Professor C. A. Lee, of New York, informs us that “a cheap Madeira is made by extracting the oils from common whisky, and passing it through carbon. There are immense establishments in this city where the whisky is thus turned into wine. In some of those devoted to this branch of business, the whisky is rolled-in in the evening, but the wine goes out in the broad daylight, ready to defy the closest inspection. A grocer, after he had abandoned the nefarious traffic in adulterations, assured me that he had often purchased whisky one day of a country merchant, and before he left town sold the same whisky back to him turned into wine, at a profit of from 400 to 500 per cent. The trade in empty wine-casks in this city with the Custom-house mark and certificate is immense; the same casks being replenished again and again, and always accompanied by that infallible test of genuineness, the Custom-house certificate. I have heard of a pipe being sold for twelve dollars. There is in the neighbourhood of New York an extensive manufactory of wine-casks, which are made so closely to imitate the foreign as to deceive experienced dealers. The Custom-house marks are easily counterfeited, and certificates are never wanting. I have heard,” said Dr. Lee, “dealers relate instances in which extensive stores were filled by these artificial wines; and when merchants from the country asked for genuine wines, these have been sold them as such, assuring them there could be no doubt of their purity. It is believed,” he observes, “that the annual importation of what is called port-wine into the United States far exceeds the whole annual produce of the Alto-Douro.”
Mr. James Forrester, an extensive grower of wines in the Alto-Douro and other districts of the north of Portugal, and another witness, stated that there was a mixture called jeropiga, composed of two-thirds ‘must,’ or grape-juice, and one-third brandy, and which brandy is about twenty per cent above British brandy-proof, used for bringing up character in ports. He further declared that sweetening-matter, in every variety, and elder-berry dye, is administered for the purpose of colouring it and giving it a body. Moreover, Mr. Forrester testified that, by the present Portuguese law, no unsophisticated port-wine is allowed to reach this country. “If any further colouring-matter be absolutely requisite by the speculator—I would not suppose by the merchants (for the merchants generally do not like, unless they are obliged, to sell very common wines, and do not like to have recourse to these practices)—then the elder-berry is, I believe, the only dye made use of in this country, and costs an enormous lot of money.”
Dr. Munroe of Hull, the author of The Physiological Action of Alcohol, and other scientific works, gives evidence as follows of the danger attending the use of alcoholic drinks as medicine:
“I will relate a circumstance which occurred to me some years ago, the result of which made a deep impression on my mind. I was not then a teetotaler—would that I had been!—but I conscientiously, though erroneously, believed in the health-restoring properties of stout. A hard-working, industrious, God-fearing man, a teetotaler of some years’ standing, suffering from an abscess in his hand, which had reduced him very much, applied to me for advice. I told him the only medicine he required was rest; and to remedy the waste going on in his system, and to repair the damage done to his hand, he was to support himself with a bottle of stout daily. He replied, ‘I cannot take it, for I have been some years a teetotaler.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you know better than the doctor, it is no use applying to me.’ Believing, as I did then, that the drink would really be of service to him, I urged him to take the stout as a medicine, which would not interfere with his pledge. He looked anxiously in my face, evidently weighing the matter over in his mind, and sorrowfully replied, ‘Doctor, I was a drunken man once; I should not like to be one again.’
“He was, much against his will, prevailed on to take the stout, and in time he recovered from his sickness. When he got well, I of course praised up the virtues of stout as a means of saving his life, for which he ought ever to be thankful; and rather lectured him on being such a fanatic (that’s the word) as to refuse taking a bottle of stout daily to restore him to his former health. I lost sight of my patient for some months; but I am sorry to say that on one fine summer’s day, when driving through one of our public thoroughfares, I saw a poor, miserable, ragged-looking man leaning against the door of a common public-house drunk, and incapable of keeping an erect position. Even in his poverty, drunkenness, and misery, I discovered it was my teetotal patient whom I had, not so long ago, persuaded to break his pledge. I could not be mistaken. I had reason to know him well, for he had been a member of a Methodist church; an indefatigable Sunday-school teacher; a prayer-leader whose earnest appeals for the salvation of others I had often listened to with pleasure and edification. I immediately went to the man, and was astonished to find the change which drink in so short a time had worked in his appearance. With manifest surprise, and looking earnestly at the poor wretch, I said, ‘S—, is that you?’ With a staggering reel, and clipping his words, he answered, ‘Yes, it’s me. Look at me again. Don’t you know me?’ ‘Yes, I know you,’ I said, ‘and am grieved to see you in this drunken condition. I thought you were a teetotaler?’
“With a peculiar grin upon his countenance, he answered, ‘I was before I took your medicine.’ ‘I am sorry to see you disgracing yourself by such conduct. I am ashamed of you.’ Rousing himself, as drunken people will at times, to extraordinary effort, he scoffingly replied, ‘Didn’t you send me here for my medicine?’ and with a delirious kind of chuckle he hiccupped out words I shall never forget. ‘Doctor, your medicine cured my body, but it damned my soul!’
“Two or three of his boozing companions, hearing our conversation, took him under their protection, and I left him. As I drove away, my heart was full of bitter reflections, that I had been the cause of ruining this man’s prospects, not only of this world, but of that which is to come.
