The Arena. Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891

If Mr. Comstock, as his letter to the Woman’s Journal indicates, regarded the mailing of Christian Life a violation of the postal laws, why was no notice taken of it by him or his Chicago agent for almost a year? Why this culpable dereliction of duty until after the anti-vice society and the postal department had been criticised by Mr. Caldwell? It matters not, for the point I wish to emphasize, whether the persecution of Mr. Caldwell, was, as appearances would lead one to infer, a retaliatory stroke in punishment for presuming to criticise the postal department and anti-vice society, or whether the censorship was asleep for the space of ten months and only chanced to wake up after the editor pointed out the iniquity of their proceedings in a case where they had shown uncalled-for vigilance. The fact as shown forth indicates the power and possibilities for evil inherent in an enactment which permits any censorship to wield such power without attaching severe penalties in the event of its being unjustly wielded, for sooner or later, unless these safeguards are present, evils of the gravest character will follow.

The other serious evil which this case most signally emphasizes, cannot be too frequently or strongly stated, and that is, the cruel wrong, the great injustice which a citizen of this republic may suffer, when perfectly innocent, while those who have persecuted him and are guilty of a serious offence before the moral law, escape unscathed. Thus, we find in this case, after many months of weary suspense, months of harassment and anxious thought, and after being put to an expense which to one in Mr. Caldwell’s circumstances was very large, when his case came up for trial before one of the ablest judges in the city, it was promptly dismissed, the judge ruling that the defendant had not violated the law, as had been charged. He was allowed to go forth a free man, but he had no redress against those who had unjustly persecuted him. He was in no way recompensed for the money which he had had to expend to establish his innocence, or paid for the great anxiety and harassment of soul he suffered. The spectacle of an innocent man robbed by the process of law of his money and peace of mind, yet left with no redress, is humiliating to every person who loves justice. A nation may sometimes err on the side of mercy with safety, but no government can afford to be guilty of a palpable injustice even to one of her humblest citizens.

Still another illustration of Pharisaism comes to my mind, a case peculiarly deplorable, because the individual stands so high in the councils of our nation, as well as occupies so prominent a seat in the Christian synagogue. I refer to the case touched upon by Mr. Fawcett in his admirable essay on a “Gambler’s Paradise.” Probably thousands of persons who had applauded the Postmaster-General’s persistent efforts to crush out lotteries, were amazed beyond measure on seeing in the metropolitan press, day after day, statements to the effect that the Postmaster-General had speculated heavily in Reading stock, and was losing vast sums. The press even went so far as to intimate that his credit was no longer good, and so general was the impression that telegrams from different portions of the country were received, inquiring if this high official had failed. To those who had fondly believed that the Postmaster-General was actuated solely by a sincere desire to destroy gambling in his active crusade against the lotteries, these uncontradicted statements from Wall Street came as a rude awakening,—a most painful revelation; for evil as lotteries are, in common with everything that fosters a love for chance and the mania for gambling, it could not be truthfully urged that the lottery was nearly so pernicious in its influence, as that great maelstrom of moral death, that realm of professional gamblers,—Wall Street. The lottery took from one to ten dollars from thousands of pockets monthly, and was a positive evil, in that, while taking these small sums, it fostered the appetite for gambling. But Wall Street is ever sweeping away numbers of fortunes, incidentally driving many of its victims to the suicide’s grave, some to State’s prison, and in a hundred other ways is it poisoning life, and interfering with the happiness of thousands; more, its baleful influence touches most intimately tens of thousands, who in no way are responsible for its existence.

As has been justly observed by a recent thoughtful writer: “The lottery is legalized in only one State in the Union, but gambling in grain is legalized in every State. The lottery is a small evil indeed compared with the speculation shark, who gambles on the price of the very bread our wives and children eat, and puts our daily bread in pawn to squeeze an added cent out of the palm of poverty. No one has to buy a lottery ticket, and it is a man’s own act if he takes the chances of that game, but bread for his little ones he has to buy and in doing so is at the mercy of the gambler.”

