ALCOHOL AND MORALS.

White Ribbon, Volume 25, Issue 293, 18 November 1919, Page 10

ALCOHOL AND MORALS.

(By Nurse Ada E. Chappell.)

\ little time since 1 wrote an article on “Food and Morals.” In this artide I want to show the effect on the morals resulting from alcohol, I could go into a detailed account of the effect of alcohol «>n the cells of the brain, particularly those to do with the finest qualities of the human being, but it might weary you, so l will quote first from an article written by Carl F.aston W illiams, published in the “Physical Culture Journal” in America this last August. The title is, “Why We Arc doing to Stay Dry." One part says: “Personal liberty in the use of alcohol is on a plane with personal liberty in the use ot morphine or cocaine, so far as the individual is concerned, but it is also on a par with personal liberty in the matter of reckless driving, which is not only a danger to the driver himself, but a menace to others. Such is booze! Furthermore, we cannot recognise personal liberty in all things, because too many people are children, mentally speaking. Give a calf enough rope, and he will hang himself. A man facing the responsibility to take a drink is like an irresponsible child. After he has had a few drinks lie is morally far less than a child. Did it ever strike you that a few drinks, paralysing the higher brain centres, rob a man of the fruits of thousands of years of mental and moral development (passed on to him by his ancestors), and that a still few more drinks will rob him of the fruits of a million years of revolutionary progress, leaving him something less than a pig?’’ The moderate drinker, who as yet can take it or leave it alone, calls the man “a weak fool” who takes so much as to make his conduct openly disgraceful. It is well for him to remember drink can make a weak fool of the strongest character. He should ask himself, What rank is the drunkard recruited from? Certainly not from the ranks of the total abstainer. So that there can he no other ranks from which they are recruited but those of the moderate drinker. In another part of the same article he goes on to say: “And now for some of the big reasons why we are going to stay dry. The urst of these is one that is usually overlooked by those who glibly say if one wishes to drink it is his own business. Aside from the fact that it is partly the business of society to pro-

tect a member of the D. Phool family from himself, there remains the fundamental truth that t’.*e welfare of others is paramount. To drink or not to drink, that’s not the question. It is not so simple as that. Perhaps aicohol is had enough in its immediate and direct effects to justify prohibition, but its far-reaching evil consequences presents even more urgent reasons for going and staying dry. The next time you sec a blind baby you will ask yourself whether or

not the affliction, innocently acquired, happened in this case to !>e the result of venereal disease contracted by the father during a period of lrresponMbility brought about by alcohol. If vol l will read a little statement published by the War Department Commission on d raining Camp Activities, you will know that gonorrhoea in former years was the cause of eighty per rent, of all blindness, babies’ eyes being infected .it birth. I mention the blind baby for the reason that he or she is a concrete illustration of the relation of alcoholism to disease. . . .

Venereal disease in nearly all cases is contracted in conjunction with the moral irresponsibility of more or intoxication. The saloon and th« brothel have always gone hand In hand. Perhaps the saloon is camouflaged as a restaurant, hotel, cabaret parlour, tearoom, or \ hat not —it is any place where booze is sold. And you may rest assured that no one knows so well as the professional seduccr of the prostitute the invariable relationship between alcoholism and sexual laxity. This is a point that does not admit of any possible di*[.ute. Not only the question of ‘Why girls go wrong,’ but also the question of why boys go wrong in most case*: finds its answer in the paralysis of the higher faculties induced hv drink. It is usually only under such conditions that normtl young men and young women can be induced to take a step which would ordinarily be revolting to their instincts and contrary to their native quality of reticence. Prohibition cannot at once entirely obliterate this evil, for secret and illegal drinking will continue to some extent, and will he associated with this sort of thing. But self respecting, lawrespecting young people will he protected. Incidentally, alcohol was barred from the Army and Navy during the war not because of the harm of drinking in itself but purely as a measure for preventing venereal disease. the great other enemy.” The opinion has been expressed that the

