THE DRINK EVIL.

ABSTRACT OF PAPER BY HENRY N. RAYMOND,

GENERAL SECRETARY BETHEL ASSOCIATED CHARITIES, CLEVELAND, OHIO.

I have before me brief statistics, limited to a single city, which show as clearly as figures can the criminal and pauper-making effect of the drink evil. The annual report of the Cleveland police department for 1896 states that 13,491 arrests were made during the year, and that of this number 6,118 were for intoxication. This in a city with a population estimated at from 325,000 to 350,000. The director of the charities and correction department of the city government in his annual report gives drunkenness as the cause of most of the imprisonments.

There were committed to the Cleveland workhouse last year 3,348 persons. 1,915 of them were sent there because of excessive drinking. 3,229 acknowledged that at times they drank to excess.

There are some other items in the report which are of interest. For instance, one prisoner is reported as serving his sixty-ninth sentence. In all that number of prisoners there were only 263 females. The recommendation of the director and the superintendent that a hundred additional cells be constructed at once shows that drunkenness and crime are not decreasing in our locality.

From the annual report of the Ohio State Liquor League, in convention at Toledo last September, I gather the following: "There are in round numbers 1,900 saloons or drinking-places in Cleveland, or I drinking-place for every 159 persons." If the estimate had left out of the calculation the number of women and children, and had been limited to the number who vote at our elections, the number for each saloon would be greatly reduced.

I am told that in Toronto, a city that supports 210 places of worship, there are only 150 drinking-places, and this includes all of the hotels; also, that such restrictions are in force as to greatly lessen the bad effects of the drink evil.

The powerful influence of the liquor league is seen in the work of its State organizations. In every State where there is liquor legislation antagonistic to its interest, there you will find a State organization watchful of the legislatures, and ready through its

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officials and agents to oppose every bill offered that in any way seeks to restrain, limit, or abolish the liquor traffic. The most experienced and able attorneys that money can retain or enlist to oppose antiliquor legislation are secured by the members of the league. The venal legislator is labored with in many ways, and often successfully.

I have not before me statistics showing the amount of capital which is invested in the business, but I have here an estimate of the amount expended in the drinking-places of Cleveland which was made by a temperance organization. Counting 313 working days as the time when the saloons are open and at work, and estimating the average daily receipts of each saloon to be $15, we have for the 1,900 saloons of the city a sum total of $8,920,500 as the receipts for the year. This estimate of $15 as the daily average of each one may be regarded as too high; but, even if we estimate $7.50 as the daily average, cutting the foregoing figures right in two, we still have $4,460,250 as the sum total for the year's sales.

It is claimed by temperance workers that the annual outgo necessary to do the work of the philanthropic organization of our city the past year was not far from $200,000, and this they claim is largely due to the drink evil. A Cleveland city official recently said that more than one-half of the police force employed, and the annual amount expended in maintaining the force ($347,730), was due to the same cause. It is also estimated that over three-fourths of the expenditure for the city relief work was absolutely due to it. The Cleveland city infirmary plant alone for the indoor work of relief cost $742,000, and the entire outgo for in and out door relief the last year was $138,500. The number of applicants cared for was 13,902. Of this number 3,582 were heads of families.

Professor Pellman, of Bonn University, Germany, has for years made a study of drunkenness, and, when possible, has traced the habit back through many generations. He has tabulated biographies of hundreds of descendants from some original drunkard. To illustrate, a German woman died at the age of sixty, the last forty · years of her life a drunkard, a thief, and a tramp. Her descendants numbered 834, of whom 709 have been traced by him in the. local records from birth to death. He found that of this number 106 were born out of wedlock. There were 142 who were beggars, and 64 more who lived from charity. Of the women, 181 lived disreputable lives; and 76 members of the family were convicts.

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these, 7 were sentenced for murder. The remainder were more or less addicted to drink.

A specialist stated in a recent temperance publication the result of his investigations. He showed that in 12 families which had been cursed by generations of drunkenness there were 57 children. His report concerning 45 of the 57 children is as follows: 25 died in early infancy. Of the remaining 20 that lived, 5 were idiots, 5 were epileptics, and the remaining 15 were either dwarfed in stature, in some way deformed, or were continual

sufferers from inherited disease.

With such an array of facts and figures, showing in one way or another the pernicious effects of the drink evil, I think it is time for us to consider what, if any, are the efforts to hold in check the evil by the single or united efforts of persons and organizations in different lines of benevolent work.