Another phase of Wall Street speculation which makes it vicious above other methods of gambling, is seen in the fact that the kings of the street when they engage in a well matured deal, play with “loaded dice.” There is no chance so far as they are concerned. When these highly respectable gamblers who are worth many millions quietly arrange a movement which will greatly increase their holdings they deliberately set to work to mislead the public. Coolly and with the deliberation of master minds they deceive the “street;” and as a result, ruin to many attends success to the few, while with every such movement lives go out in darkness, reputations are ruined, and families are reduced from affluence to penury. Even at the very time when we were informed by the daily press that the Postmaster-General, through the manipulation of the “little wizard,” was losing enormous sums of money, more than one man was driven to suicide by the sudden turn in affairs and one or more banks were forced to the wall. How many happy homes were wrecked, and men of moderate fortunes were reduced to penury by this well-directed stroke of Mr. Gould, will of course never be known, and if the Postmaster-General had chanced to be on the side of the wizard in this gambling deal, would he not have been morally responsible for a share of the wreck and ruin wrought? Nay, more, was he not, as an active participant in this great game of chance, morally responsible to a certain degree? Is there any essential difference between gambling by spending ten dollars for a lottery ticket or ten thousand dollars in railroad stock, which you have been led to believe will be bulled to a fictitious value and which you hope to be able to unload on some one else at an enormous advance? In each instance it is purely a game of chance for all save those who are within the Wall Street ring, who control sufficient money and stocks to dictate the course of the game and to whom there is no risk. The Louisiana lottery is a positive evil, a cancerous sore on the body politic. But Wall Street is a far greater evil; it is a cancer whose roots have already fastened upon the vitals of our political, educational, and religious institutions; an evil which nothing can remedy, save a political revolution of the great earnest masses of our people. The pulpit is abashed in its presence because so many leading lights and pillars in each wealthy congregation are connected with the “street,” which is the polite way of designating “gamblers” who delve in stock speculation. The press, with honorable and noble exceptions, wink at this great plague spot, while loudly crying for laws to correct comparatively harmless evils. The political parties depend too much upon the kings of the “Street” for the sinews of war in great campaigns, to lift a voice against it. The “Saloon” and the “Street,” two colossal curses, cast their swart and portentous shadow over the palaces and hovels of a great nation, yet by virtue of their power, the Church and State, the clergy and the politicians, remain silent or temporize in their presence. The Republic needs to-day, as never before, true men in every official station,—men who are clean, conscientious, frank, and upright; men who, while strictly honorable and pure in life and action, are also broad-minded, tolerant, and large-brained; men unswayed by partisanship or bigotry; statesmen rather than politicians; and, above all, men that are in no wise tainted with Pharisaism.

CANCER SPOTS IN METROPOLITAN LIFE

Some months ago I wrote of a phase of wretchedness in our great cities, which I designated “Uninvited Poverty.” I confined myself to the examination of those who may be properly designated the helpless victims of adverse fate. There are other phases of misery, however, which result from sin, on the part of the immediate sufferers. In my former paper I spoke of suffering where the wretchedness sprang from sin at the head of the social fountain. But I now wish to notice especially misery, degradation, and moral eclipse, resulting directly from giant evils, which are tolerated in all our large cities, though known to every thoughtful person, from judge to artisan, from clergyman to sexton, from editor to reporter, from wealthy matron to the humble sewing woman. Every earnest thinker knows that there are evils feeding the furnaces of physical, mental, and moral destruction; that there are flourishing nurseries, common schools, and universities of crime, degradation, and death. Yet the great churches slumber on, their melodious chimes call the self-satisfied to cushioned seats where are heard expositions of ancient lore and legends of a vanished past, with incidental and general reference to the conditions of to-day, enabling the children of wealth, who vainly imagine they are the disciples of Jesus, to spend a comfortable hour and perchance contribute to carrying the Gospel to some nature-favored heathen land, never as yet cursed by rum and other evils which flourish with tropical luxuriance in all civilized countries, and which ever follow with blighting, corroding, and life-destroying influence in the wake of our boasted modern civilization. Two great evils confront every thoughtful American citizen to-day. One the oppression of the poor and the unfortunate; the other, the omnipresent cancer spots in metropolitan life, the infection of which is reaching the highest circles of Boulevard society and penetrating the cellars of the tenement houses. Recently a little work has been published which deals chiefly with what we may term the “cancer spots of social life” in one of America’s great cities.5 It is prepared by an earnest Christian gentleman, who has had a committee of conscientious men and women investigating the actual conditions in the social cellar of Chicago. The author states that his purpose is not to show that Chicago is an exception to the general rule in regard to poverty, crime, or degradation. He merely desires to indicate deplorable facts as they exist in this great city to show how dire destitution is working havoc with the children of men almost under the shadow of the palaces of those who profess to be Christians. He cites as an illustration of the extreme poverty in Chicago the fact that when the compulsory education law went into effect, the inspectors found in the squalid region, a great number of children so destitute, that they were absolutely unfit to attend school; decency forbidding that the sexes in far more than semi-nude condition should mingle in the school-rooms, and although a number of noble-hearted ladies banded together and decently clothed three hundred of these almost naked boys and girls, they were compelled to admit the humiliating fact that they had only reached the outskirts, while the great mass of poverty had not been touched. A faint idea of the extent of poverty in this one city may be gained from the following facts from the record of one of the city police stations.

