The Distracted Preacher

by Thomas Hardy

  Last year I visited the United States, and found that the condition and position of inebriate asylums there had undergone a great change since Mr. Dalrymple’s visit in 1871. First I will mention changes of public notoriety. The State Inebriate Asylum at Media had been suppressed because it was said to be a failure. The New York Inebriate Asylum in Ward’s Island had been ordered to be suppressed for the same reason. At Binghampton Dr. Dodge had left, and Dr. Congdon was carrying on his work with no better success. The Government at Albany had consented to give the institution a trial for one more year, after which time, unless it redeemed its character, the building was to be devoted to other purposes. In consequence of the failure in the States, the Government of Upper Canada had converted the building they had erected for an inebriate asylum into a lunatic asylum, and they had repealed the statute for the control of inebriates.

  The New York statute has not been repealed, but it has been decided in the Supreme Court that it is unconstitutional, and it is therefore now never acted upon. The ground of this decision was that an intemperate American is a citizen not only of his own State, but of the United States, and that the State has no right to deprive a citizen of the United States of his liberty for conduct which is not criminal. In America the law is strained to permit drunkards who are not insane to be sent to asylums. In Maryland they are classified in a ward apart, and Dr. Conrad, the superintendent of the State Hospital there, said in a public discussion at which I was present —

  “We have one hall [ward] devoted to inebriates or dipsomaniacs. The experience which I have had in the hospital has been confined to a class known as dipsomaniacs. Many have been coming to the hospital for several years, scarcely making an endeavour to withhold from drinking three days. / do not know of a single case where a cure has been affected by confinement.”

  My own impressions of the inebriate asylums of America—and I visited six of them—are most unfavourable. I believe the treatment of habitual drunkards for the cure of their supposed disease to be unsound from top to bottom and everywhere. I make no exception; for the only institution in which I did find good, honest, earnest work being done was the inebriate Reformatory at Philadelphia, in the management of which the idea of curing a disease is steadfastly put on one side. All honour is due to the devoted men and women who labour in this place at the regeneration of their fallen fellow-citizens. But elsewhere I saw and heard nothing to show that any earnest effort was being made to change the habits of the inmates, or that the so-called institutions were anything more or better than boarding-houses within the walls of which the open consumption of strong drink was discountenanced; “capital places to pick up in after adebauch,” as more than one inmate told me; “but good for nothing else.” All the inmates whom I questioned admitted that without the slightest difficulty they could obtain what drink they liked during their daily walks, and with still greater freedom some of them ridiculed the supposed restraints of other institutions through which they had previously passed. It was not one of the labours of Hercules even to have a private store of drink within the asylum. The physician to a neighbouring hospital told me that on the occasion of some private theatricals at the inebriate asylum for the city of New York, he visited four of the inmates in their own rooms, and each one of them was able to offer him the choice of spirits out of his own cupboard. In fact, these American inebriate asylums seemed in some way to be part of the great whisky fraud.

  At Binghampton especially, which I visited in company with Dr. John Gray of Utica, and Dr. Burr, one of the governors, the utter hollowness,or rather the total absence of any attempt at discipline and treatment was most obvious. One young man I did find shut up in a small room in the basement, and I was told that he had been there for ten days for repeated acts of drunkenness and for abusing the doctor. His friends refused to remove him, and the doctor hesitated to turn him out of doors penniless. But the other inmates, whom I found an educated, intelligent set of men, spoke very freely of the absence of all restraint. I was also told that the conversation and behaviour of the inmates, most of whom had led dissolute lives, was far more amusing than edifying. On the whole I came to the conclusion, that if Binghampton does cure 34 per cent. of habitual drunkards, the air of the place must be remarkably salubrious.

  I heard also some account of those domestic mischiefs which Bentham anticipated in the passage I have quoted; of intemperate husbands who had been robbed of liberty that their wives might enjoy licence, and of other abuses which the evil passions of men and women are sure to suggest, with such a facile instrument as lettres de cachet for an imputed vice, for they referred to the time when committals were in force. On going through these institutions my mind was strongly moved with the inward question—How am I to know that these people are habitual drunkards or drunkards at all? In a lunatic asylum I can pick out any sane man who is wrongfully detained, but these men differ in nothing from myself except that they are said to be more prone to yield to a certain temptation. If compulsory detention be permitted, will it not often be used most wrongfully? for no one can distinguish the right from the wrong persons to whom it may be applied. But even if these places had been as successful as they have been the opposite, what sufficient precedent could they afford for a grave change in our law? They are occupied by a small number of inmates drawn from the well-to-do classes of society, of whom Mr. Dalrymple says, “The thing which struck me very forcibly was the exceeding luxury of the better class of patients but then they pay £10 week.”

  Probably all the inebriate asylums of the United States do not contain 250 inmates, a very small datum to draw heavy conclusions from. We have larger material than that in the inebriate asylums of our own country, from which we might, if we took the trouble, obtain trustworthy statistics. I do not know what the statistics of permanent reform in them may be, although, judging from the freely expressed opinions of medical men, they are by no means encouraging. The superintendent of one of the best of them, however, let me a little behind the scene as to what became of his old patients. He told me that the number of patients who passed through his house during the year was considerable, that not a week passed without patients going out and new ones coming in, and that of those whose history he had been able to follow, a very large proportion died within two years; and this is exactly what a physician would expect.

