Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/476

 462 THE A M ERIC A N JO URNAL OF SOCIOLOG Y

the workingmen's districts. The Y. M. C. A. and Y. M. I. are about the only social gathering-places for young men left to compete with the hundreds of surrounding saloon clubs of the suburban districts.

Of the direct substitutes these general statements may be made :

1. They are but isolated attempts, not yet having caught the spirit of the times : the spirit of cooperation and combination.

2. The religious element is intruded. Men will not largely patronize a place where the feeling prevails that someone is doing something for them. The best results will be obtained from substitutes carried on, not as a philanthropic enterprise, but upon a strictly business basis.

3. They lack in attractiveness. To compete successfully with the saloon, a substitute must not only be as attractive as the saloon it is to replace, but must possess a degree of attract- iveness sufficient to overcome the force of habit which is firmly established.

Before venturing an answer to the question, What is the place of substitution in the final solution of the "liquor prob- lem"?, let me call attention to two facts: (i) Beer is the almost universal beverage of the working people. Mr. Louis Wreden, general secretary of the "Deutcher Orden der Haru- gari," said to me that he could not then recall a single German family in which beer was not used. The laboring people of many nationalities feed beer to their children as others do milk. "You can depend on the beer, but you can't tell about the milk you get down here," one man remarked. As has been stated, among some people the substitutes do not substitute. No drink has yet been discovered by the chemist which is at once so pleasing in its effect, so slightly intoxicating, 1 and so cheaply manufactured. (2) The substitute, to attain any degree of success, must keep in mind the following self-evident fact

1 Most incredible of the facts which the study of the saloon revealed to me was the relatively small amount of drunkenness. Without entering into a discussion of the reasons which, with a little thought, each may discover for himself, it is sufficient to state that the amount of drunkenness, in proportion to the amount of liquor drunk, is much less in the down-town than in the rural districts.