On one night last February, one hundred and twenty-four destitute homeless men begged for shelter in the cells; of this number sixty-eight were native born Americans. The station was so crowded, that in one cell, eight by nine and a half feet, fourteen men passed the night, some standing a part of the night, while others lay packed like sardines. After a time, those on the floor exchanged places with the poor creatures who had been standing. The following incident related is as typical as it is pathetic: An old man, cold, homeless, destitute, not knowing where to lay his head, was seen to take a shovel and deliberately break a window in a store opposite a police station. He was immediately arrested. “What did you do that for?” demanded the officer. “‘Cos I was hungry and cold and knew if you got me I could have food and shelter.” He was taken care of after he had broken the law. There is something radically wrong with social conditions which compel men who find every avenue from exposure and starvation closed, to become lawbreakers in order to live. Some months ago, one of the Chicago dailies instituted an inquiry to find out as nearly as possible the number of men out of work in that city; the returns gave a total of 40,000 adults who had nothing to do. In connection with this fact I quote from the author of “Chicago’s Dark Places”:—

At a meeting of the Trades Association a motion was made to the effect that the Association request the mayor of the city and the director of the World’s Fair to issue a proclamation declaring that the city was flooded with idle men, and warning the unemployed of other cities and districts not to come here as there was not work for them.

The following morning a reporter waited upon the mayor and asked him what he would do if the resolution were presented to him. His immediate reply was to the effect that he would gladly issue such a proclamation, especially mentioning the fact that there were 20,000 unemployed men in the city already.

Now look at the two statements, and you see the awfulness of the fact, no matter which estimate is accepted as correct. Suppose you strike a balance between the two (although the Trades Association inclines to believe the Globe’s figures are the more accurate), and you have the appalling assurance that 30,000 unemployed men are wandering through the streets of this city seeking work. Even granted that the mayor’s conservative estimate is most correct, the fearful fact still remains that our peace is menaced by twenty thousand men who have not the necessary work to earn their daily bread.

These facts most conclusively refute the statements too often made that “men won’t work,” and “there’s work enough if men are only willing to do it.” Such is not the truth. I can find you many instances where good, steady workmen have offered to the foremen of certain establishments $10, $25, and even the whole of the first month’s wages if they would find them employment.

One laboring man being interrogated by one of the commissioners who gathered the facts for the author of this work, replied to the question, “What can you say for those who won’t work, who are commonly called the ‘bums of society’?” in such a thoughtful and suggestive way that I give his words verbatim.

