But the magistrate did not send him to prison. The widow, the son, and myself rode in a cab to their little home, where the mother and myself carried him to bed. In that little bed for some weeks he lay, not knowing what had occurred, but conscious that something unusual had happened. When the delirium had passed and he lay in bed weak and ill, I showed him the cut on his mother’s arm, and told him what had happened; but he could not believe it till I appealed to his mother. ‘But you would not have done it, Will, you would not have done it but for the drink.’ Then he believed it, and, looking very strange, he got out of bed and kneeling down, he said: ‘I call God to witness that I’ll never take another drop.’ No other pledge was needed. Years have gone by, and it has been kept; the widow’s heart sings for joy, for she is cheered, sustained, and comforted by her son, and the full fruition of her hopes and his hopes has come. He has a small shop of his own, that does for him and his mother. He has taken to himself no wife, but mother and son hand in hand and heart to heart go gently through life. But it might have been different.
But it is not only the poor widow who is despoiled of her hopes and robbed of her joy through the instrumentality of drink. Time and space would fail me to tell of the shamed and sorrowing fathers I have seen in homes of refinement and luxury who have looked pitifully to me to exercise some magic power and give them back their lads. ‘Good lads, only for the drink.’ If the young men of our land could only see, as I have seen, the parental anguish, could only take some measure, as I have taken some measure, of proud fathers, loving mothers and admiring sisters, it were enough to make them dash the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the pride of its mantling temptation.
There is yet another cause that leads to much evil among boys, and to a great deal of trouble for parents, and that is the neglect of many parents to provide situations or work for their boys before they leave school. Scores of lads become criminals from this one cause. The day arrives when these lads can legally leave school, and they do it. There is nothing at home to entertain them, so they seek entertainment in the street. A few weeks’ idleness, coupled with the undisciplined liberty of the street, is sufficient for the ruin of many lads. Once let boys whose only discipline has been the discipline of school be released from that discipline and no other substituted, and they will be in mischief, or, worse still, acquiring idle and shiftless habits that will stick to them through life. They become thieves or drones, and, personally, I have more hope of the thief. The number of lads that get into the hands of the police from this one cause is a very large one, and I more than suspect that every Metropolitan police court magistrate has commented upon the matter till he is tired. A large part of my time has been taken up in finding employment for such boys while they have been under remand or under sentence. Numbers of such lads are discharged by the various magistrates on the police court missionaries promising to find them employment. No one knows better than the magistrate that undisciplined idleness is the ruin of growing boys. Of course these situations ought to be procured by the fathers of the boys, and would be if such fathers had only the common-sense to know that financially it would pay them to see that the day after their boys leave school they are decently at work, not to be made into little slaves, but to acquire the habit of regular industry, without which their lives must be burdensome.