The Distracted Preacher (18 page)

But the desire is uncontrollable, and therefore the indulgence is innocent. This may be said of all desire which culminates in conduct; and in a certain sense, all desire is uncontrollable which is not controlled. Hence the sin is really in the mind, not in the action. But is the desire for drink uncontrollable? Wonderful stories have descended to us from Marc, Macnish, and other old authors as to drunkards preferring a plunge into Tartarus to abstention from one draught of brandy; and perhaps they are truly recorded. But to a drunkard Tartarus seems a long way off, and perhaps he thinks it will not be very hot there after all. Moreover it does not cost him much to say what he would dare to do. Has anyone tried in vain upon a drunkard the certain infliction of an immediate pain, or the refusal of a pleasure greater than his drink? I can give a case in which the pleasure was not apparently very great. Many old Rugbeians will remember, as I do, J. S.,the clever, amusing drunkard, who used to entertain their boyhood with music and legerdemain in the dining halls. After a heavy debauch he made a bet of one guinea with Mr. Sam Bucknill, the old school doctor, that he would not get drunk again for a twelvemonth, and he won it. He waited until midnight of the last day of his sobriety, and then steadily recommenced the process of drinking himself into his grave. He was never sober again.

There is, however, one practical, business-like point of view from which the agitation for a law of compulsory detention in inebriate asylums has arisen. We learn from Dr. Peddie's paper read before the last meeting of the British Medical Association that these institutions under the present law are
not remunerative,
because the inmates will not remain in them a sufficient length of time to make them so. This fact, that they do not pay, has prevented such a liberal expenditure as would make them attractive; for Dr. Peddie thinks that the bodily comforts and the amusements of the incarcerated drunkards ought to be very carefully provided for, “pleasing the palate with good culinary arrangements,” “inducements for sport in the way of fishing and shooting,” and the prison bars generally gilded as much as possible. If Parliament will only be so good as to pass a law which will sanction “compulsory commitments” and “prolonged detentions,” then these enterprises would come to resemble the “many existing and thriving lunatic retreats.”

This is outspoken at least, but whether Parliament will come to the rescue “of inebriate institutions which have struggled under cramping difficulties “ by adopting a new principle of criminal legislation seems more than doubtful. The knot seems scarcely worthy of such unravelment. It was unfortunate that Dr. Dalrymple, earnest and honest as he was, should have visited the United States to study the operation of the inebriate laws at the time he did. And still more so that his Committee should have been so much led by the evidence of his American witnesses. Even that cautious and enlightened statesman, Dr. Playfair, has admitted that his opinion, originally hostile to the proposed law, was changed by the evidence he heard, although I think at the present time he holds his judgment in suspense. When Mr. Dalrymple visited the States, the inebriate asylums there possessed to some extent the confidence of the public. And the Empire State and the Keystone State, and also the city of New York even, possessed such institutions of their own at Binghampton and Media and Ward's Island, supported partly out of public funds. Moreover, State laws had been enacted and were in operation, authorizing the commitment and compulsory detention of habitual drunkards in these asylums. Moreover, the Government of Upper Canada had built, or were building, an inebriate asylum at Hamilton, and had passed an Act similar to the New York Act to authorize commitment and detention therein. The inebriate asylum movement was in the early swing of apparent success, and the statements of results were readily accepted from the enthusiastic but interested men of whose worth and work they were a measure. I have carefully read the evidence which Mr. Dalrymple gave before his own Committee, and I am bound to say that under the circumstances in which he saw the inebriate institutions of America, it seems to me eminently fair and impartial. It could not fail to have an immense effect upon the minds of the other members of his Committee. But, in addition, the Committee examined at great length Dr. Parrish, the superintendent of the Pennsylvania State Asylum at Media, and Dr. Dodge, the superintendent of the New York State Asylum at Binghampton, who supplemented Mr. Dalrymple's evidence with statements of facts of which they professed to be cognizant, and especially with the very weighty fact that they absolutely cured about 34 percent of their drunkard patients, though, indeed, in one place Dr. Parrish says, “There is no such thing as apermanent cure of anything.”

Last year I visited the United States, and found that the condition and position of inebriate asylums there had undergone a great change since Mr. Dalrymple's visit in 1871. First I will mention changes of public notoriety. The State Inebriate Asylum at Media had been suppressed because it was said to be a failure. The New York Inebriate Asylum in Ward's Island had been ordered to be suppressed for the same reason. At Binghampton Dr. Dodge had left, and Dr. Congdon was carrying on his work with no better success. The Government at Albany had consented to give the institution a trial for one more year, after which time, unless it redeemed its character, the building was to be devoted to other purposes. In consequence of the failure in the States, the Government of Upper Canada had converted the building they had erected for an inebriate asylum into a lunatic asylum, and they had repealed the statute for the control of inebriates.

The New York statute has not been repealed, but it has been decided in the Supreme Court that it is unconstitutional, and it is therefore now never acted upon. The ground of this decision was that an intemperate American is a citizen not only of his own State, but of the United States, and that the State has no right to deprive a citizen of the United States of his liberty for conduct which is not criminal. In America the law is strained to permit drunkards who are not insane to be sent to asylums. In Maryland they are classified in a ward apart, and Dr. Conrad, the superintendent of the State Hospital there, said in a public discussion at which I was present —

“We have one hall [ward] devoted to inebriates or dipsomaniacs. The experience which I have had in the hospital has been confined to a class known as dipsomaniacs. Many have been coming to the hospital for several years, scarcely making an endeavour to withhold from drinking three days. /
do not know of a single case where a cure has been affected by confinement.”

