustard, and other spices. And this same law (elsewhere considered as to adulteration of liquors) seems to encourage light wines by a distinct provision that "the blending of liquors will be permitted if spirits or other ingredients are not added." In Rhode Island, if manufactured from fruit or grain grown in the State, no license is required for the manufacture of cider, wine, or malt liquors; and (with a thrift not uncharacteristic) alcohol, while subject to a heavy license for home consumption, may be produced for exportation without any license at all.
IX. Remove all Duties, Taxes, Imposts, or Burdens of any Sort on Food Products, Serials, or Meats, in order that the food supply may be unfailing everywhere.
Ten years ago the Hon. Edwin Reed, of Boston, Massachusetts, published a pamphlet[5] in which he had the courage to say that, if a man were well fed, liquor could have no terrors for him. "Take care of the eating and the drinking will take care of itself." Repeal all laws that in any degree and on any pretext tend to enhance the market prices, was Mr. Reed's thesis, and he nailed it boldly to the Massachusetts State-House door! Mr. Reed proceeded with figures to remind us that the countries where drunkenness existed to the most alarming degrees were those countries where the masses of the people eat the least, see meat perhaps once or twice a year, and perhaps never; where the year's labor barely suffices to pay the year's taxes!—in Italy, Russia, or Sweden, and parts of Germany, for example, where life is a struggle for bread enough to keep life in the body. The figures Mr. Reed gives are too appalling for an Anglo-Saxon to read calmly. "If Russia," says Mr. Reed, "could reduce her infant mortality to that of Great Britain she would save annually a million of lives. Half the Russian mothers can not nurse their children. The whip and spur of poverty drives them to labor in the fields, where they follow the plow three days after confinement, and where the death rate is forty-eight per thousand.... In France many a factory hand lives on a slice of sour bread for a meal, over which he is fortunate if he can rub an onion to give it flavor.... In Italy, where taxes are imposed to twenty-five per cent of the laborer's income, the average length of life is twenty-seven years, and the whole kingdom is mortgaged to an average of seventeen per cent." In Würtemberg Mr. Reed assures us that "in this garden of Germany the peasant lives on black bread and potatoes with meat only once a year." And even in England Mr. Reed (quoting his authority) declares that the collier breakfasts on bread soaked in hot water and flavored with onion, dines on bread and hard cheese, with sour, thin cider, and sups on potatoes or cabbage greased with a bit of bacon rind. And precisely the identical testimony, varying only the staples of starvation, comes from Switzerland, Poland, and other countries. Now, all this requires something, and that something usually takes the form of something alcoholic. Poor Edgar Allan Poe produced his fascinating prose and marvelous poetry on dinners of herbs, and the well-fed, fat, greasy Honey-thunders and Podsnaps recognize the crime, not in the fact that such a man was left to eat such dinners, but that he took a glass of whisky to keep the life in his poor unnourished body while he wrote. Therefore Mr. Reed would make food as plentiful as Nature has enabled man to make it. In other words, a condition of unfedness requires the human system to crave alcoholic stimulants, and what the human system craves it must find, since the craving becomes functional, and impossible to disregard, malgre laws, systems, or statutes whatsoever. Even the children in Switzerland, says Dr. Schuler (quoted by Mr. Reed), are fed whisky between meals in order to sustain their tiny lives, the low regimen of whose mothers has given them the frailest possible hold on life to live at all. Mr. Reed believes also that, on public grounds, other effort for amelioration should be made by the State, such as shorter hours of labor, two holidays a week, etc. But as to these we will not follow him here. He makes his point, however, and his pamphlet is worth the consideration of philanthropists. It can not be denied that, with the exception of the shorter hours for labor and the general tendency to increase the number of holidays ("Labor Day," Arbor Day, Memorial Day, Lincoln Day, etc.), much of Mr. Reed's theories have got into our statute-books. And the general tendency to ameliorate the condition of the laborer, which is everywhere apparent in the United States, may fairly be alluded to here as among statutory efforts to the universal betterment.
[To be concluded.]