The Bamberg herald. [volume] (Bamberg, S.C.) 1891-1972, 1903-04-16
Why the Poor Man Drinks.


inhabitants Janesville has forty-tiye bar
rooms and fifteen churches. Now the
question and answer: Why the poor
man drinks. I have always had a way
of believing that he did it not because he
deliberately chose to do wrong or because
by his own act he was willingto increase
the sum total of evil and misery in the
world, but because drink was about the
only kind of pleasure within his reach.
Pleasure-this is the thing you have got
to allow for in nearly every mans life
and oddly enough that is the very thing
we most commonly overlook. The aver
age individual can't get along without q
certain amount of pleasure or excitement
or relaxation or-call it what you will,
but, whatever it is, human nature Graves
it, and if it can't be got in one way 1t will
in another.
What happens to boarding schools
where excessive strictness of discipline
prohibits the normal pleasures of youth ?
They turn out lads of the type who later
SOW more wild oats than the boys who
have never been unduly repressed. What
does the Chinaman, practically exiled
from his country and the slave of long
monotonous laundry hours, do? He gets
even with fate by smoking opium and
dreaming dreams of fairer world. The
miner, shut off from many creature COM
forts of the world above him, resorts to
grog. The Western cowboy tries to keep
in passable humor with his rough ex
istence by gambling, the sweatshop
worker by immortality, and the gold pros
pector by fighting. 1t would seem that
the harder mans lot was in life the
more desperate he was to square things
by reckless indulgence in whatsoever
pleasure was at hand.
Take it nearer home if you will, and in
the case of the poor man. See what has
happened in the large cities where the
ordinary laborer is of no more amount
in the great scheme of things that sur
rounds him than is the smallest fish in the
sea. To begin with you've taken the JOY
of creative work away from him, for
nowadays, because of the introduction of
machinery and the specialization of labor,
no one man turns out the whole of
thing but only a very small part of it.
Practically no artisan in these times can
hold up for you to appreciate complete
product of his own handiwork and say:
"That is mine and / am proud of it." In
the second place you've herded him and
his family like catLle into rookeries and
Easements in foul dark alleys, thereby. de-
priving him of the happiness that comes
from creating and owning home. Again,
you've set him to work young with little
or no education which debars him from
knowing the blessings of books and the
delights of richly stored mind. Still
again, because of his long hours you've
made it largely impossible for him to get
away from the ugliness of the city and to
know what it is instead to see the beauti-
full in Gods world out under the blue.
For sports which furnish safety value
for the surplus animal energy of so many
men he has neither the time nor place.
Friendships of the right kind are denied
him because he has no home to which he
may invite those for whom he may care,
and club is out of the question. The best
plays at the theatres are too costly for
him, likewise travel and museums and
libraries are beyond his appreciation.
Thus you see one after another those
forms of pleasure that are wholesome and
harmless are placed absolutely beyond
his power to enjoy. What is left? Drink
drink because of the carnal pleasure it
yields. because of it's power to drive
sordid memories and facts out of the
mind and to replace them by a rosyhued
world of the imagination, and drink be-
cause it can be had at a clean, inviting
sociable saloon, the poor mans club and
the only place where he can have quiet
chat with his fellowmen. Granting that
the average man must have pleasure of
some sort once and so often, is it to be
wondered at then, when all things are
denied him, that the chap drinks himself
into a forgetfulness of his condition ?
For just SO much as you grind man
down and take the dearest things of life
away from him just so much he is bound
to get what consolation he can out of the
indecent things. will close by saying l
have not seen with the forty-tive bar
rooms as many drunken men in James
vile in one months time as l have seen
in Bamberg on one Saturdays afternoon;
and to-day being election day, have not
seen one nor heard of an arrest being
made on that account.