“Let me ask, What is a bum? As a rule, you will find him to be a creature degraded by circumstances and evil conditions. Let me illustrate. A man loses his job by sickness or some other unavoidable cause. He seeks work, and I have shown you how difficult it is to find it. He fails time and time again. Is there any wonder that he grows discouraged, and that, picking up his meals at the free lunch counter, sleeping in the wretched lodging houses, associating with the filthy and degraded, he, step by step, drifts further away from the habits of integrity and industry that used to be a part of himself? He sinks lower and lower until, overcome by circumstances, he is at the bottom of the social ladder,—at once a menace and a disgrace to the city. Instead of blaming and condemning him, poor fellow, we should look at the circumstances that made him what he is, and endeavor to remedy them.”

It is not, however, with the uninvited poverty which flourishes in every great city of America that the work chiefly deals. It paints most thrillingly the darker and more terrible side of social conditions; where crime and debauchery mingle with poverty; where every breath of air is heavy with moral contagion. I have only space to notice briefly two of the great evils described,—the saloon and the disreputable concert halls, as these seem to me the greatest curses touched upon.

THE SALOON CURSE

First in the list of crime-producing, soul-destroying evils of metropolitan life, rises the saloon, the deadly upas of the nineteenth century civilization, the black plague of moral life. In Chicago there are about 5,600 saloons. During the year ending March 1, 1891, observes the author of “Chicago’s Dark Places,” the expenditure for beer in Chicago alone was not less than forty million dollars ($40,000,000). He continues:—

“The population is about 1,200,000. This gives an average expenditure for beer alone of $33.25 for every man, woman, and child in Chicago, and these results are gained after the most conservative figuring. This would give over fifty-three gallons of beer to be consumed by each man, woman, and child in the city.

“We are told that Germany is a great beer-drinking country, and yet the official statistics for 1888 show that in Germany only twenty-five gallons per capita were drunk. Our estimate for Chicago shows more than double that per capita.

“Let us look now and see what this immense sum of $40,000,000 annually spent in beer might do for this city if wisely expended. It would supply to 40,000 Chicago families an income of $1,000 a year, or over $83 a month.

“Where would our Chicago poverty be, if $40,000 families were each spending in legitimate trade $83 a month? Workmen would be in demand, and business would so increase as to make Chicago in ten years the leading city on this continent; or, take this money and spend it directly in building beautiful new homes for the workingmen of this city, and what should we see?

“Fourteen thousand commodious cottages built at a cost of $2,500 each, on lots which, bought in acreage in a suburban district, could be deeded to the workingmen at $180 each, and these, together with a check for another $180, given to each family to help in furnishing the houses they owned. What an aggregation of domestic happiness in home life, and all for the money spent in beer for one year alone.

“Now, if Chicago’s expenditure for beer only amounts to $40,000,000 we may safely say that for all kinds of intoxicating beverages, including wines and distilled liquors, Chicago spent last year upwards of eighty millions of dollars. Is there any limit to the great good that could come to the city with this amount expended in proper channels?”

Another well-taken point is the lawlessness of the saloon power. It is essentially a law-defying, crime-breeding, and disorder-producing element, a terrible arraignment, yet no one can question the truth of the last two charges, while its lawless character is seen in the facts set forth in this volume wherein it is shown, (1) that the Brewer’s Association pays the costs of all the suits and defends all of its members, whether they have violated the laws or not. (2) The saloons are required to close on Sunday, yet a large number totally ignore the law, running every Sunday. (3) They are required not to sell to minors without a written order from parents or guardian, and yet there are thousands of saloons which pay no attention to this requirement. (4) They are forbidden to harbor women of bad repute, and yet we are informed that one saloon in Chicago keeps from twenty-five to forty harlots, while in hosts of other saloons special arrangements are made for the gratifying of all forms of nameless immorality which springs from lust fed and inflamed by rum.

The influence of the saloon on the young is one of the most serious phases of the many-sided evils of the liquor traffic. All persons who know anything about the effect of strong drink freely indulged in, know that like opium, it weakens when it does not destroy the moral nature; it wipes out the line of moral rectitude from mental discernment; it feeds the fires of animal passion as coal feeds a furnace; it drys up the soul and shrivels the higher impulses and nobler aspirations of its victims. Yet we are told that in a saloon under one of the newspaper offices in Chicago one night, fourteen boys and girls from fourteen to seventeen years of age were seen to enter; and to show that this is an evil by no means confined to Chicago, facts gathered from other reliable sources are cited from which we find that nine hundred and eighty-three young men and boys were seen to enter nineteen saloons in Albany, Indiana, one evening within one hour and a half. On a certain evening in Milwaukee four hundred sixty-eight persons were seen to enter a single saloon, most of whom were young men and boys.

