OCCUPATIONAL TYPES 315
There are, however, certain moral dangers which arise from the labouring man s situation. The constant overtax of his body, the dreary monotony of his work, the lack of mental stimulation in it, and all too frequently his under feeding, render him an especially easy victim of the tempta tion to strong drink. Here is a vital point at which the drink problem is connected with our industrial system, a matter which is sometimes overlooked by temperance re formers. Weary in body, vacant in mind, he is too apt to seek in the saloon the social contact which he craves, and in alcohol the stimulation for his nervous system which has been taxed near to the point of exhaustion in its motor centres and left unstimulated in its higher, inhibitive func tions; and so into the hell of drunkenness he too often plunges, both pushed and pulled by forces arising from the conditions under which his life must be spent.
We must consider, also, the demoralizing effect of ir regularity of employment. Students of economics stress the evils resulting from unemployment and irregular employ ment, which they find to be caused mainly by economic mal adjustment. " Even in such fat years as 1899, 1900, 1901, it appears, the average trade unionist loses one out of every five or six working days." 1 Booth in his " Life and Labours in London" (quoted in Adams and Sumner) says: " The irregularity immediately resulting from fluctuations in demand, seasons and other causes is a sufficiently serious evil in itself, but other results, as serious, if not more so, follow in its track. Casual employment is found almost invariably to involve deterioration in both the physique and character of those engaged in it. ... The hopeless hand- to-mouth existence into which they thus tend to drift is of all things least conducive to thrift ; self-reliance is weakened, and habits of idleness, unsteadiness and intemperance are formed. . . . The effects of such casual work are even more marked in the next generation." " The curse of the American workingman," say Adams and Sumner, " is ir-
1 Adams and Sumner, " Labor Problems," p. 165.
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