404 RUM, THE ALL-BLIGHTING CURSE. receptacles of crime. They make laws to punish thieves and murderers, and yet they license the traffic that produces them. They enact severe statutes to prevent the introduction of disease and pestilence from abroad, and they license persons to sell the poison which creates disease and pestilence at home. The power of the Legislature to prohibit absolutely the sale, rests upon the broadest and deepest foundations of moral justice as well as of political economy. It rests upon the broad principle of self-preservation, upon the same foundation on which the whole criminal code is based. If the Legislature have the right to punish offenses after they are committed, they surely have the right to prevent their commission." The Westminster Review, in asserting the full right of the supreme legislative power of any nation to arrest and suppress all crimes and evil doing, says: "The sale of alcoholic liquors exposes vast numbers to the worst dangers. The traffic can be prevented by law, for it has been. It is not only clearly within the prerogative of legislation to prohibit the promiscuous sale of ardent spirits, but it is the absolute duty of legislators to prevent it, as much as the sale of any other poison. The power of a government to punish crime implies the right of the government to prevent it." WE XXVIII. E are compelled now to gaze on the most frightful and disheartening phase of the social life of the British people. Nothing like full justice can be done to the subject without devoting to it far greater space than it is possible to give in this work. But its magnitude is so vast, and its ramifications so extended, they must be analyzed and traced, at least in some. of their chief outlines, in order to gain even a faint conception of the moral and social condition of the population of Great Britain. I shall, therefore, with what brevity I can, pass over the field, chiefly with the view of showing what the conse quences of the use of alcoholic drinks are on the laboring classes. By the term Rum, I mean all distilled and fermented PARLIAMENTARY REPORT ON DRUNKENNESS. 405 liquors; for, in a greater or less proportion, they all contain alcohol, and prove injurious just in proportion to the quantity contained and the extent to which they are drugged. The statistics are stupendous and appalling. But when we state that one-third of the British revenue is derived from the importation, manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors as appears from official returns-we get but a faint idea of the consumption of poisonous drinks; nor are there any statistics to show the extent of the consequences of this enormous consumption upon individuals or the national welfare. The celebrated Parliamentary Report on Drunkenness, founded upon a most elaborate examination of witnesses by the National Committee, of whom the late Mr. Buckingham, M. P. for Sheffield, was chairman, thus speaks: "The consequences of the vice of intoxication are so many and so fearful, that it is difficult to enumerate even an outline of them ; and to pursue them in all their melancholy details would require a huge volume." The following are only a few of the evils directly springing from this source: To individuals—" Destruction to health; disease in every form and shape; premature decrepitude in the old; stunted growth, and general debility and decay in the young; loss of life by paroxysms, apoplexies, drownings, burnings, and accidents of various kinds; delirium tremens, paralysis, idiotcy, madness and violent death; destruction of mental capacity and vigor, and extinction of aptitude for learning, as well as desire for practicing, any useful art or industrial occupation; irritation of all the worst passions of the heart; extinction of all moral and religious principle; disregard of truth; indifference to education; violation of chastity, and insensibility to shame." To national welfare: "The destruction of grain converted by distillation into poison; the highest medical authorities examined before your Committee being uniform in their testimony, that ardent spirits are absolutely poisonous to the human constitution so that an immense amount of food is destroyed in 406 CONSEQUENCES TO NATIONAL WELFARE. such a manner as to injure greatly the agricultural producers themselves; for whose grain, but for this perverted use of it, there would be more than twice the present demand. The loss of productive labor in every department of occupation, to the extent of, at least, one day in six throughout the kingdom, as testified by witnesses engaged in various manufacturing occupations, by which the wealth of the country is retarded or suppressed to the extent of one million out of every six produced, to say nothing of the constant derangement, imperfection and destruction in every industrial process, occasioned by intemperance and consequent unskillfulness and neglect of those affected by intoxication, producing great injury in our domestic and foreign trade. The extensive loss of property at sea, from shipwrecks, foundering, fires and innumerable other