Part 3

Hamlet says:

“it is a custom More honor’d in the breach than the observance. This heavy-headed revel east and west Makes us traduced and tax’d of other nations: They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase Soil our addition.”

{26} Morals has made wonderful progress since then, in all directions, and heavy drinking has been more and more restricted to those who are

“Marked cross from the womb and perverse.”

With few exceptions every one who goes to perdition by the alcohol route would reach that destination by some other highway if the alcohol line were not running.

Every man whose sloth or improvidence has brought himself and his family to beggary, every thieving tramp upon the highways, every rascal in the penitentiary, every murderer upon the gallows, hastens to plead “whisky brought {27} me to this!” because he knows that such a plea will bring him a gush of sloppy sympathy unobtainable by other means.

Whisky makes no man lazy, shiftless, dishonest, false, cowardly or brutal. These must be original qualities with him. If he has them he will probably take to whisky--though not inevitably--which then does the community the splendid service of hurrying him along to destruction, and of abridging his infliction upon the public. {28}

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PEOPLE who have done much in the way of reforming drunkards have been astonished to find how little real manhood remained after eliminating whisky from the equation. They had supposed the manhood to be only obscured, and were disheartened to find how frequently it happened to be demonstrated that there never was enough of it to pay for the trouble of “saving the victim of intemperance.” Like the cherubim before the throne of God, the Temperance orators “con- tinually do cry,” the burden of their song being that hundreds of thousands are annually slain by the monster Intemperance. {29} Quite singularly these figures are probably not exaggerated. Myriads of times kindly-hearted physicians write in the death certificate “pneumonia,” “heart-failure,” “diabetes,” etc., when truth demands “beer” or “whisky.”

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BUT what of this?

Is it not merely Nature sweeping out her overcrowded workshop? Ridding her laboratory of misfits, defectives, and rejects? Into her junk pile alcohol whisks away daily thousands of thieves, gamblers, prostitutes, loafers, “sports,” spongers, swindlers, {30} and others of the criminal and quasi-criminal classes. Over their moldering clay the daisies bloom in sweet oblivion of

“The sins and crimes Done in their days of nature.”

Upon these alcoholism accommodatingly performs the office of judge and executioner, cutting their careers off at an average of five years, which, without this interposition, would possibly be extended to 20 or 30. The certainty and celerity with which it ferrets out and destroys these classes gives it strong advantages over the ordinary processes of destruction.

It was exceedingly unfortunate for {31} the community that the leaders of the James and Younger gangs were temperate men. Had it not been so, their careers, instead of extending over 20 harassing years, would have been cut short inside of five. Uncontrollable predilection for whisky, and the society of strange women brought about the destruction of nearly all of the band who from time to time were slain by each other’s hands or those of justice. Temperance and chastity in a rascal of any kind mean an immense amount of mischief to the community. Fortunately they are quite rare. {32} THE rapid spread of Prohibition is full of suggestion. The grain fields of Kansas and Texas are periodically devastated by the green bug. When the green bugs are at their worst a parasite appears which sweeps them off, and the wheat growers have a respite. Then, having destroyed their provender, the parasites starve, and the green bugs have a chance to grow again until the parasites overtake them in the hour of their triumph and power.

Will the suppression of the alcoholic scavenger allow the criminals and quasi-criminals to multiply like the green bugs? {33}

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DURING the ages of terrible oppression of the European peoples which culminated in the French Revolution, the main amelioration of the hardships endured was found in the vices of the oppressors. The sword of the duelist, quarreling over women, the picturesque horrors of delirium tremens, and the loathsome mal de Naples continually swept away hecatombs of tyrant lordlings and frequently obliterated whole families. In fact no aristocratic family ever withstood these adverse influences very long. Extinction came as promptly and as certainly as the curculio to the ripening plum. The student of French and English {34} history is continually astonished at the brief time in which noble names remain in view. They rise to dizzy eminence on one page, and on the next go down to oblivion. One rarely finds the name of a century or two ago mentioned in any of the European news of to-day. Mr. Freeman, the eminent English historian, says, conclusively, that in spite of the perennial vaunt of ancestors who “came over with the Conqueror,” and of Tennyson’s musical mendacity about the “daughter of an hundred Earls,” the families who can trace back to even so recent a date as the reign of the Stuarts are very rare. {35} Frequently hundreds of years elapsed before the historic titles were “revived” to gild some parvenu. Since then these families have been kept up only by intermarriages with later parvenus.

The royal family itself has been repeatedly on the point of extinction, and the continuity of the line only maintained by extraordinary efforts.

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IDLENESS, luxury, and more or less flagrant debauchery have done their appointed work in removing the deteriorated forms of human life {36} from the world, that their room might be had for more acceptable growths.

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SOCIETY has been most aptly likened to a vat of good wine, which is scum and froth at the top, dregs and sediment at the bottom, and good, pure, clear liquor in the middle. Vice does admirable work in skimming away the supernatant scum and in drawing off the dregs and settlings.

Unceasing fermentation seems to be a condition necessary to the health of society. The humblest work incessantly to lift themselves into the ranks of {37} the middle-classes, the middle-classes strive as earnestly to make themselves plutocrats, aristocrats, and lordlings. This ambition for worldly advancement is one of society’s most powerful adjuncts for good. When a man at last reaches the social summit he desists from further efforts at improvement. He becomes like a man who after struggling forward to reach the head of the procession refuses to march another step. Some vice, mayhap merely over-eating, is likely to remove him and secure the ground for another man to come to the front, who is also removed summarily when he becomes obstructive. If the fortune-builder is {38} not thus removed, his children are subject to attack.

Were it not for this, the upper stratum of society would speedily become so crowded that ascent to it would be impossible, all healthful, ambitious motive be taken away from the middle and lower classes, stagnation follow, and society perish from congestion.

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HISTORY is full of illustrations of the benefits of vice in assisting to shape the destinies of Nations and peoples. Take, for example, the {39} Bourbons whose stupidity and tyranny have passed into a proverb. In the last century their worse than worthless personalities filled nearly every throne in southern Europe. They seemed to breed like wolves in a famine-stricken land, and their fangs were at every people’s throat Fortunately they had vices. Wine and lechery did what human enemies could not and the pack of wolves rotted away like a flock of diseased sheep. The mortality was so regular that for a long time French kings were succeeded by their grand-sons and great-grandsons, their sons all burning themselves out before the time came for ascending the throne. {40} The unutterably vile life of Louis XV. was terminated by the smallpox communicated to him in the course of a most disgraceful amour. His grandson, who succeeded him, had no destructive vices, and so the people were compelled at last to resort to the guillotine to rid themselves of him. The vast problem for the French in 1790 would have been greatly simplified if Louis XVI. had been a shortlived debauchee like his father and two brothers. The healthy German blood of his Saxon mother corrected some-what the virus in the Bourbon veins, and he lived to become an intolerable cumberer and obstructive.

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