THE NEW HELPLESSNESS OF ION.
THE conductors of the Daily Telegraph have, as is their custom in the autumn, been sinking shafts into that treasure-yielding stratum, the mind of the British middle class, and, as usual, have been well rewarded. They made, it is true, at first a singular mistake. They overrated in a way which their long experience should have made impossible, the capacity of the British public for enjoying positive silliness. Believing, with a certain school of artists, that the public would delight in anything if only it concerned the nursery, they caused some one to write a letter accusing the British infant of having lost his original good manners. Of course letters followed in profusion, most of them from persons who assent to the proposition; but they were too much even for the British paterfamilias. The special variety of fool who alone obeyed the invitation or yielded to the temptation to vivisect the nursery, was a little too foolish for human endurance, and after a great gush of sour-smelling pap, that subject was abandoned. The next attempt, however, was more successful. The managers of the autumn entertainment persuaded some one either to procure or to forge a letter from a drunkard, and the paper was instantly submerged in liquor. Ac- cording to the article with which the editor on Tuesday wound up the discussion, he must have received more than a thousand letters upon drunkenness, from which he published a selection of about 15 per cent. They are really worth reading, for they add to one's know- ledge of average English nature. A large proportion are, of course, purely didactic, and marked only by the wonderful self-confidence, shot in the strangest way with gleams of pity, with which the Briton, when free from any particular vice, announces his infallible method of eradi- cating that vice, not only from his neighbours' hearts, but from the hearts of the human race. They have only to pray or to swallow quassia, to seek amusement or to take twenty tumblers of sour milk a day, and they will be free for ever from the desire for spirits neat. Most of this class of letters are a little foolish, being full of an old-nurse kind of wisdom, though penetrated with a wish to do good which we cannot but admire; but there is a residuum which we think kindly men would rather not read aloud. They are confessions, and they are penetrated by the weakness which is, we should say, the first drawback to the usage of the confessional, the weakness which seeks sympathy, though it be a sympathy of contempt—there is such a thing, and men get it very often from women—rather than either new strength or any definite guidance. The writers acknowledge habitual drunkenness, ending often in delirium tremens, and once or twice in some- thing very like insanity ; describe their mental symptoms minutely—they rather shrink, with a little homely and honest shame, from the physical symptoms—and ask mankind, or, in one or two cases, Heaven, for some ab extra cure, something which shall charm away the desire to drink, with the magical operation of opium upon pain. Could they not be released from suffering—they all acknowledge intense suffering, which, indeed, impels them to pour themselves out on paper—by rescuers from without P Could they not be cured—that is a favourite idea—by a strong dose of concentrated sym- pathy, or by a drug which would, they fancy, act as antidote, not to the liquor itself, but to the desire for the liquor, say, for instance—there is quite a discussion upon this sub- stance—chloride of gold ? American doctors or quacks are administering that drug to "incurable drunks" with effects which are affirmed and denied with about equal vehemence. Could they not be lectured, could they not be drenched with water, could they not be disgusted by nasty liquor, could they not, finally, be locked up till the evil desire had been somehow charmed away? The belief that there must be some drug which would cure them is almost pathetic in its imbecility, and is obviously derived from the fallacy that they are the victims of a purely physical disease, to be removed like other diseases, by the action of medicine on the coats of the stomach. Most drugs will act even if administered to the most unwilling, and why not some quick-biting drunkard's cure P Others, however, reject drugs ; but in nearly all-there is one unvarying note, a sense of utter helplessness, of possession, as our believing grandsires would have called it, which is at once pitiful and disheartening. They are not hopeless cases at all, or they could not thus bemoan themselves, for the really hopeless case has usually given up the-struggle, and knows it ; but they none of them believe that the cure can only come from within, from a retoning of their own wills, that no external influence is of the smallest value except so far as it strengthens their wills, that even confinement is useless, drunken criminals drinking again with delight the moment their sentences have expired. Their only hope is to endure as they would endure any other torture, and then, in a time varying with each constitution, sometimes limited to days and sometimes extending over months, the terrible " thirst " which has little to do with thirst, will, in all but the worst cases of dipsomania, suddenly seem to have passed away; but none of them see this.