The question is often asked how it is that society tolerates such a confessed violator of law and order as the saloon has demonstrated itself to be. If an individual defied the law as a large number of the saloon keepers do, he would be quickly punished. Nay, more, if a poor, starving man steals a loaf of bread to appease his gnawing hunger, or to save the life of his starving family, he is sent to prison, that the majesty of the law may be vindicated. But when a saloon-keeper breaks the law in keeping open on Sunday in selling liquor to minors, or in making his saloon a rendezvous for women of bad repute, nothing is said because (1) of the moral apathy throughout the web and woof of Christian society; (2) professing Christians are more loyal to party-hacks and demagogues than they are to their own homes and their country, (3) the saloon is a unit in its voting strength, loyal to its tools and relentless to its foes, and the voting power of the saloon element in any great city when united with the voting strength of the Christian element in either of the great parties, turns the scales for the minions of the rum power. Let me illustrate. In Chicago there is about 5,600 saloons. These saloons will average not less than two voters to the saloon, the proprietor and the bar-keeper; as a matter of fact, I expect four votes would come nearer the correct figures, as numbers of saloons have several bar-tenders. But placing the number at two, we have a voting strength of 11,200. Now each one in this army can surely influence four persons, many can influence from six to ten votes, but placing the figures at four, we have the enormous total of 44,800 voters to be added to the 11,200 engaged in the traffic, giving a startling aggregate of 56,000 voters, which the saloon power can count on with reasonable certainty, when any measure affecting its interests is to be acted upon, or when persons are to be elected who can enforce or ignore laws enacted to restrict the liquor evil. This argument presented to the political parties is usually irresistible; they simply permit the saloon element to dictate its policy and its candidates. And against this army of home destroyers, this solid battalion of evil, this power which prostitutes political integrity, destroys virtue, breeds crime, fills prisons with victims and homes with misery, and requires the expenditure on the part of the government of millions of dollars in punishing the criminals and the paupers it annually makes,—I say against this army engaged under the banner of the rum traffic, what counteracting opposition is springing from the home loving, the upright and pure-minded citizens of our great cities? What concerted action is the church with her tens of thousands of communicants putting forth? It would be an easy matter to thwart the allied power of rum, if a few persons in every church and every society for ethical improvement were ablaze with moral enthusiasm, and wise enough to adopt lines of action similar to those successfully carried out by the liquor interest. For example: Suppose in every church four or six earnest men and women form a league for the protection of the home; let them secure the pledge of every voter in the church who has love for his fellow-men and respect for decent government, that he will vote for no man for any office who patronizes the saloon, who fraternizes with the liquor element, or who is supported by the rum shops, and that he will use all honorable means to further good government, by seeking the advancement to office of pure and upright citizens. Something like that would be all that would be necessary for the general membership to sign. Then let each league appoint an executive committee of three or five to act precisely as do officers in an army, to confer with the executive committee of other leagues to secretly arrange or map out a campaign, and to give commands to the army. It would be an easy matter to poll the saloon vote in such a way as to ascertain exactly where it stood in cases where there was a question as to the position of candidates, after which the word could be given that no votes be cast for the choice of the saloon element. I am speaking now chiefly of municipal elections, as they most intimately affect the saloon power in our great cities. If something like this policy was followed, and every church had its active league, it would not be long before there would be enrolled on the side of pure government and true morality, an army far eclipsing in strength and number the rum element, an army that could easily turn the balance of power into the hands of high-minded citizens, who would enforce the laws with equal justice, without fear or favor. I merely throw out this as a hint of what might be accomplished, because it has become fashionable for good but easy-going people to dismiss these matters with the remark that nothing practical can be done to meet the demoralizing and degrading power of the saloon.