Nor was this the end. As I came down the Champs <E'>lys<e'>es afterward, I met several groups of these patriots, who showed by their walk and conversation that they were decidedly the worse for their celebration of the day; and the whole thing led me to reflect seriously on the drink problem, and to ask whether our American solution of it is the best. I have been present at many large festive assemblages, in various parts of Europe, where wine was offered freely as a matter of course; but never have I seen anything to approach this performance of my countrymen. I have been one of four thousand people at the H<o^>tel de Ville in Paris on the occasion of a great ball, at other entertainments almost as large in other Continental countries, and at dinner parties innumerable in every European country; but never, save in one instance, were the festivities disturbed by any man on account of drink.
The most eminent of American temperance advocates during my young manhood, Mr. Delavan, insisted that he found Italy, where all people, men, women, and children, drink wine with their meals, if they can get it, the most temperate country he had ever seen; and, having made more than twelve different sojourns in Italy, I can confirm that opinion.
So, too, again and again, when traveling in the old days on the top of a diligence through village after village in France, where the people were commemorating the patron saint of their district, I have passed through crowds of men, women, and children seated by the roadside drinking wine, cider, and beer, and, so far as one could see, there was no drunkenness; certainly none of the squalid, brutal, swinish sort. It may indeed be said that, in spite of light stimulants, drunkenness has of late years increased in France, especially among artisans and day laborers. If this be so, it comes to strengthen my view. For the main reason will doubtless be found in the increased prices of light wines, due to vine diseases and the like, which have driven the poorer classes to seek far more noxious beverages.
So, too, in Germany. Like every resident in that country, I have seen great crowds drinking much beer, and, though I greatly dislike that sort of guzzling, I never saw anything of the beastly, crazy, drunken exhibitions which are so common on Independence Day and county- fair day in many American towns where total abstinence is loudly preached and ostensibly practised. Least of all do I admire the beer-swilling propensities of the German students, and still I must confess that I have never seen anything so wild, wicked, outrageous, and destructive to soul and body as the drinking of distilled liquors at bars which, in my student days, I saw among American students. But I make haste to say that within the last twenty or thirty years American students have improved immensely in this respect. Athletics and greater interest in study, caused by the substitution of the students' own aims and tastes for the old cast-iron curriculum, are doubtless the main reasons for this improvement.[12]
[12] Further reasons for this improvement I have endeavored to give more in detail elsewhere.
Yet, in spite of this redeeming thing, the fact remains that one of the greatest curses of American life is the dram-drinking of distilled liquors at bars; and one key of the whole misery is the American habit of ``treating,''—a habit unknown in other countries. For example, in America, if Tom, Dick, and Harry happen to meet at a hotel, or in the street, to discuss politics or business, Tom invites Dick and Harry to drink with him, which, in accordance with the code existing among large classes of our fellow-citizens, Dick and Harry feel bound to do. After a little more talk Dick invites Harry and Tom to drink; they feel obliged to accept; and finally Harry invites Tom and Dick, with like result; so that these three men have poured down their throats several glasses of burning stimulants, perhaps in the morning, perhaps just before the midday meal, or at some other especially unsuitable time, with results more or less injurious to each of them, physically and morally.
The European, more sensible, takes with his dinner, as a rule, a glass or two of wine or beer, and is little, if at all, the worse for it. If he ever takes any distilled liquor, he sips a very small glass of it after his dinner, to aid digestion.
It is my earnest conviction, based upon wide observation in my own country as well as in many others during about half a century, that the American theory and practice as regards the drink question are generally more pernicious than those of any other civilized nation. I am not now speaking of TOTAL ABSTINENCE—of that, more presently. But the best TEMPERANCE workers among us that I know are the men who brew light, pure beer, and the vine-growers in California who raise and sell at a very low price wines pleasant and salutary, if any wines can be so.
As to those who have no self-restraint, beer and wine, like many other things, promote the ``survival of the fittest,'' and are, like many other things, ``fool-killers,'' aiding to free the next generation from men of vicious propensities and weak will.
I repeat it, the curse of American social life, among a very considerable class of our people, is ``perpendicular drinking''—that is, the pouring down of glass after glass of distilled spirits, mostly adulterated, at all sorts of inopportune times, and largely under the system of ``treating.''