CHAPTER II.—THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE.
The Discovery of the Cause is the Discovery of the Remedy.—Bichat.
The undoubted antiquity of the poison vice has induced several able physiologists to assume the hygienic necessity of artificial stimulation. But the not less undoubted fact that there have been manful, industrious and intelligent nations of total abstainers would be an almost sufficient refutation of that inference, which is sometimes qualified by the assertion that the tonic value of alcoholic drinks is based upon the abnormal demands upon the vitality of races exposed to the vicissitudes of a rigorous climate and the manifold overstraining influences of an artificial civilization. For it can, besides, be proved that the alleged invigorating action of alcoholic drinks is an absolute delusion, and the pathological records of contemporary nations establish the fact that endemic increase of intemperate habits can nearly always be traced to causes that have no correlation whatever to the increased demands upon the physical or intellectual energies of the afflicted community. Potentially those energies have lamentably decreased among numerous races who once managed to combine nature-abiding habits with a plethora of vital vigor.
The physiologically unavoidable progressiveness of all stimulant habits is a further argument in favor of the theory that the poison vice has grown up from very small beginnings, and the genesis of the fatal germ has probably been supplied in the hypothesis of Fabio Colonna, an Italian naturalist of the seventeenth century. “Before people used wine,” says he, “they drank sweet must and preserved it, like oil, in jars or skins. But in a warm climate a saccharine fluid is apt to ferment, and some avaricious housekeeper may have drunk that spoiled stuff till she became fond of it and learned to prefer it to must.”
Avarice, aided perhaps by dietetic prurience, or indifference to the warnings of instinct, planted the baneful seed, and the laws of evolution did the rest.
But the tendency of those laws has often been checked, and as certainly often been accelerated, by less uncontrollable agencies.
The first venders of toxic stimulants (like our quack medicine philanthropists) had a personal interest in disseminating the poison habit. Reform attempts were met by appeals to the convivial interests of the stimulant-dupe, by the seduction of minors, by charges of asceticism; later by nostrum puffs and opium wars. More than two thousand years ago the worship of Bacchus was propagated by force of arms. The disciples of Ibn Hanbal, the Arabian Father Mathew, were stoned in the streets of Bagdad. The persecutions and repeated expulsions of the Grecian Pythagoreans had probably a good deal to do with the temperance teachings of their master. In Palestine, in India, in mediæval Europe, nearly every apostle of Nature had to contend with a rancorous opposition, inspired by the most sordid motives of self-interest, and our own age can in that respect not boast of much improvement. In spite of our higher standard of philanthropic principles and their numerous victories in other directions, the heartless alliance of Bacchus and Mammon still stands defiant. In our own country a full hundred thousand men, not half of them entitled to plead the excuses of poverty or ignorance, unblushingly invoke the protection of the laws in behalf of an industry involving the systematic propagation of disease, misery and crime. Wherever the interests of the poison traffic are at stake the nations of Europe have not made much progress since the time when the sumptuary laws of Lorenzo de Medici were defeated by street riots and a shrieking procession of the Florentine tavern-keepers.
The efforts of such agitators are seconded by the Instinct of Imitation. “In large cities,” says Dr. Schrodt, “one may see gamins under ten years grubbing in rubbish heaps for cigar stumps; soon after leaning against a board fence, groaning and shuddering as they pay the repeated penalty of nature, yet, all the same, repeating the experiment with the resignation of a martyr. The rich, the fashionable, do it; those whom they envy smoke; smoking, they conclude, must be something enviable.”
Without any intentional arts of persuasion the Chinese business men of San Francisco have disseminated a new poison vice by smoking poppy gum in the presence of their Caucasian employes and accustoming them to associate the sight of an opium debauch with the idea of enjoyment and recreation. Would the opponents of prohibition attempt to deny that analogous influences (the custom of “treating” friends at a public bar, the spectacle of lager beer orgies in public gardens, etc.) have a great deal to do with the initiation of boy topers?