p. 115My Dear Mr. Blatchford,
The question that I have written at the head of this letter is scarcely inside the question of Socialism. Yet you discuss it in your 21st letter. I suppose it is because the opponents of Socialism say that drink is the cause of the poverty of the working classes, and not the bad system under which they live. You felt called upon no doubt to reply to this rejoinder of theirs to your accusation against the present system.
I might well pass this by, only you might think if I did that I agree with all you say in your 21st letter, which I don’t. I agree with a good deal that is in it, of course; but some things don’t tally with what I have found to be true in my rough journey through working-class life.
First of all, there can be no question that drink has a good deal to do with both with the extreme poverty and the extreme moral degradation of vast masses of the working population. It is no use denying this. It is proved in the most direct manner by the fact that among those who do not drink, there is a degree of tidiness and comfort, and even of sufficiency, that makes them almost a class separate to themselves. If all the working classes were as well off as those I am referring to, there would be no occasion for the outcry raised by Socialists about the poverty of the working classes. They not only live fairly well, but they actually save money, besides dressing decently and enjoying occasional holidays. I know many such, and they get no more wages than their mates p. 116 who are worse off. The difference is, they don’t drink: they are steady, reliable workmen, and consequently are not so often out of work.
Mind you, I am not going to say that our industrial system is perfect. I am not going to say it is not responsible for many of the evils we suffer from. I am not going to say, with rabid teetotalism, that if drink were banished, we should have “heaven below” straight away. But I do say that experience shows that the working classes would not be so badly off as they are if they were not so given to this universal habit of taking intoxicating drink. And therefore I don’t think you help your cause by seeming to deny it.
You think there is great excuse for their taking refuge in the dramshop or in the dram privately at home. Well, perhaps so; but that is another question which ought not to stand in the way of the fact first set forth. Let it first be granted that the drinking habits of the working classes are responsible for a good deal of, though not for all, their wretchedness, and there will be more chance for an excuse getting a proper hearing. But let the excuse be the right one. It does not seem to me that your first excuse for them is the right one. You seem to admit that working men are oftener drunk than men of the middle class, yet you deny they are the heaviest drinkers. This sounds odd. Frequent intoxication must be the result of frequent drinking. You seem to escape on the word “heavy”— at least you try to escape, but I don’t think you really escape. (“Heavy,” I suppose, means the quantity taken at one time.) You mention the case of a journalist and a sailor that once drank a quantity of whiskey, rum, and stout that would have turned a poor labourer mad four times over, and yet were able to attend to their business. But this proves nothing to your purpose. It only proves that these particular men were heavy drinkers. It does not prove that the working classes are lighter drinkers than the middle classes. Why, nothing can prove this, Mr. Blatchford, in the face of the notorious fact to the contrary. The working classes drink a deal more than is good for them; so do the middle classes for the matter of that; but they do not go to the same extreme with it, and it is not among them the cause of poverty and misery that it is among the working classes. Of course there may be several good explanations of this, but the fact is visible to anybody.
p. 117 Your explanation certainly does not strike me as the right explanation at all. You think it is owing, first to the lower health of the labourer as compared with the middle class. It is something new to me to hear that the labouring man suffers more from low health than the clerk or the shopkeeper or the merchant. I am sure it is not correct, as far as my experience goes. Of course, your experience may be different. Indeed, I am inclined to think, Mr. Blatchford, that your idea on this subject is strongly coloured by your own case. You are a man of the mental temperament; and if you have been a working man, as I gather from the particulars of your life that were published by Mr. Stead, then I can well believe that you found manual labour not good for your health at all. But the common run of labouring men are not of the slim and nervous build. They are men of big bone and iron sinew. They are what are called “able-bodied.” They inherit this from mothers and fathers that were not Italians; and their occupation tends to strengthen what they inherit. Hard work in the open-air makes them brawny and healthy and strong. If you shake hands with one of them, it is like putting your hand in a vice. Whereas those who use their brains and spend most of the time indoors grow thin-bodied and delicate by comparison, and are much oftener out of health. If “a low state of health” makes drink hurtful to a man, I should say it is just the middle-class man that ought to be hurt by drink, and the working man that ought to be able to stand it without harm.