The day nursery and kindergarten workers show that oftener than otherwise working women come to poverty and the necessity of hard and daily work for the support of themselves and children through the desertion or drunkenness of their husbands.

Concerning settlement work and its efforts in this direction, Rev. H. C. Haydn, of Cleveland, writes: "We have no plans as to the liquor traffic, except to study the neighborhood, try to change public sentiment, and work upon childhood and the home. It is easy to trace the connection of criminal poverty with this business. Bettering the homes of the poor and their environments will help childhood and the family to better health, contentment, and less craving for drink. But we make no head against the liquor traffic, as such, any of us; and we down the drink evil only in the individual that 'downs' it. In the present state of politics, what hope is there? We and all settlement workers are on the slow principle of leavening the locality, and bringing in a better sentiment. "

To all who are desirous of studying the legislative aspect of the liquor problem, I commend "The Liquor Problem," the report of the Committee of Fifty on that subject, a duodecimo volume of something over 300 pages, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. of Boston and New York. The results of investigations that required over a year of hard work are given in this book.

The Law and Order League and the Ohio Anti-saloon League are two prominent organizations in Ohio that are trying to solve the

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liquor problem by purifying the politics of the State and amending some of its liquor legislation. Superintendent Russell of the latter organization emphasizes the fact that his league does not hire lawyers nor detectives, nor try cases in court in the prosecution of the law-breaker. "Our State Board," he adds, "is a unit in approval of the opinion of Rev. Dr. Gladden, to the effect that it is preposterous that the people of a municipality should take up directly the enforcement of law when there is a legal method of keeping the public peace, and there are sworn officers to do this very thing.

"The province of our league," he adds, "is simply to stir up a public demand, which will compel the public officers to fulfil their obligations, to stand by them when they do their duty, and, when they fail in this respect, to endeavor at the next municipal election to elect those who will. . . . We believe that, where public sentiment cannot through such ways of work be brought to a pitch where officers will dare to do their duty, failure will also follow under the law and order plan. . . . Attempts to usurp the functions and perform the duties of the municipal and county officers end in failure."

The enactment of the cumulative sentence law in Ohio was a good piece of legislation, but up to date for lack of enforcement has been useless to organized charity in its work among the poor. Mr. Akers, however, who is the present director of the city board of charities and correction, gives assurance that he will at once take measures to have the law enforced in its present form. A few years ago, when a member of the workhouse board of management, he saw the necessity of such a law, and since then has been a persistent advocate for the drafting and passage of one. He writes to me, in substance, as follows, concerning his reasons for the law's enforcement. The chronic drunkard will try, as he has never tried before, to cease his drinking, through a wholesome fear of the longer sentences that will now be given. The workhouse, when compelled to turn over part of the prisoner's earnings to the distressed family, will not be losers thereby, because the prisoner during his long confinement becomes a more skilful workman at brush-making. He will spoil less material, and will make more and better brushes. It will also be much better for the family, less pauperizing, and there will be less likelihood that they will suffer for the man's wrong-doing.

IX.

Outdoor Relief.

OUTDOOR RELIEF IN CANADA.

BY AGNES MAULE MACHAR.

In Canada, as throughout the British Empire, we have been congratulating ourselves on the wonderful advance, material and mental, which the world has enjoyed during the last sixty years. Yet, with all our scientific and industrial progress, one spectre still haunts us that no scientific conjuring has been able to lay. Lazarus still sits at the gate of Dives, even amid the pomp and splendor of our Queen's Jubilee.

Baffling as the problem has proved itself, it behooves us to face it as best we can. "Blessed is he that considereth the poor.". It is just consideration-fair, sympathetic, brotherly consideration — that is to-day most urgently needed. It is easy to bestow a hasty alms to relieve distress (or our own pain in contemplating it). It is not difficult, for some, to accept ready-made theories which would forbid, as "pauperizing," the exercise of even true and intelligent charity, and which, vaguely and superficially caught up, supply a convenient excuse to the selfish and the illiberal. It is not so easy, though more needful, to analyze and discriminate; to meet differing needs. by differing methods; to watch opposite evils; and to devise the best way out of the dilemma that confronts us. There is at present so strong a reaction from the old habit of mere almsgiving, derived from a simpler past, that the social pendulum is in danger of swinging to the opposite extreme, so as to risk ignoring the true charity which, like mercy, "blesses him that gives and him that takes.” But not all the political economy in the world can absolve us from the duty of "hearing the needy when he cries" and "dealing out our bread to the hungry," if that be the only thing we can do for