accidents, which, according to the evidence of the most experienced shipowners. and nautical men, are clearly traceable to drunkenness. The comparative inefficiency of the army and navy, in each of which intemperance is the cankerworm that eats away its strength and its discipline to the very core; it being proved that one-sixth of the effective strength of the navy, and a much greater proportion of the army, is as much destroyed by intoxicating drinks as if the men were slain in battle; and that the greatest number of accidents, seven-eighths of the sickness, invalidings, and discharges for incapacity, and nine-tenths of all the acts of insubordination, and the fearful punishments and executions to which these give rise, are to be ascribed to drunkenness alone. The increase of pauperism, divested of that sense of shame which would disdain to receive relief while honest industry could secure the humblest independence, and associated with a recklessness of all obligations, domestic or social, which has converted the pauper from a grateful receiver of aid under avoidable calamity, to an idle and disorderly clamorer for the right of being sustained by the industry of others, or a profligate and licentious parent of illegitimate offspring. The spread of crime in every form, from theft, fraud and prostitution in the young, to burnings, robberies and more hardened offences in the old, by BUCKSTONES-THE BREWER-STATEMENT. 407 which the jails and prisons, the hulks and convict transports, are filled with inmates, and an enormous mass of human beings are transformed into excrescences of corruption and weakness. The retardation of all improvement, inventive or industrial, civil or political, moral or religious. So that the mere pecuniary loss to the nation from the several causes already enumerated, may be fairly estimated at a little short of fifty millions pounds sterling per annum”—$250,000,000. XXIX. HIS Report was made in 1834; but last year Dr. Frederick Richard Lee's Prize Essay for the Legislative Prohibition of the liquor traffic, the very best authority on this subject extant, says: "Thirty years have elapsed since this deliberate conviction was enrolled upon the records of the British Parliament, and yet, notwithstanding the boasted march of improvement, the progress of education, the spread of knowledge, and above all, the specific efforts to combat this vice of intemperance by moral appeal, EVERY WORD OF THAT REPORT REMAINS The immense amount of testimony on this subject which has been brought out in England during the last few years, has gone to prove that the increase in the consumption of alcoholic liquors, in the production of degradation and crime, has far exceeded that of any other period in British history. There is no country in which so much fermented liquor is drunk, or where it has produced such dreadful results. For a very long time in Great Britain, as in this country, it was advocated and believed, that most, if not nearly all, the evil of alcohol sprang from the use of distilled liquors, little importance being attached to the universal consumption of ale, and other fermented drinks. Gradually this delusion is passing away. Mr. Charles Buckstone, the great brewer, says: "It would not be too much to say, that if all drinking of fermented liquors could be done away, crime of every kind would fall to a fourth 408 THE WILDERNESS OF HORRORS. of its present amount, and the whole tone of moral feeling in the lower orders might be indefinitely raised. Not only does this vice produce all kinds of want and mischief, but it has a negative effect of great importance. It is the mightiest of all the forces that clog the progress of good. It is in vain that every engine is set to work that philanthropy can devise, when those whom we seek to benefit are habitually tampering with their faculties of reason and will, soaking their brains with beer, or inflaming them with ardent spirits. The struggle of the school, the library and the church, all united against the beer house and the gin palace, is but one development of the war between heaven and hell. It is, in short, intoxication that fills our jails; it is intoxication that fills our lunatic asylums; it is intoxication that fills our workhouses with poor. Were it not for this one cause, pauperism would be nearly extinguished in England.” FROM XXX. ROM the vast mountain of perfectly authenticated facts contained in Dr. Lee's great book, we open a few of his glimpses into what he so well calls this "wilderness of horrors.". We glance at the following fruits of darkness, which stand out distinctly from the shadowed back ground : "DRUNKENNESS IN ITS VARIOUS DEGREES. "POVERTY, BEGGARY, PAUPERISM. "IGNORANCE, WITH ITS BRUTALITY AND VICE. "ACCIDENTS, AND DISEASE ESPECIALLY. "IDIOTCY AND MADNESS. “OFFENCES AND CRIMES.” To these causes as the adversaries of civilization, the writer accounts for its slow progress in attempted conquests over barbarism throughout the British dominions; but far more particularly at home. As to the cost of the drinking system, nothing as yet has compared with its moral mischiefs, its power to des |