My own impressions of the inebriate asylums of America—and I visited six of them—are most unfavourable. I believe the treatment of habitual drunkards for the cure of their supposed disease to be unsound from top to bottom and everywhere. I make no exception; for the only institution in which I did find good, honest, earnest work being done was the inebriate
Reformatory
at Philadelphia, in the management of which the idea of curing a disease is steadfastly put on one side. All honour is due to the devoted men and women who labour in this place at the regeneration of their fallen fellow-citizens. But elsewhere I saw and heard nothing to show that any earnest effort was being made to change the habits of the inmates, or that the so-called institutions were anything more or better than boarding-houses within the walls of which the open consumption of strong drink was discountenanced; “capital places to pick up in after adebauch,” as more than one inmate told me; “but good for nothing else.” All the inmates whom I questioned admitted that without the slightest difficulty they could obtain what drink they liked during their daily walks, and with still greater freedom some of them ridiculed the supposed restraints of other institutions through which they had previously passed. It was not one of the labours of Hercules even to have a private store of drink within the asylum. The physician to a neighbouring hospital told me that on the occasion of some private theatricals at the inebriate asylum for the city of New York, he visited four of the inmates in their own rooms, and each one of them was able to offer him the choice of spirits out of his own cupboard. In fact, these American inebriate asylums seemed in some way to be part of the great whisky fraud.

At Binghampton especially, which I visited in company with Dr. John Gray of Utica, and Dr. Burr, one of the governors, the utter hollowness,or rather the total absence of any attempt at discipline and treatment was most obvious. One young man I did find shut up in a small room in the basement, and I was told that he had been there for ten days for repeated acts of drunkenness and for abusing the doctor. His friends refused to remove him, and the doctor hesitated to turn him out of doors penniless. But the other inmates, whom I found an educated, intelligent set of men, spoke very freely of the absence of all restraint. I was also told that the conversation and behaviour of the inmates, most of whom had led dissolute lives, was far more amusing than edifying. On the whole I came to the conclusion, that if Binghampton does cure 34 per cent. of habitual drunkards, the air of the place must be remarkably salubrious.

I heard also some account of those domestic mischiefs which Bentham anticipated in the passage I have quoted; of intemperate husbands who had been robbed of liberty that their wives might enjoy licence, and of other abuses which the evil passions of men and women are sure to suggest, with such a facile instrument as
lettres de cachet
for an imputed vice, for they referred to the time when committals were in force. On going through these institutions my mind was strongly moved with the inward question—How am I to know that these people are habitual drunkards or drunkards at all? In a lunatic asylum I can pick out any sane man who is wrongfully detained, but these men differ in nothing from myself except that they are said to be more prone to yield to a certain temptation. If compulsory detention be permitted, will it not often be used most wrongfully? for no one can distinguish the right from the wrong persons to whom it may be applied. But even if these places had been as successful as they have been the opposite, what sufficient precedent could they afford for a grave change in our law? They are occupied by a small number of inmates drawn from the well-to-do classes of society, of whom Mr. Dalrymple says, “The thing which struck me very forcibly was the
exceeding luxury
of the better class of patients but then they pay £10 week.”

Probably all the inebriate asylums of the United States do not contain 250 inmates, a very small datum to draw heavy conclusions from. We have larger material than that in the inebriate asylums of our own country, from which we might, if we took the trouble, obtain trustworthy statistics. I do not know what the statistics of permanent reform in them may be, although, judging from the freely expressed opinions of medical men, they are by no means encouraging. The superintendent of one of the best of them, however, let me a little behind the scene as to what became of his old patients. He told me that the number of patients who passed through his house during the year was considerable, that not a week passed without patients going out and new ones coming in, and that of those whose history he had been able to follow, a very large proportion died within two years; and this is exactly what a physician would expect.

Finally, I think we have no data which would justify us in appealing to the legislature for a new law, which would curtail in a most anomalous manner the liberty of the subject, on the plea of promoting the cure of habitual drunkenness. I do not think this fear of interference with the liberty of the subject “balderdash,” as it was called at the British Medical Association meeting. Habitual drunkenness which can be distinguished as a form of mental disease can be dealt with under the lunacy laws. A London physician told the Parliamentary Committee that he had a great many such patients in his private asylum. “Perhaps there had been a little undue straining of the law to receive them,” but there had been “faint scintillations of aberration,” &c, which justified the medical man in certifying the insanity.

There need, however, be no straining of the lunacy laws when any real symptoms of insanity coexist with habitual drunkenness; though as a matter of convenience, regarding the detail of treatment, such cases might perhaps be classified apart, either in separate wards or in a separate asylum.

It is no part of the duty of the State to deal by penal enactments with intentions and dispositions, and therefore, in dealing with drunkenness, it can only regard the overt act. Mr. Hill, the late recorder of Birmingham, once proposed that it should be made legal for the police to secure and detain all the wellknown habitual criminals of that town, forming an extremely small fractional part of its inhabitants, by which preventive measure he showed that crime with all its consequences could be almost abolished; but the mischief and danger of punishing a man for what he might do in the future was at once recognized.

The overt acts of the drunkard ought to be punished in such a way as to make them a real warning, and especially the act of public drunkenness,which is a kind of indecent exposure; also failure through drunkenness to maintain children, and indeed all drunken conduct which invades the rights of others; and there can be no just reason why the punishment for such acts should not be accumulative. It is unreasonable that magistrates should have to commit the same person from fifty to a hundred times for a constantly-repeated offence, and the remedy would appear to be a
penitentiary
for habitual drunkard offenders, in which they should be compelled to earn their maintenance, and from which they should be released
on trial,
and live for a time under the surveillance of the police.

Until some evidence has been procured that adult drunkards are capable of being reformed, all public money expended on
reformatories
ought to be devoted to the reformation of the young whose vices and crimes are to so great an extent the effect of parental intemperance.