  Finally, I think we have no data which would justify us in appealing to the legislature for a new law, which would curtail in a most anomalous manner the liberty of the subject, on the plea of promoting the cure of habitual drunkenness. I do not think this fear of interference with the liberty of the subject “balderdash,” as it was called at the British Medical Association meeting. Habitual drunkenness which can be distinguished as a form of mental disease can be dealt with under the lunacy laws. A London physician told the Parliamentary Committee that he had a great many such patients in his private asylum. “Perhaps there had been a little undue straining of the law to receive them,” but there had been “faint scintillations of aberration,” &c, which justified the medical man in certifying the insanity.

  There need, however, be no straining of the lunacy laws when any real symptoms of insanity coexist with habitual drunkenness; though as a matter of convenience, regarding the detail of treatment, such cases might perhaps be classified apart, either in separate wards or in a separate asylum.

  It is no part of the duty of the State to deal by penal enactments with intentions and dispositions, and therefore, in dealing with drunkenness, it can only regard the overt act. Mr. Hill, the late recorder of Birmingham, once proposed that it should be made legal for the police to secure and detain all the wellknown habitual criminals of that town, forming an extremely small fractional part of its inhabitants, by which preventive measure he showed that crime with all its consequences could be almost abolished; but the mischief and danger of punishing a man for what he might do in the future was at once recognized.

  The overt acts of the drunkard ought to be punished in su
ch a way as to make them a real warning, and especially the act of public drunkenness,which is a kind of indecent exposure; also failure through drunkenness to maintain children, and indeed all drunken conduct which invades the rights of others; and there can be no just reason why the punishment for such acts should not be accumulative. It is unreasonable that magistrates should have to commit the same person from fifty to a hundred times for a constantly-repeated offence, and the remedy would appear to be a penitentiary for habitual drunkard offenders, in which they should be compelled to earn their maintenance, and from which they should be released on trial, and live for a time under the surveillance of the police.

  Until some evidence has been procured that adult drunkards are capable of being reformed, all public money expended on reformatories ought to be devoted to the reformation of the young whose vices and crimes are to so great an extent the effect of parental intemperance.

  Although the duty of the State does not extend to the punishment of private and self-regarding vice, it is bound to prevent public temptation to vice. It cannot prevent incontinence, but it suppresses brothels; it cannot stop gambling, but it closes betting-houses. So, therefore, it seems to be the bounden duty of the State to place the sale of strong drink under stringent regulation; to the effect that the trader in drink may not be the pander of drunkenness.

  Moreover, the ruling powers of the State ought to enforce the equable administration of the law, so that it shall not be overstrained in Birmingham nor relaxed in Glasgow, and drunkenness made the special curse of a locality.

  But, above all, the opinion and the influence of each right-thinking and right-feeling individual member of the aggregate which forms the State ought to be and must be brought to bear against this grievous evil. And when we consider the immense change in public opinion in this respect since the days of our youth; when we see the clergy of all creeds, from the Catholic cardinal to the common ranter, for the first time in our history earnestly denouncing the drunkard as a miserable sinner; when we see gentlemen regarding the vice which was fashionable with their fathers as the extreme mark of vulgarity; when the legislature has already stamped drunkenness with the fitting sign of disgrace, by placing the policeman’s hand upon the shoulder of any sot reeling along the highway; when the professed enemies of drink are enrolled in an army of three millions; and the foundations of a national education have at last been laid, we may feel assured of the steady increase of that national opinion, the only soil in which a national temperance can take firm root.

  It is not drunkenness we wish to punish, but temperance we wish to promote; and to conclude, as I began, with Milton’s words, “Were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing.”

  “The Liquor Question”

