BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M.D.
CHAPTER VI.—SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES.
“Deeprooted evils can not be abolished by striking at the branches.”—Boerhave.[1]
The history of the temperance movement has demonstrated the sad futility of palliative remedies. We have seen that the malady of the poison vice is not a self-limited, but a necessarily progressive evil. The half-way measures of “restrictive” legislation have resulted only in furnishing additional proof that prevention is better, because less impossible, than control.[A] The regulation of the poison traffic, the redress of the unavoidably resulting mischief, the cure and conversion of drunkards, in order to be effectual, would impose intolerable and never ending burdens on the resources even of the wealthiest communities, while the advocates of prohibition would forestall the evils both of the remedy and the disease.
But we should not overlook the truth that, in our own country at least, the poison plant of intemperance springs from a composite root. In southern Spain, under the dominion of the Saracens,[2] the poison vice was almost unknown during a series of centuries.[B] The moral code and the religion of the inhabitants discountenanced intemperance. The virtue of dietetic purity ranked with chastity and cleanliness. An abundance of harmless amusements diverted from vicious pastimes. Under such circumstances the absence of direct temptations constituted a sufficient safeguard against the vice of the poison habit; but in a country like ours the efficacy of prohibition depends on the following supplementary remedies:
1. Instruction.—In the struggle against the powers of darkness light often proves a more effective weapon than might or right. Even the limited light of human reason might help us to avoid mistakes that have undoubtedly retarded the triumph of our cause. We must enlighten, as well as admonish our children, if we would save them from the snares of the tempter; among the victims of intemperance, even among those who can speak from experience and can not deny that their poison has proved the curse of their lives, only a small portion is at all able to comprehend the necessary connection of cause and result. They ascribe their ruin to the spite of fortune, to the machinations of an uncharitable world, to abnormally untoward circumstances, rather than to the normal effects of the insidious poison. Intoxication they admit to be an evil, but defend the moderate use of a liquor as infallibly injurious in the smallest as in the largest dose; they underrate the progressive tendency of their vice and overrate their power of resistance; they cling to the tradition that alcohol, discreetly enjoyed, may prove a blessing instead of a curse. We must banish that fatal delusion. We must reveal the true significance of the poison habit before we can hope to suppress it as a life blighting vice. Our text-books should be found in every college and every village school from Florida to Oregon. Every normal school should graduate teachers of temperance. The law of the State of New York providing for the introduction of primers on the effects of alcoholic beverages was attacked by one of our leading scientific periodicals, with more learning than insight, on the ground that the physiological action of alcohol is as yet obscure even to our ablest pathologists, and therefore not a fit subject for a common school text-book. The same objection might be urged against every other branch of physiology and the natural history of the organic creation. “Every vital process is a miracle,” says Lorenz Oken,[3] “that is, in all essential respects an unexplained phenomenon.” A last question will always remain unanswered wherever the marvelous process of life is concerned, but our ignorance, as well as our knowledge, of that phenomenon has its limits, and in regard to the effects of alcoholic beverages it is precisely the most knowable and most fully demonstrated part of the truth which it behooves every child to know, but of which at present nine tenths of the adults, even in the most civilized countries, remain as ignorant as the natives of Kamtschatka who worship a divinity in the form of a poisonous toadstool. A boy may be brought to comprehend the folly of gambling even before he has mastered the abstruse methods of combination and permutation employed in the calculus of probable loss and gain. We need not study Bentham[4] to demonstrate that honesty is an essential basis of commerce and social intercourse. By the standard of usefulness, too, temperance primers might well take precedence of many other text-books. Our school boys hear all sorts of things about the perils encountered by the explorers of African deserts and Arctic seas, but next to nothing about the pitfalls in their own path—no room for the discussion of such subjects in a curriculum that devotes years to the study of dead languages. Is the difference between the archaic and pliocene form of a Greek verb so much more important than the difference between food and poison?
With such a text as the monster curse of intemperance and its impressive practical lessons, a slight commentary would suffice to turn thousands of young observers into zealous champions of our cause, just as in Germany a few years of gymnastic training have turned nearly every young man into an advocate of physical education. The work begun in the school room should be continued on the lecture platform, but we should not dissemble the truth that in a crowded hall ninety per cent. of the visitors have generally come to hear an orator rather than a teacher, and enjoy an eloquence that stirs up their barrenest emotions as much as if it had fertilized the soil of their intelligence, just as the unrepentant gamesters of a Swiss watering place used to applaud the sensational passages of a drama written expressly to set forth the evils of the gambling hell. Enthusiasm and impressiveness are valuable qualifications of a public speaker, but he should possess the talent of making those agencies the vehicles of instruction. The great mediæval reformers, as well as certain political agitators of a later age, owe their success to their natural or acquired skill in the act of stirring their hearers into an intellectual ferment that proved the leaven of a whole community—for that skill is a talent that can be developed on a basis of pure common sense and should be more assiduously cultivated for the purposes of our reform. A modern philanthropist could hardly confer a greater benefit on his fellow-citizens than by founding a professorship of temperance, or endowing a college with the special condition of a proviso for a weekly lecture on such topics as “The Stimulant Delusion,” “Alcoholism,” “The History of the Temperance Movement.”
Pamphlets, too, may subserve an important didactic purpose, and in the methods of their distribution we might learn a useful lesson from our adversaries, the manufacturers of alcoholic nostrums, who introduce their advertisements into every household, by publishing them combined with almanacs, comic illustrations, note-books, etc., i. e., not only free, but winged with extra inducements to the recipient, and often by the special subvention of druggists and village postmasters—till quack annuals have almost superseded the old family calendars with their miscellanies of pious adages and useful recipes. Could we not retrieve the lost vantage ground by the publication of temperance year-books, compiled by a committee of our best tract societies and distributed by agents of the W. C. T. U.—with inspiring conviction to emulate the zeal stimulated by a bribe of gratuitous brandy bottles?
Popular books must above all be interesting, and with a large plurality of readers that word is still a synonym of entertaining. A German bookseller estimates that the romances of Louisa Mühlbach have done more to familiarize her countrymen with the history of their fatherland than all historical text books, annals and chronicles taken together, and we should not despise the aid of the novelist, if he should possess the gift of making fiction the hand-maid of truth, and the rarer talent of awakening the reflections as well as the emotions of his readers, for all such appeals should prepare the way for the products of the temperance press proper, by which we should never cease to invoke the conscience and the reason of our fellowmen.