effective or total abolition of alcohol in civil iiie would automatically reduce the number of transmissions of veneiml disease by perhaps three-fourths or more, thus offering the most important single factor in the solution of this problem, aside from the universal practice of sanitary prophylaxis. And alcohol will interfere even with that. Therefore, while you may have talked of personal liberty in this connection, v et just as soon as yOu understand the relation of alcohol to blindness, sterility, abortion, dead-born babies, physical deformity, mental defectiveness, mutilating operations on women (eighty per cent of abdominal operations being due to gonorrhoea, the most prevalent of all diseases in the world, except measles), locomotor ataxia, insanity (paresis), and various, sometimes fatal, organic diseases of the heart, liver, kidneys, and brain — just as soon as you understand this relationship, you will no longer hold that the right to drink is a sacred privilege upon the eternal principle of personal liberty.’’ When one hears the statements made about the state of America because of Prohibition and the numbers of people who have taken to drugs because they cannot get drink, it makes one wonder if they have been misled themselves, or if they are deliberately making up these statements to gull the public of New Zealand. When we have from such sources as \V t C. Gorgas, SurgeonGeneral, I’nited States Army, the folkwing statements. lie says: ‘‘l am Sfoing to speak first of what is usually mentioned last, if at all, in most discussions of health in civil life, particularly if women are present. Vet because you are women—mothers, wives, sweetheaits, and sisters —I wish particularly to call your attention to the subject of venereal disuse and its deadly menace, not only to our manhood, but to womanhood, and to children yet unborn. Aou may readily understand what these diseases mean to an army if I tell vou what is a fact, that during the first year of the war one European nation had more men disabled from these diseases than from disabilities incident to warfare. . . . N°

wonder, combined with the fact of "hat had happened to an European Army, they discovered, when they railed up their young men in the Prime of life —according to the Medical Department of the United States Army—that one out of every three in civilian life had venereal disease. W. C, Gorgas, Surgeon-General, United

States Army, says: ‘ln the old days the regular Army would not accept a man suffering from these diseases; its sole problem was to fight against the men contracting them while in the service to their own detriment and the endangering of their fellows. Now ( ic> l 7) , however, the Army has had to shoulder the burden of the disease carried by the men of draft age in civil life; with the result that in six camps the total number of cases brought into the Army by draft men was six and one-half times as large as the number of cases contracted after admission into the service.”’ If this was not enough to make a nation sit up and look into the cause, then that nation was lacking in the undertaking of what makes for the strength and wealth of a nation. Rut America did sit up, and she placed all hotels and drink saloons out of bounds for her soldiers and where the authorities of town or city did not co-operate with the Military Authorities to this end, the camp would be removed. When the authorities saw the military meant what they said, they obeyed. The result was that only 16.8 per 1000 have contracted venereal disease since entering the Army. Compared with the 3 jo per thousand infected on entenng the Army when their liberty 10 get under the influence of <1: ink, and while in that condition of irresponsibility contract the blight of civilisa tion. America has certainly benefited from the bitter experience of Eng land, who, according to George Craig Stewart, D.D., said during the first fightcen months of the European War England had more men incapacitated for service by venereal disease, contracted in mobilisation camps, than by all the lighting at the front. No won der one of England’s poets wrote many years ago:

“ The harlot’s cry from street to street Will be Old England’s winding

shoe.” The harlot’s cry from street to street proved the winding sheet of Greece and Rome. And the British Empire is in the deadliest peril of being swallowed up in the same way. Lloyd George saw the danger, and made desperate efforts to free England from the principal cause of the spread of infection from venereal disease, but the drink magnates got him by the throat and threatened to choke him politically if he dared to put out the drink. He knew in his hands lay the destiny of the Empire, and he had to hang on to that and relinquish what would have ended the war in half the

time if he had been backed up. But for the incapacity which arose from these diseases, largely contracted while under the influence of drink in the British Army, our young boys would not have been called up as they were to till the places in the firing line which was deserted by these men who thought, as the drink trade here would have us think, that it is liberty to be permitted to get in such a condition through drink that they could tolerate to associate with such women, and thus insult their poor mothers, sisters, wives and sweethearts. The 1 rade tells you immorality is not brought about through drink. The insult is the greatest they can give to the mother who bore them and the pure women who loved them. It means that their characters were so filthy that they, of their own desire, without the cursed stuff which “steals men’s brains away,” as Tennyson said, would have done the wicked, beastly things they aid. Surely the women of New Zealand know their men and boys better than that, and will do our men and boys who contracted the venereal disease —and they arc not a few—the justice of putting the blame where it is largely due. An orderly—who was not a temperance man told me it was his duty at Home for the boys to report to him when they had contracted venereal disease, for him to draft them for treatment. He said he used to be amazed at numbers of nice boys from good homes and Christian homes, who had to report to him, and he used to say to them: “You! How do you come here?” The reply invariably was, “1 got drunk, and I did not know what I did.” In some cases, perhaps, only drunk once, and in that one time seized upon by the women who are lying in wait for the man or boy who is under the influence of drink, and the taint contracted which he may never be rid of. Don’t I know these things? I was not ir. rescue work for over ten years near Shorncliff Camp—then one of the largest military camps in England—without seeing for myself the fatal connection between alcohol and contracting venereal disease. My woik was to get in touch with the fallen women and girls, therefore ! had to watch the public-houses, and there I used to see the ghastly trade plied. The men go into the hotel, and get under the influence of drink. Then he would come out with one of these women. Then she would come back, and go back to the bar, and presently

another man lx* led out, maybe too drunk to walk steady, then back again until the bar was closed. Some of these women had been in our Home, and we found them so diseased 1 had taken them to the London Lock Hospital, where they had been turned out incurable. They were back again to infect more men as they themselves had been infected.