  Article from the March 15, 1879 issue of The Saturday Review

  The debate and division on Sir Wilfred Lawson’s Resolution were not significant of any change of opinion in the House or in the nation on the liquor question. Parties, as parties, have no conviction any way which they use their strength to enforce, and no party leader has any serious proposal to make. A larger number supported the Resolution than would have supported Sir Wilfred Lawson’s usual Permissive Bill, because the Resolution was so vague that no one was afraid that in voting for it he could be held to have voted for anything in particular. There was no gain to any one in such a Resolution being proposed and discussed, except to record the opinion that drunkenness is a great evil, and to make it plainer than ever how immense are the difficulties ‘of suppressing it by legislation. The general effect of the Resolution was that new legislation should be devised, having what is termed local option as its basis. So far as this means anything, it means that the residents in localities to be somehow determined are in some unknown way to be able to do something indefinite towards controlling the sale of liquor. This so charmed Mr. Forster. and Mr. Bright that they voted for the Resolution. Lord Hartington, on the other hand, having a sense of statesmanship, denounced the vanity of such a Resolution. Parliament, if it is to use the time it loves to waste, must debate about something, and there was nothing in the Resolution to debate about. A Resolution is a very useful mode of proceeding when it affirms what ought to be done, and leaves it open to the Government to say how it ought to be done. If the Resolution had been to the effect that all public-houses should be closed from a certain day, but that proper compensation should be given to existing publicans, the objection to it would have been one of substance only, and not of form. Buta Resolution that there should be “local option” of some kind and in some way had no meaning. It might mean fifty things, as to none of which those who tried to believe that they could seem to believe in local option would agree. Local option may mean that the ratepayers or the inhabitants generally of each parish should vote whether there should be no public-houses in it or twice as many as now. Or it might mean that things should go on as at present, but that the persons to grant licences should be elected; or it might mean that the magistrates should grant licences, but that they should act in conjunction with assessors chosen by a popular vote. Numberless other suggestions might be made as to its possible meaning, and each possible meaning would in turn be open to innumerable objections. Possibly there might be discovered some form of local option which would be an improvement on the present system; but no one can say that this is so until a definite proposal which happens to hit the mark is made. To the only proposals for a local option which have been hitherto made there are objections of the gravest character. Direct voting on the question of beer or no beer would carry bitterness and turmoil into every parish; and local elections held for other purposes would be spoilt and corrupted if the decision as to the quantity of beer to be sold in a parish was remitted to such humble officials as the Guardians of the poor.

  One member alone was found to support the extreme opinion that the present system is perfect, and that Parliament should never again meddle with so beautiful and admirable an arrangement. Both Lord Hartington and the chief Ministerial speakers agreed that it was possible and desirable to make new efforts to combat the standing cause of crime and the curse of the British nation. If anything new is to be done, it must be in the direction of the prohibition or regulation of the liquor trade, or in that of relieving it from existing restrictions. That the liquor trade should be prohibited is entirely impossible. It would be monstrous to prevent all alcohol being sold because some persons take too much, and the nation would never stand it for a day. No statesman would dream of looking in that direction for the legislation he desires; and Mr. Forster, in his new-born zeal for local option, took care to lay down that there must, in his opinion, be always a Parliamentary minimum of public-houses. The counter proposition that there should be free-trade, as it is called, in liquor has for years had the warm support of a number of sensible and influential persons at Liverpool, but has never made any way either in Parliament or the country. The substance of the proposal is that everyone should be allowed to sell liquor provided he is of good character, or practically that nothing very bad is known against him, and that his premises are fit for the purpose. But this is only a device for getting rid of the difficulty of deciding who are to have licences, and how many public-houses there are to be. It is not meant to be an encouragement to drinking. On the contrary, a very heavy duty is to be put on every licence. This would, it is supposed, deter adventurers from starting public-houses except where they were so much wanted that success would compensate for the payment of the duty; while the venue from the successful houses would go to the ratepayers and enable them to provide, without cost to themselves, the police who watch over drunkards and the prisons to which drunkards are sent. It is difficult to see how this can be called free trade. It seems rather a scheme for throwing the whole trade into the hands of capitalists. It therefore becomes a means of regulating the trade, not of enlarging its sphere, and is only one mode of effecting an object which may be attained in
other ways.

  Regulation, it must be observed, proceeds in two different directions, with two distinct objects. In the first place, it endeavours to prevent drinking from becoming a public nuisance. To this head belong all the provisions for police superintendence, the attempt to get the trade into respectable hands, and the imposition of penalties in case of disorder being permitted by the publican. In the next place, it aims at lessening the amount of liquor consumed. Provisions that public-houses shall be closed at certain hours or on certain days, as on Sundays in Scotland and Ireland, and that the number of public-houses shall be limited, fall under this head. The real question is whether Parliament can go further in this direction than -at present or not. There is little, if anything, more to be done in the way of limiting the hours during which public-houses are to be allowed to remain open. The really important and practical point is whether drinking could be diminished I by lessening the number of public-houses, while, at the same time, proper provision was made for the wants of the population. At present it is supposed that there is such a thing ascertainable as the proportion between any given population and the number of public-houses it requires, and that the secret of calculating this lies in the breast of the magistrates. The real contention of those who hope to combat drunkenness by limiting the number of public-houses is that the magistrates do not know the secret they profess to know, and that a much less number would suffice. The houses that were spared would have an ill-deserved monopoly, and those that were sacrificed would furnish grounds for heavy claims for compensation. But it may be assumed perhaps that Parliament could surmount these difficulties, or would pronounce that, in view of a great good to be obtained, certain evils must be endured. Some slight burden, too, might be cheerfully accepted by the respectable, if they could feel that they were really helping the poor and ignorant; and a man who takes his liquor in moderation would for such a purpose be content to walk further than he has been accustomed and than is quite agreeable to him. What is really doubtful is whether diminishing the number of public-houses would make any perceptible difference in the amount of liquor consumed. Many excellent people who long to reform the nation guess that the difference would be not only perceptible, but very great. But it is very difficult to prove they are right, and it is on this head that the evidence taken by the Lords’ Committee may be specially valuable. If it could once be established that there was a proper proportion between the population and the number of public houses, and that this was a quite different proportion from that now accepted by the magistrates, Parliament could lay down general principles as to the number of houses and the mode of reducing the present number, and the less that was left to local option of any kind the better.