Then you think “the labourer does not drink with any caution or method.” Well, this is just what your anti-Socialists say in another shape. They say the working people as a rule drink recklessly and excessively, and consequently make away with more money than they can spare, and keep themselves in chronic poverty which a cautious and methodical way of life would enable them to avoid, as many of them do. In fact, Mr. Blatchford, here you admit the charge instead of turning it on “the highly-respectable middle-class gentlemen.”
Then you suggest that one cause of the intemperance of working men is the impure nature of the liquor supplied to them. Oh! Mr. Blatchford, Mr. Blatchford, you must have felt hard put to use such an argument as this. Why the “purer” the liquor, the stronger its intoxicating power; and if the working classes get so p. 118 often drunk on fourpenny, what would they do with “Old Tom,” “Irish Whiskey,” and Scotch “Mountain Dew?”
You say drunkenness is a disease. I do not find this true in the way you put it. You say “it is just as much a disease as typhus or cholera.” If you had said there are cases where it has all the spontaneous force of a disease, through inherited predisposition—cases of dipsomania, in fact, where the unhappy victims are not responsible for their actions—you would have been strictly within the bounds of truth; but you err in writing as if all drunkenness were of this character. Very little of the prevalent drunkenness is of this character. It is almost all the sheer mechanical result of taking drink that the drinkers could leave alone.
The working classes are to be excused for drinking, as you say, but the excuses don’t lie exactly where you put them in the opening part of your letter. They partly lie where you place them a little further on. Most of them lead “dull and cheerless lives,” as you say, “working too hard and too long,” and they naturally find an agreeable diversion in the public-house, with its cosy bar and flaming lights, and jovial company, and refreshing liquor. But this is not the whole explanation. The cause is mostly mental. A man with a well-furnished mind has a resource within himself that would not only make him independent of the stimulus that comes with public-house drinking, but that would lead him to scorn such a resource of exhilaration. If the mind is empty, the spirits are soon depressed. We all know the difference between pleasing thoughts, and the state in which we have no thoughts at all. We all come through these different states at different times. If a man is habitually in the vacant state, he falls an easy prey to external sources of excitement, among which drink and joviality is the most easily accessible to a working man. He “keeps his spirits up by pouring spirits down.” If he was well fortified mentally, he would not make this suicidal mistake.
How is he to attain this state of mental fortification? This touches the root of the whole question. It is here where the chief excuses of the working classes begin to appear. They are not favourably situated for attaining the mental state that would enable them to surmount the difficulties of their position. They do not receive a proper education even if they pass all the popular standards—which very few of them do. Popular education is addressed to the intellect, merely—which is only a part of man’s p. 119 mental being, and not the controlling part. The controlling part of the mental mechanism lies in the desires and sentiments—to which the trained intellect becomes but a servant. Man has low desires, and he is capable of having high desires generated within him by divine truth. As a rule, divine truth is neglected, though theoretically acknowledged. The consequence is, that a man goes into the world without those regulating elements of duty and love and reverence and fear and hope which are the spiritual floating power against the tendency to sink, or the spiritual weapons by which a man successfully fights the terrible battle of life in which so many are slain.
