CHAPTER VI.

THE CHIEF OCCASION OF CRIME.

THE malignant action of alcohol upon the brain, and through this organ upon the mind itself, is sometimes spoken of as that of an excitant of the lower faculties or the animal passions; and sometimes as that of a depressant of the higher and rational nature. Perhaps it is both; but we have no occasion to enter into the discussion. Whether the animal nature is excited unduly or the spiritual deadened, the same result follows. The "moral equilibrium of character" is destroyed. It matters little whether we fire up the locomotive beyond control or pitch off the engineer. It is more to our purpose to notice, as observers, the proximate methods in which the use of intoxicants leads to crime. The subject compels brevity, and we do little more than suggest lines of thought.

First. Drunkenness itself is, by statute and by reason, a crime-a social nuisance.

Second. Drink excites the evil passions-how much or how little it takes to do it is a question of temperament and circumstance.

Third. It fortifies for crime.*

Fourth. It throws off the reins of prudence. Recklessness is one of the first fruits of drink. Reason teaches that crime is folly; alcohol clouds the reason.

Fifth. It tempts to crimes, especially of lust and robbery, by putting the victim in the power of the criminal.

Sixth. And emboldens to crime by rendering its detection difficult where the necessary witness is wholly or partially insensible.

Seventh. Idleness and poverty are prolific agencies in the production of crime; but intemperance is the main cause of these.

Eighth. Truancy is regarded as one of the most common proximate causes of crime. But

*In Governor Andrew's "Errors of Prohibition," I find a curious passage. After describing a horrible murder in the County of Bristol, Mass., he says: “I suppose this murder is reckoned among the crimes chargeable to drinking. And, perhaps, the mixture of whisky and gunpowder which he drank blunted his nerves and calmed his agitation, and thus fortified his audacity to the extent of enabling him to do what would otherwise have been too much for him. . . . . . But the purpose of violence and robbery was formed before he drank. The crime was sufficiently complete, as a purpose of the mind, without the draught." Suppose this to be so; has society any less interest in protecting itself against the proximate cause of the crime? If, without the whisky, there would have been no murder, then is not the murder "chargeable to drinking," even though it be also chargeable, as the old indictments had it, to the " "instigation of the devil?"

Mr. Philbrick, for so many years the Superintendent of Schools in Boston, in one of his reports, tells us that "among the causes of truancy, that which so far transcends all others as to be properly considered the cause of causes, is the immoderate use of intoxicating drinks. This is the unanimous testimony of the truant officers."

Ninth. Intemperance is the efficient ally of other vices. Wine has been well styled, "The Devil's Water-Power." Without it much of the machinery of evil would stand still. It is the life of the gaming-house and the brothel, and surely these are hot-beds of crime.

From this rapid glance at the rationale of the relation between crime and intemperance, we are prepared to pass to a view of results. And here we are embarrassed only by the uniformity and abundance of the testimony.

As long ago as 1670, Sir Matthew Hale, Chief-Justice of England, said:

"The places of judicature I have long held in this kingdom have given me an opportunity to observe the original cause of most of the enormities that have been committed for the space of nearly twenty years; and, by due observation, I have found that if the murders and manslaughters, the burglaries and robberies, the riots and tumults, the adulteries, fornications, rapes, and other enormities that have happened

in that time, were divided into five parts, four of them have been the issues and product of excessive drinking-of tavern or ale-house drinking."

And through the centuries since, the same testimony has been borne by judges of the highest and lowest courts exercising criminal jurisdiction. I need only cite from a recent letter of I.ord Chief Baron Kelley to the Archdeacon of Coventry, in which he says thirds of the crimes which come before the courts of law of this country, are occasioned chiefly by intemperance" (Report to Convocation of Canterbury, p. 52).

"two

Still more impressive is the evidence of those whose official duties have brought them into close personal contact with criminals. Says Mr. Clay, the chaplain of the Preston House of Correction (England), in 1855:

"I have heard more than 15,000 prisoners declare that the enticements of the ale and beer houses had been their ruin. . . . If every prisoner's habits and history were fully inquired into, it would be placed beyond doubt that nine-tenths of the English crime requiring to be dealt with by the law arises from the English sin, which the same law scarcely discourages."

Frederick Hill, late Inspector of Prisons in England, and a high authority in all matters of penal science, writes:

"I am within the truth when I state, as the result of extensive and minute inquiry, that in four cases out of five, when an offence has been committed, intoxicating drink has been one of the causes. Nothing serves more to explain the good conduct of prisoners than their complete withdrawal from the excitement and temptation of intoxicating liquors. Removed from these, they become different men, and are no more deserving the epithets which are often applied to them, than a person who has ceased to be in a passion merits the name of a madman.”

Similar testimony is borne by Dr. Elisha Harris, of New York, after an inspection of prisons, in a paper on "The Relations of Drunkenness to Crime" (1873). He says:

"As a physician, familiar with the morbid consequences of alcoholic indulgence in thousands of sufferers from it; as a student of physiology, interested in the remarkable phenomena and results of inebriation; and as a close observer of social and moral wants, it was easy for the writer to believe that not less than one-half of all crime and pauperism in the State depends upon alcoholic inebriety. But after two years of careful inquiry into the history and condition of the criminal population of the State, he finds that the conclusion is inevitable, that, taken in all its relations, alcoholic drinks may justly be charged with far more than half of the crimes that are brought to conviction in the State of New York; and that full eighty-five per cent. of all convicts give evidence of having in some larger degree been prepared or enticed to do