E.—REFORM.
The consequences of intemperance have at all times provoked protests against the more ruinous forms of the poison-habit, but the advance from special to general principles is often amazingly slow; and even now the cause of temperance is hampered by the [[70]]shortsightedness of reformers who hope to eradicate the Upas-tree by clipping and hacking its more prominent branches. They would limit prohibition to the more deadly stimulants, not dreaming that the fatal habit is sure to reproduce its fruit from the smallest germs; that the poison-vice, in fact, is infallibly progressive, ever tending to goad the morbid craving of the toper to stronger and stronger poisons or to a constant increase in the quantity of the wonted stimulant: from cider to brandy, from laudanum to morphine, from tonic bitters to rum, from a glass of wine to a dozen bottles, from beer and tobacco to the vilest tipples of the dram-shop. “Principiis obsta” (Resist the beginnings) was a Latin maxim of deep significance. The cumulative tendency of the stimulant vice may be resisted, but only by constant vigilance, constant self-denial, constant struggles with the revivals of a morbid appetency, all of which might be saved by the total renunciation of all abnormal stimulants whatever, for only in that sense is it true that “abstinence is easier than temperance.”
We must accustom our boys to avoid the poison-vice as a loathsome disease, rather than as a forbidden luxury which could ever be indulged without paying the penalty of Nature in a distressing reaction, far outweighing the pleasures of the morbid and momentary exaltation. We must teach them that the artifice by which the toper hopes to cheat Nature out of an access of abnormal enjoyment is under all circumstances a losing game, which at last fails to produce, even for the moment of the fever-stimulus, a [[71]]glimpse of happiness at all comparable to the unclouded sunshine of temperance.
But before we can hope to redeem the victims of the poison-vender, we must learn to make virtue more attractive than vice. We must counteract the attractions of the rum-shop by inviting reforming topers, not to the whining conventicles of a Sabbath-school, but to temperance gardens, resounding with music (dance music, if “sacred concerts” should pall) and the jubilee of romping children, and shortening summer days with free museums, picture galleries, swings, ball grounds, and foot-race tracks. The gods of the future will contrive to outbid the devil.
It would be unfair, though, to depreciate the services of the Christian ministers who in a choice between dogma and reform have bravely sided with Nature, and, defying the wrath both of spiritual and spirituous poison-mongers, of rum-sellers and heretic-hunters, are trying their utmost to undo the mischief of their antinatural creed, by frankly admitting that a man can be defiled by “things that enter his mouth,” and that the sacrament of eucharistic alcohol should be abandoned to the rites of devil-worshipers.
But the religion which pretends to inculcate a peace-making spirit of meekness has been strangely remiss in opposing the excessive use of a diet which is clearly incompatible with the promotion of that virtue. In Christians, as in Turks, Tartars, and North American Redskins, a chiefly carnivorous diet engenders the instincts of carnivorous beasts, and a Peace Congress celebrating its banquets with sixteen courses of flesh food might as well treat a vigilance [[72]]committee to sixteen courses of opium. “Frugality” should again be promoted in the ancient sense of the word; in a community of reformants temperance and vegetarianism should go hand in hand. Or rather, the word “temperance” should be used in the extended sense that would make it a synonym of Abstinence from all kinds of unnatural food and drink; and Dr. Schrodt’s rule should become the canon of every dietetic reform league. “Avoid,” he says, “all drinks and stimulants repulsive to the palate of an unseduced child, but also all comestibles that need artificial preparation to make them palatable.” The first part of that rule would exclude opium, tobacco, alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee, absinthe, fetid cheese, and caustic spices. The second would abolish many kinds of animal food, but sanction milk, butter, eggs, honey, and other “semi-animal” substances, condemned by the extreme school of vegetarians. “From the egg to the apple,” is an old Latin phrase which proves that the frugality of the ancient Romans never went to such extremes. Milk, eggs, and vegetable fats, in their combination with farinaceous dishes, might amply replace the flesh food of the northern nations, and, considering the infinite variety of fruits and vegetables known to modern horticulture, there seems no reason why a vegetarian diet should necessarily be a monotonous one. The Religion of Nature will require the renunciation of several deep-rooted prejudices, but its path of salvation will in no sense be a path of thorns. [[73]]