Going out into life in this unfurnished state, what chance has the poor working man? His physical energies are spent in drudgery; his mind supplies no counter force to the mental depression natural to such a state. He craves help against his own feelings. He cannot find it in himself. He cannot find it in his cheerless home. He lacks the means of providing it by change and travel. He finds it ready-made in the public-house; the tobacco pipe, and the beer mug, and the song of companions supply him with an atmosphere in which his senses are soothed and his spirits fortified, and the miseries of his lot alleviated for the time being. He “drinks and forgets his sorrows,” little dreaming the terrible price he has to pay for his consolation if he continues, as he probably will, in that line of things. The thing is sweet to a depraved taste, and, under its indulgence, he becomes demoralised to an extent that only becomes apparent when you compare him with the enlightened mechanic who finds his alleviations in the comforts and well-being of a well-kept home. He becomes insensible to the claims of his wife and family. He never has money to spare for their simplest necessities. There is nothing like drink for diddling money away and keeping a man in perpetual poverty. Food imposes its own limit, but drink becomes an endless swill in which a man’s wages are spent long before the week is out, with perhaps a long score at the “pub” besides. His house is squalid; his wife meanly clad; his children in rags. They run the streets, and are often without food. He is in a rut from which he cannot lift himself. Rent gets behind, and by-and-bye the man and his wretched family are turned out of doors, to find shelter in some more squalid den for a time. Then. as an unsteady man, he easily gets out of work, and the story ends in darkness.
p. 120 For all this, Mr. Blatchford, drink is responsible. But then a higher misfortune is responsible for the drink. The difficulty is to suggest a remedy powerful enough to deal with the higher misfortune in such cases. Who shall take hold of the working world to give it the right education, and then secure it the right conditions for turning that education to account? I see no answer except the one I have several times pressed upon your attention. I am certain that Socialism is no answer, for you leave out the principal ingredient of social well-being. You give us the study of microbes for the culture of the religious faculties. Oh, Mr. Blatchford, such a system, even it secured bread and butter for all, would only give us clever devils, and unhappy ones at that. It would not necessarily give us even temperance in the sense of banishing drunkenness. Is it only the poor that drink?
This touches another question, or, rather, the same question in another department. You seem to take it for granted that with a right industrial system the poor, no longer poor, would give over drinking. I don’t think you are any more correct here than you are in many other parts of your brilliant but illogical argumentation.
There is a great deal of private intemperance among the upper classes. There is a great improvement, no doubt, as compared with the habits of the last generation; but it is questionable if the tide has not begun to turn again, if we are to trust the testimony of some medical men, who complain especially of the spread of drinking habits among ladies. It is not to be wondered at. The general acceptance of Darwinism, with a corresponding loosening of moral restraints, was certain to leave people a prey to the strongest bent of weakness. Ladies who suffer from lowness of spirits are very likely to avail themselves of the readiest help if there is no particular reason why they should not do so. Once persuade men and women that they are improved monkeys, who will by and bye disappear to give place to (perhaps) higher specimens to come after them, and none of them ever to re-appear again under any possible circumstances, you destroy any motive for any restraints beyond those imposed by public opinion. The crime in every case then consists of being found out. Private drinking was likely to flourish under such a habit of thought.
If, then, good circumstances are no preventive of intemperance under the present system, how slim is the ground for your happy p. 121 thought that in your “Merrie England,” intemperance will disappear before the prevalence of plenty for all. It is a vain thought. Even if you secured the expected plenty, you could not (with a microbe religion) avert that listlessness of mind that would crave for excitement, and find it in its very easiest and most effective form in the “wassail bowl” that Robbie Burns glorifies in his poetry.
Your whole theory is vitiated by the radical mistake of ignoring inherent tendency in the direction of evil. You look at the surroundings of the people as the cause of their vices. The fact is, there is a reciprocal action. The surroundings have something to do with the production of vice, but the chief cause is inside the people themselves, in those deficiencies and affinities and susceptibilities in which (in the absence of enlightenment) the surroundings find their leverage. If there were no responsive affinity, bad surroundings would be innocuous. Your mistake is the mistake that a person would make who should blame the sea for the sinking of a ship. It is true the sea sinks the ship, but the efficient cause is the hole in the ship’s bottom. It is the proclivities of the uninstructed people that give unfavourable surroundings their demoralising power. Without these the “surroundings” could not produce vice, as absolutely proved by the fact that they do not produce it where the mind is fortified against it by the power of enlightenment.
Your dissenting, though respectful friend,
JOHN SMITH.