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.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The poison-habit, as we might call the craving for the stimulus of unnatural diet, is the oldest vice, and in some of its forms has been practiced by almost every nation known to history or tradition. Thousands of years before Lot got drunk on home-made wine, the ancestors of the Brahmans fuddled with soma-juice; Zoroaster enacts laws against habitual intoxication; the art of turning grape-juice from a blessing into a curse seems to have been known to the nations of Iran, to the Parsees, and to the [[64]]first agricultural colonists of the lower Nile. Nunus, the Arabian Noah, is said to have planted vineyards on the banks of the Orontes; the worship of Bacchus was introduced into Asia Minor several centuries before the birth of Homer. The origin of the opium habit antedates the earliest records of Chinese history; for immemorial ages the Tartars have been addicted to the use of Koumis (fermented mare’s milk), the Germanic nations to beer, the natives of Siam to tea and sago-wine. Intoxication and the excessive use of animal food were prevalent vices, especially in the larger cities, of pagan Greece and Rome.
Yet the ancients sinned with their eyes half open. Their recognition of dietetic abuses was expressed in the word frugality, which literally meant subsistence on tree fruits—or, at least, vegetable products—in distinction from the habitual use of flesh-food. The advantages of temperate habits were never directly denied; the law of Pythagoras enjoins total abstinence from wine and flesh, and the name of a “Pythagorean” became almost a synonym of “philosopher.” In all but the most depraved centuries of Imperial Rome, wine was forbidden to children and women. The festival of the Bona Dea commemorated the fate of a Roman matron who had yielded to the temptation of intoxicating drink, and was slain by the hand of her stern husband. Lycurgus recommends the plan of letting the pupils of the military training-schools witness the bestial conduct of a drunken Helot, in order to inspire them with an abhorrence of intoxication. The bias of public opinion [[65]]always respected the emulation of patriarchal frugality and frowned upon the excesses of licentious patricians.
But the triumph of an anti-physical religion removed those safeguards. Mistrust in the competence of our natural instincts formed the keystone of the Galilean dogma. The importance of physical welfare was systematically depreciated. The health-laws of the Mosaic code were abrogated. The messiah of Antinaturalism sanctioned the use of alcoholic drinks by his personal example—nay, by the association of that practice with the rites of a religious sacrament. The habit of purchasing mental exaltation—even of a fever-dream—at the expense of the body, agreed perfectly with the tendencies of a Nature-despising fanaticism, and during the long night of the Middle Ages monks and priests vied in an unprecedented excess of alcoholic riots. Nearly every one of the thick-sown convents from Greece to Portugal had a vineyard and a wine cellar of its own. The monastery of Weltenburg on the upper Danube operated the largest brewery of the German empire. For centuries spiritual tyranny and spirituous license went hand in hand, and as the church increased in wealth, gluttony was added to the unnatural habits of the priesthood, and only the abject poverty of the lower classes prevented intemperance from becoming a universal vice. As it was, the followers of the Nature-despising messiah lost no opportunity to drown their better instincts in alcohol. They could plead the precedence of their moral exemplars, and vied in sowing the seeds of bodily diseases [[66]]which their system of ethics welcomed as conducive to the welfare of a world-renouncing soul.
Among the slaves of the Scotch kirk-tyrants the long-continued suppression of all healthier pastimes contributed its share to the increase of intemperance. On the day when the laboring classes found their only chance of leisure, outdoor sports were strictly prohibited. Dancing was considered a heinous, and on the Sabbath almost an unpardonable, sin. The tennis-halls were closed from Saturday night to Monday morning. Bathing was sinful. Mountain excursions, strolls along the beach, or in the open fields, were not permitted on the day of the Lord. Dietetic excesses, however, escaped control, and thus became the general outlet for the cruelly suppressed craving for a diversion from the deadly monotony of drudgery and church-penance. For “Nature will have her revenge, and when the most ordinary and harmless recreations are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences which no moralist would be willing to condone, … and the strictest observance of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations was found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not cheer” (Saturday Review, July 19, 1879). “Everyone,” says Lecky, “who considers the world as it really exists, must have convinced himself that in great towns public amusements of an exciting order are absolutely necessary, and that to suppress them is simply to plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest depths of vice.” [[67]]