It is not, perhaps, quite fair to draw deductions from the case of drunkards, most of whom have probably gone into slavery because of some congenital weakness of will ; but we think we see in these letters, as in so many of the speeches and writings poured forth every day, evidence of a distinct change in the national character, the cause of which we should greatly like to trace. It looks at first sight as if the moral fibre were growing weaker, as if the increased possibility of help arising from the growing pitifulness of men's minds were developing helplessness. We see that phenomenon dis- play itself in over-trained soldiers, who become abjectly helpless without their leaders, and in children who are cared for too much, and who are protected until they cannot, as it were, be trusted to walk without their go-carts ; and it may extend to human beings at large. There is a form of weakness just now manifesting itself in working men all over Europe and America which is frequently mistaken for discontent, but which is really a kind of helplessness and desire for external aid closely resembling that of the Daily Telegraph's drunkards. They cry aloud for external aid, want the State or " Society " to shoulder all their burdens, and declare themselves incompetent to attain knowledge, or abstain from drinking, or avoid overwork, unless the com- munity will find them drugs in the shape of restrictive laws, or, as in the matter of public-houses, will, by extinguishing such places, make of the world an asylum for potential inebriates. That poor wretch, Henry Bruce, who was sen- tenced this week to six months' imprisonment by the Recorder for breaking Mr. Benson's shop-window, was an extreme instance of helplessness of that kind. He pleaded in defence, that he could not get work because there were no munici- palities to give it him, and so he broke the window. He was quite helpless, helpless even to object to his punish- ment, which he quite admitted it was the duty, "under the circumstances," of the Recorder to inflict. He was,
he said, the victim of circumstances, as if circumstances prevented him from turning his hand to any work till an opening presented itself. There is an apparent bone- lessness of character about a defence like that which is almost exasperating ; yet it is the character which the working class in all countries is beginning to show. They are all seeking some external help, some magical drug, some scientific go-cart, which will give them the strength to do what they ought to do, and in the end must do, in reliance on themselves alone. The signs of this disastrous change are thickening on all sides, and we should have little hope for the immediate future, were there not one doubt left remaining in our minds. May it not be a new consciousness of the power residing in association which is slightly dazing mankind, rather than any genuine loss of the faculty of self-help ? They can walk just as well as ever ; but seeing omnibuses and the ease they give, they want omnibuses to carry them everywhere. The force to be obtained through associated action, the action of Unions, State action, social action, is so enormous, that men want to utilise it for everything, even to help themselves against their own vices and loss of self-respect. Society can tunnel the Alps, and fling wires across the Atlantic : why should not society make all men rich or sober or industrious ? That is not an infrequent phenomenon in human affairs. The riding races of Tartary and Spanish America will never volun- tarily walk a mile, and half-believe that their horses ought to row for them ; but they have not, for all that, lost control of their own limbs, or the power of making, when necessity com- pels, long and continuous marches. They are using a convenient power because it is convenient and helpful, and not because they themselves are without the power to act without it. The Telegraph's drunkards have heard everywhere of the "magical power" of sympathy in making men better, till they think it might help them not to drink ; but they have not lost the power of compelling themselves to abstain, or the sense, in the last resort, of the duty of that compulsion. The workmen hear of the community and what it can do every day and all day, until they think it can give them shorter hours ; but they have not lost the power of insisting for themselves, by their own self-sacrifice, that they will, like the rest of mankind, have some space of the day for their own. They are not getting paralysed, but worshipping a new force of which they do not yet quite understand either the action or the limitations. The Bible is inspired,' says the new convert, and has made a new man of me ; therefore test by the Bible the truths of astronomy, or, as Cruden did, the facts as to the deafness of adders.' It is quite possible that this is the true explanation, and that the new generation has not lost its will, but is only blindly applying a new dis- covery, which it sees to be in some directions a potent solvent. It is certainly doing that in the case of education, which it expects to make men good as well as intelligent, and in the case of science, from which it anticipates a new morality as well as a new command over the forces of Nature; and it may make the same blunder about what it calls "the law of love." Love will alleviate many miseries, and therefore it will cure toothache, or the desire for drink, or the evils of competition. It is but the error of the old Gnebres. The sun is the source of fructifying energy, therefore expect all things from the sun.
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