Lot of the Drunkard

Mitchell provides a social commentary on the effects of the "habitual and hopeless drunkard" on the community.

The regular, well-established drunkard should consider, it would seem, in some of his lucid intervals, that he is about the most troublesome individual at present making straggling and irregular tracks on the surface of the earth. By the word drunkard is understood the variety to which the word habitual is prefixed. There are other varieties of drunkard, or rather drinker- as the moderate, the occasional, the spasmodic- but the drunkard about which the world is concerned is the regular, or the sot. Compared with him inebriates of a less degree inspire but a languid and intermittent interest. The habitual and hopeless drunkard is the sort upon whom the mass of his fellow-citizens bestow their time and money. It is for him that all the “cures” are opened and all the asylums are provided. To him all the thrilling appeals to reform are made. What to do with the drunkard is the main question, and has been something over half a century.

“Lot of the Drunkard,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed January 23, 2026, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/1748.