Library Collections: Document: Full Text


American Charities

Creator: Amos G. Warner (author)
Date: 1908
Publisher: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York
Source: Straight Ahead Pictures Collection

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The number of habitual drunkards is, however, comparatively small, and destitution occasioned by them, though serious enough, is not the real menace to society. On the other hand it must be acknowledged that by far the larger proportion of those who drink do not fall into distress. It is only when it accompanies idleness, incompetence, sickness, neglect of family obligations, that the effects of casual and social drinking become obviously destructive. When we know why the average man drinks, "we shall be on the road to thorough temperance reform. Does the laboring man spend his margin in drink because of exhaustion in his trade, or because he has nowhere to go except to the saloon, or because it is the only cheap and pleasurable mental stimulus open to him? Mr. Booth mentions that the bicycle has been a preventive of drinking among clerks in London. To sum up: intemperance, as a cause of dependence, is symptomatic; on the one hand of defect and deterioration of personal character, on the other of those wasting, monstrous, and oppressive social conditions which produce abnormal appetites and antisocial conduct.

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In the tables of the causes of poverty, the column next to the one giving the percentages for intemperance includes under "other moral defects" the very small number of cases in which poverty has been traced directly to "immorality." This term is here used to stand for sexual licentiousness, or other perversion of the sexual instinct. But the small number of cases of poverty directly attributable to this factor in no wise reflects its importance. Careful observers believe it to be a more constant and fundamental cause of degeneration than intemperance. It certainly produces degeneration of a more or less pronounced type in a much larger number of persons. It persists almost to the end in the most degenerate stock, while at the same time it is operative among the healthier classes. A reference to the accounts quoted later on, describing the habits of the Rooneys, the Jukes, and the Ishmaels, will show that in these distinctly pauper families sexual vice plays a part in degradation more important than intemperance.

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The medical profession has given us even less of scientific exposition of the degeneration which results from perversion of the sexual instincts than of that which comes from the abuse of stimulants and narcotics. The changes which must undoubtedly take place in the structure of the nervous and circulatory systems, as a consequence of self-abuse or sexual excess, have not been sufficiently studied. Venereal disease has been treated at length, but the effect upon the physical and mental man of vice as vice has been neglected. The great bulk of literature existing upon the subject is simply the output of advertising quacks.

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No boy among boys, or man among men, can have failed to have evidence thrust upon him showing that a very great amount of vitality is burnt out by the fires of lust. Among the rougher classes of day laborers upon railroads, in quarries, and even upon the farms, the whole undercurrent of thought, so far as conversation gives evidence of it, is thoroughly base and degrading. In many cases inefficiency certainly results from the constant preoccupation of the mind with sensual imaginings. At the present day, a given amount of such preoccupation will diminish a man's industrial efficiency more than ever before, because of the increasing importance of the mental element in all work. If a man has brute strength, he can shovel dirt quite passably, even though his thoughts are elsewhere. But most of the occupations of the present require alertness and sustained attention. Railroad day laborers, and others of a similar class, are very commonly kept from rising in the industrial scale by their sensuality, and it is this and the resulting degeneration that finally converts many of them into lazy vagabonds. The inherent uncleanness of their minds prevents them from rising above the rank of day laborers, and finally incapacitates them even for that position. It may also be suggested that the modern man has a stronger imagination than the man of a few hundred years ago, and that sensuality destroys him the more rapidly. A highly developed nervous system makes him a more powerful man, if it is properly used, but it enables him to destroy himself more promptly if that be his tendency.

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In addition to the direct effect of the perversion of the sexual instincts must be reckoned the ravages of venereal disease. Among the degraded class it is accounted a mark of manliness to have had syphilis until exposure to it is no longer dangerous, from 25 to 30 per cent of the Juke family were tainted with it. It is this disease cooperating with drunkenness that finally brings the prostitute and her consort through the hospital to the almshouse. There are probably few almshouses in the country where some of the inmates are not paupers in part because of its effects upon them; it is not easy to visit a foundling hospital of any size, or a children's hospital, where this disease is not especially excluded, without finding children in bitter and hopeless misery because of congenital syphilis. The doctors administer remedies which give temporary relief, but the doctors themselves often express a belief that the best thing that can be hoped for such children is an early death.

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