Clerical despotism is still a potent ally of intemperance. In hundreds of British and North American cities the dearth of better pastimes drives our workingmen to the pot-house. They drink to get drunk, as the only available means of escaping tedium and the consciousness of their misery. Nature craves recreation, and the suppression of that instinct has avenged itself by its perversion.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Dietetic abuses have contributed more to the progress of human degeneration than all other causes taken together. Our infants are sickened with drastic drugs. The growth of young children is stunted with narcotic beverages; the suppression of healthier pastimes drives our young men to the rum-shop; intemperance has become the Lethe in which the victims of social abuses seek to drown their misery. The curse of the poison-habit haunts us from the cradle to the grave, and for millions of our fellow-men has made the burdens of life to outweigh its blessings. There is a doubt if the “years” of Genesis should be understood in the present meaning of the word; but historians and biologists agree that the average longevity of our race has been enormously reduced within the last twenty centuries, and intemperance is the chief cause of that decrease. Our average stature has been reduced even below that of the ancient natives of an enervating climate, like that of the lower Nile, as proved by D’Arnaud’s measurements of the Egyptian mummy-skeletons. On our own continent, outdoor life in the struggle with the [[68]]perils of the wilderness has somewhat redeemed our loss of physical manhood; but what are the men of modern Europe compared with their iron-fisted ancestors, the athletic Greeks, the world-conquering Romans, the Scandinavian giants, the heroic Visigoths? Like a building collapsing under the progress of a devouring fire, the structure of the human body has shrunk under the influence of the poison-habit; and there is no doubt that the moral vigor of our race has undergone a corresponding impairment—appreciable in spite of the recent revival of intellectual activity and the constant increase of general information.
The tide is turning; the victims of anti-physical dogmas are awakening to the significance of their delusion; the power of public opinion has forced the dupes of the alcohol-brewing Galilean to join the crusade of the temperance movement; diet-reform has become a chief problem of civilization; but the upas-tree of the poison-habit is too deeply rooted to be eradicated in a single generation, and the task of redemption will be the work of centuries. As yet the probing of the wound has only revealed the appalling extent of the canker-sore. The statistics of the liquor traffic have established the fact that the value of the resources wasted on the gratification of the poison-vice far exceeds the aggregate amount of the yearly expenditure for educational, charitable, and sanitary purposes—nay, that the abolition of that traffic would save a sum sufficient for all reforms needed to turn earth into a physical and social paradise. And yet that waste expresses only the indirect [[69]]and smaller part of the damage caused by the curse of the poison-habit. The loss in health and happiness cannot be estimated in coin; but if the sum thus expended in the purchase of disease were devoted to the promotion of arson and robbery, the utmost possible extent of the consequent mischief would probably fall short of the present result. The stimulant habit in all its forms clouds the sunshine of life like an all-pervading poison-vapor. Alcohol undermines the stamina of manhood; narcotic drinks foster a complication of nervous diseases; opium and tobacco impair the vigor of the cerebral functions. The excessive use of animal food, too, avenges itself in all sorts of moral and physical disorders. It inflames passions which no prayer can quench. “Alas! what avails all theology against a diet of bull-beef?” Father Smeth wrote from the Sioux missions; and the almost exclusive use of flesh food has, indeed, afflicted our Indians with the truculence of carnivorous beasts. The same cause has produced the same effects in western Europe. The carnivorous saints of medieval Spain delighted in matanzas and heretic-hunts, as their carnivorous ancestors in the butcher sports of the circus, and their British contemporaries in bear-baits and Tyburn spectacles.
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.