Extracts from the Address of Rev. W. F. Crafts at the Rocky River Conference.

White Ribbon, Volume 5, Issue 54, 1 December 1899, Page 9

Extracts from the Address of Rev. W. F. Crafts at the Rocky River Conference.

“ Permit me as a specialist to point out some of the newlines of study while giving you, in brief, the nineteenth century’s verdict on the drink curse. I shall poll a jury, whose right to speak impartially, or at least with no prejudice on our side, will not be chal lenged, a jury in which none are temperance specialists, but all outsiders, most of whom come to the question from the standpoints of science and business. The foreman of our jury is the insurance actuary, a composite juryman re presenting this whole profession, who tells us in the name of statistical science, in the interest of business, that even such very moderate drinking as does not cut a man off from insure ce alto gether injures health and shortens life. This on the basis of half a century’s records in English and American insurance companies. In British companies where total abstainers and moderate drinkers are classified separately and rebates are divided in each at sta f ed periods in proportion to how much each class fall short of the expected mortality, it has been found that the mo-

derate drinkers die about as expected, but the total abstainers persist in outliving their appointed time and get twenty to thirty per cent rebates. Emory McClintock shows that abstainers out live the moderate drinkers to the same degree in this country, and at last they are tardily demanding that they shall receive their due in rebates by being separately classified.

The insurance verdict is that to the average, normal man, tippling is killing.

Our second juryman is the railway president, another composite juryman, who, speaking for the railways of the country as a whole, tells 11s that nearly all railways forbid employes to drink while on duty, and that an increasing number are refusing to employ anyone who is not an abstainer at all times. Modern machinery is too delicate and the damages of drunkenness to property and life too great to trust an engine or even a switch to a fuddle 1 brain.

Perhaps we shall sometime learn that as clear brains are needed to run a government as to run a freight train. Our third jurym «n is a composite banker who speaks for a symposium of bankers which showed that bankers increasingly prefer total abstainers for tellers and bookeepers. Even a little alcohol may fuddle a brain enough to make a serious mistake in the swift and numerous mathematical calculations. Even a little createsa desire for more, and more leads to costly vices and consequent embezzlements.

Our fourth juryman is the commis sioner of the United States bureau o labour, wl o speaks fo.'his wl o’e force cd specialists. We will quote “by the book ” from his twelfth annual report, devoted by order of Congress to the “ Economic Aspe ts o the Liquor Question.” He questioned employers all over the country, liquor dealers included, as to whether they require employes to be abstainers. The result ; stated in these words; “More than half the establishments reporting req fire in ertain occupations and under ctrtai 1 circumstances that employes shall not use intoxicating liquors.’ The report seems to me to have taken too narrow a range. It should have shown the bearing of the liquor traffic on our two chief economic problem-;, the unemployed and the farmer. But our fifth juryman, the superintendent of: the last census, will give us a verdict on this. The census show's that, of each dollar spent for books and printing, thirty eight cents goes to labour ; of every

dollar spent in hats and caps, thirtyseven cents goes to labour, and so down the list to tlie bottom where stands the liquortraffic, paying labourof each dollar received only two cents in the case of whisky, only one when the sale is beer. This means that if the money spent for drink w’ere spent for the twenty chief comforts of life, one and one-third million more would be employed providing for all the unemployed willing to work, even in panic years, and the farmers would get 5f00,000,000 more for raw materials.

Our sixth juryman is the chief of the Massachusetts bureau of labour, who speak.-, for his expert assistants also, by order of the State Legislature, as to the influence of intoxicating liquors in promoting crime and pauperism, in his twentysixth annual report, 1896. He reports that of the paupers in that State sixtyfive and one-fourth per cent were known to be addicted to the use of intoxicating drinks, and that eighty-two per cent of the criminals were “in liquor” at the time of committing the offence. A yet larger proportion of the criminals, ninetyfour per cent, were addicted to the use of liquors. He shows also that arrests increase when the plan of no-license is changed to license, and vice versa; also that fifty-one per cent of the insane were addicted to drink.

Our seventh juryman is the chairman of the “ committee of fifty,” made up of millionaires andcollege professors, some of them drinking men, and none of them temperance specialists. I think it not unfair to say that this juryman while seeking to be impartial, may fairly be supposed to be prejudiced against radical temperance views. It is all the more significant, therefore, that even this juryman finds that twenty-five per cent of those aided by charity organization societies, outside of poorhouses, “owed their poverty to the personal use of liquor.” The report adds, “In the case of t e almshouses, the liquor habit played a much larger part.” Our eighth juryman, more familiar with poverty and crime, is a composite expert in charities and corrections. He reports from a symposium of 816 alms house superintendents in the New Voice of August 12, 1899, that fifty-one perce t of the paupers came to the poor house by way of the saloon ; also from a sym po .i um of a thousand jailers, in the same paper, that seventy-two per cent of the crime in licensed states and thirty seven per cent in prohibition states is due to drink.

Our ninth juryman is a composite charity specialist, who tells us that drink is the chief cause of poverty in the name of such men as Professo r J.J McCook of Hartford, specialist on tramps, aul John Hums, labour leader in the British Parliament, and Charles Booth, chief authority on the condition of the poor of London, and Charles Doring Bace, who speaks with like authority for New York, and Edward Everett Hale, foun. der of more charitable societies than any other living man. Our tenth juryman is Continental science personified. He tells us that so far from wine checking intemperance by substituting the less of two evils, h lance consumes more alcohol —reducing all drinks to that - than any other nation, and that the leading scientific and medical bodies, alarmed by the increased use of absinthe, have asked the government to restrain and reduce the drink curse. Our eleventh juryman shall l>e the ty pical Anglo Saxon Kipling. His books are so odorous with drink that they are l>eing excluded from Sabbath school libraries, and he makes no secret of his own drinking, yet he tells how in a con cert hall in the city of Buffalo, he saw two young men get two girls drunk, and then lead them reeling down a dark street. ‘ Then,” he says, ‘ recanting previous opinions, 1 became a Prohibitionist. ... I have been a fool

in writing to the contrary.” Our twelfth juryman shall be the composite Anglo-Saxon soldier, who re ports that one hundred living military officers. Lord Wolsey. Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener and ninety-seven American commanders including every one that has officially spoken on the subject, with the notable and welcome exception of Eagan, has condemned even b>er—that was the only drink in que; t ion—as the foe of health and order and that as a consequence Congress ordered its banishment in a law which the Re form Bureau had the honour to write. Let not the lawlessness of those who re fused to enforce i ' becloud the lac t tli.it the passage of the law by Congress was the greatest victory of the last ten years The principles of total abstinence and prohibition were thus endorsed. In the words of General Carlin. 4 lt is use less to dis riminate between the army and other people ’ If beer is bad for health and order in the army, it is a foe to both everywhere, and its total sup prossion everywhere should be our goal. This is the nineteenth cen ury verdict the verdict of science .and bus ness; much more of patriotism an 1 religion.’