B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
There is a tradition that the ancient Thessalians made it a rule that the guests of their banquets must get drunk on pain of expulsion. To let anyone remain sober, they argued, would not be just to the befuddled majority, of whose condition he might be tempted to take all sorts of advantage. If the evils of drunkenness were undeserved afflictions, it would certainly be true that sobriety would give an individual an almost unfair advantage over the rest of his fellow-men. He would be an archer trying his skill against hoodwinked rivals, a runner challenging the speed of shackled competitors. There is not a mechanical or industrial avocation in which sobriety does not give a man the advantage which health and freedom confer over crippling disease. For the baneful effects of intemperance are by no means limited [[61]]to the moments of actual intoxication, but react on the half-lucid intervals, and even on the after years of the reformed toper. Temperance, in the widest sense, of abstinence from unfit food and drink, would be the best gift which the fairies could bestow on a favorite child, for the blessing of frugal habits includes almost all other blessings whatever. Spontaneous gayety, the sunshine of the unclouded soul, is dimmed by the influence of the first poison-habit, and the regretful retrospects to the “lost paradise of childhood” are founded chiefly on the contrast of poison-engendered distempers with the moral and physical health of earlier years. Temperance prolongs that sunshine to the evening of life. By temperance alone the demon of life-weariness can be kept at bay in times of fiercest tribulation: Undimmed eyes can more easily recognize the gleam of sunshine behind the cloudy. The prisoners of the outlawed Circassian insurgents admitted that, in spite of hunger, hardships, and constant danger, their captors contrived to enjoy life better than their enemies in the brandy-reeking abundance of their headquarters. The myth of the Lotos-eaters described a nation of vegetarians who passed life so pleasantly that visitors refused to leave them, and renounced their native lands. The religion of Mohammed makes abstinence from intoxicating drinks a chief duty of a true believer, and that law alone has prevented the physical degeneration of his followers. With all their mental sloth and the enervating influence of their harem life, the Turks are still the finest representatives of physical manhood. At the horse [[62]]fairs of Bucharest I saw specimens of their broad-shouldered, proud-eyed rustics, whose appearance contrasted strangely with that of the sluggish boors and furtive traffickers of the neighboring natives. After twelve hundred years of exhaustive wars, alternating with periods of luxury and tempting wealth, the descendants of the Arabian conquerors are still a hardy, long-lived race, physically far superior to the rum-drinking foreigners of their coast towns. For more than six hundred years the temperate Moriscos held their own in war and peace against all nations of Christendom. Their Semitic descent gave them no natural advantage over their Caucasian rivals; but they entered the arena of life with clear eyes and unpalsied hearts, and in an age of universal superstition made their country a garden of science and industry. Their cities offered a refuge to the scholars and philosophers of three continents, and in hundreds of pitched battles their indomitable valor prevailed against the wine-inspired heroism of their adversaries.
Frugality has cured diseases which defied all other remedies. For thousands of reformed gluttons it has made life worth living, after the shadows of misery already threatened to darken into the gloom of approaching night. Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman of the sixteenth century, had impaired his health by gastronomic excesses till his physicians despaired of his life, when, as a last resort, he resolved to try a complete change of diet. His father, his uncles, and two of his brothers had all died before the attainment of their fiftieth year; but [[63]]Luigi determined to try conclusions with the demon of unnaturalism, and at once reduced his daily allowance of meat to one-tenth of the usual quantity, and his wine to a stint barely sufficient to flavor a cup of Venetian cistern-water. After a month of his new regimen he regained his appetite. After ten weeks he found himself able to take long walks without fatigue, and could sleep without being awakened by nightmare horrors. At the end of a year all the symptoms of chronic indigestion had left him, and he resolved to make the plan of his cure the rule of his life. That life was prolonged to a century—forty years of racking disease followed by sixty years of unbroken health, undimmed clearness of mind, unclouded content. Habitual abstinence from unnatural food and drink saves the trials of constant self-control and the alternative pangs of repentance. “Blessed are the pure, for they can follow their inclinations with impunity.”