T his drink is a vicious circle. In all t!»e wars I worked there I cannot re. all one girl living as a prostitute who did not drink. They used to say to me, ‘1 could not live this life but for the drink.” When they got sober the memory of their homes and of their pure, happy childhood was too maddening -they had to drown their memories in drink, and the fragments of their womanly feelings before they could start then evening's ghastly trade. One can quite understand the ac count a "hip's doctor gave, whost name I know, who noticed a woman on board with six girls under her charge. He got into conversation with her, and she was quite open about her occupation and tha* of the girls with her. She said, “A dry countn is no good to the likes of us,

so we are going to a wet country. There are numbers of men who would not come to us unless they were under the influence of drink for the first time.” So this brothel keeper, ’with her slaves, was leaving the “dr\” country and travelling on this ship, which plied between there and New Zealand. No wondei Dr. Richard Arthur, M I).. M.L.A., Sydney, in his address to officers, says:—“All medical men know that drink and venereal disease go hand in hand; alcohol rouses sexual desires, and lessens or a hoi ishes sel f-rest raint. ” On one of the ships whu h came from Home recently there was a nice boy about sixteen years of age. While

girls have gone home infected with in Wellington the firemen got him to go ashore with them, and they made him drunk, then took him to a house of ill-fame. When he came to himself, and knew’ what he had done, he flung himself on his bunk and sobbed as if his heart would bre (ik. It is probable he contracted venereal dis ease, then to curse him for the rest of his life. Even if not, that black spot is going to haunt his memory while reason lasts, and make him feel the meanest cur that ever walked when he falls in love with some pure girl. His soiledness will look all the blacker ag.iinst her virgin purity. Mothers, would you like this to happen to your son, or would you like your daughter, while under the infill ence of the genteel sounding wine, to have her purity stolen from her? There arc many girls to-day in New Zealand "ho are fond of their wine, who are substituting it for morning tea. Just .is the prostitute looks out for the man under the influence of drink, so the villain looks out for the girl who “is not herself,” that he may lob her of her greatest treasure. Do not be foolish mothers or girls, and think such men will go to those with whom it is a trade. Oh! no, the purer the girl the more desirable she 's, .md the safer for their own skin, and it is their own skin they love supremely, and other people can take care of their own if they can. Rut they can’t when drink is in, because “wit’s out." You think New Zealand is so safe, and these dangers do not exist here. A short time ago I was told of a man in Auckland who himself told a companion in sin the following, which was passed on to me, that he had succeeded in seducing 33 girls out of ho whom he had tried. He had met them at places of amusement, such as the pictures and dances. Such a man could not fail to be diseased, How manv of those

the disease, no one knows. It i s so easy, the steps down hill. Some flattery, some refreshment, a bottle of wine, a motor-car ride, and another craracter blighted. How many girls, if they knew the truth, have been robbed of the boy they loved through the cursed drink. One man told that quite six boys had come to his tent to say good-bye before going into battle, and had said, “Eve got it— l am not coming out of this battle. Poor boys! Betrayed by the curse we have the chance to put out of the country now. We could have done it before if we women would have woke up to what it means. No wonder the Bible s.ins, “No drunkard shall enter heaven.” It seems to me the reason is because the mind is the medium be tween God and man, and when that i« switched oft, as drink does, there i' no pow er in the person w hile under its sway to receive any message from God. It seems almost like a prophec the lecture the late Dr Batchelor, of Dunedin, gave in iqoq. After spea* ing of the venereal diseases and the curse they were even then in Nf» Zealand, he went on to say: “In thi< young country, which nature has so bountifully endowed, tbe reproach i' ours alone if our race fails to achieve the highest level of mental, physical, and moral efficiency. . . \Ye have already shown that we refuse to he trammelled by the traditions and conventions of the Old World, and do not fear exploiting fresh fields. Why n°t then make some effort to eradicate or mitigate a disease that has been a* the root of so much racial decadence in the Old World' . . . The wo men of this land now have the power to resolutely insist on drastic measure* to counteract this canker of modern civilisation, and, for the sake of your sons and daughters, for the sake oI the generations vet unborn, I urge V Ol to grasp your opportunity, and gra c p it in time ”