“You may rest assured I did not sleep much that night. The drunken aspect of that man haunted me, and I found myself weeping over the injury I had done him. I rose up early the next morning and went to his cottage, with its little garden in front, on the outskirts of the town, where I had often seen him with his wife and happy children playing about, but found, to my sorrow, that he had removed some time ago. At last, with some difficulty, I found him located in a low neighbourhood, not far distant from the public-house he had patronised the day before. Here, in such a home as none but the drunkard could inhabit, I found him laid upon a bed of straw, feverish and prostrate from the previous day’s debauch, abusing his wife because she could not get him some more drink. She, standing aloof with tears in her eyes, broken down with care and grief, her children dirty and clothed in rags, all friendless and steeped in poverty! What a wreck was there!
“Turned out of the church in which he was once an ornament, his religion sacrificed, his usefulness marred, his hopes of eternity blasted, now a poor dejected slave to his passion for drink, without mercy and without hope!
“I talked to him kindly, reasoned with him, succoured him till he was well, and never lost sight of him or let him have any peace until he had signed the pledge again.
“It took him some time to recover his place in the church; but I have had the happiness of seeing him restored. He is now more than ever a devoted worker in the church; and the cause of temperance is pleaded on all occasions.
“Can you wonder, then, that I never order strong drink for a patient now?”
One of the most terrible results of hard drinking is that kind of insanity that takes the name of “delirium tremens;” and its characteristic symptoms may be described as follows: Muscular tremors—more especially of the hands and of the tongue when protruded—along with complete sleeplessness, and delirium of a muttering, sight-seeing, bustling, abrupt, anxious, apprehensive kind. The afflicted patient has not the ability to follow out a train of thought, to explain fully an illusion or perverted sensation, or to perform any act correctly; for he may be one moment rational and the next incoherent, now conscious of his real condition and of surrounding realities, and then again suddenly excited by the most ridiculous fancies—principally of a spectral kind—such as strange visitors in the shape of human beings, devils, cats, rats, snakes, &c.; or by alarming occurrences, such as robberies, fires, pursuits for crimes, and the like. He is easily pleased and satisfied by gentleness and indulgence, and much fretted and agitated by restraint and opposition. The face is generally of a pale dirty colour and wearing an anxious expression; eyes startled but lustreless, sometimes considerably suffused, and the pupils not contracted unless considerable doses of opium have been administered, or very decided arachnitic symptoms have supervened; skin warm and moist, often perspiring copiously; tongue sometimes loaded, but generally pale and moist, occasionally remarkably clean; appetite small, but the patient will often take whatever is presented to him; thirst by no means urgent, and seldom or never any craving for spirituous liquors; urine scanty and high-coloured, and, in some cases which Dr. Munroe (from whose volume this description is derived) tested, containing a large quantity of albumen, which, however, disappears immediately after the paroxysm is over; alvine evacuations bilious and offensive; and the pulse generally ranges from 98 to 120, generally soft, but of various degrees of fulness and smallness, according to the strength of the patient and the stage of the affection. The precursory symptoms are by no means peculiar or pathognomonic, but common to many febrile affections, implicating the sensorium in the way of repeatedly-disturbed and sleepless nights, with perhaps more of a hurried and agitated manner than usual for some days previously. The paroxysm which is distinguished by the phenomena above described—occurring with remarkable uniformity, independently of age and constitution—usually runs its course, if uncomplicated and properly treated, on the second or third day, though sometimes earlier, and it seldom extends beyond the fifth day. It then terminates in a profound natural sleep, which may continue for many hours, and from which, if it even lasts for six hours, the patient awakes weak and languid, but quite coherent. The casualties of the disease are convulsions or coma, which, if not immediately fatal, are apt to leave the sufferer a wreck for the remainder of life.
CHAPTER XXI.
ATTEMPTS TO ARREST IT.
The Permissive Liquors Bill—Its Advocates and their Arguments—The Drunkenness of the Nation—Temperance Facts and Anecdotes—Why the Advocates of Total Abstinence do not make more headway—Moderate Drinking—Hard Drinking—The Mistake about childish Petitioners.
There has recently appeared on the temperance stage a set of well-meaning gentlemen, who, could they have their way, though they would sweep every public-house and beershop from the face of the land, are yet good-natured enough to meet objectors to their extreme views a “third” if not “half-way.” Sir Wilfred Lawson is the acknowledged head and champion of the party, and its news on the all-important subject are summed up in a Permissive Prohibitory Liquor Bill. It may be mentioned that the said Bill was rejected in the House of Commons by a very large majority, and is therefore, for the present, shelved. It stands, however, as an expression of opinion on the part of eighty-seven members of parliament, backed by 3,337 petitions, more or less numerously signed, from various parts of the kingdom, as to what should be done to check the advancing curse of drunkenness, and, as such, its merits may be here discussed.
The Permissive Prohibitory Liquors Bill, as Sir Wilfred Lawson describes it, provides that no public-houses shall be permitted in any district, provided that two-thirds of its population agree that they should be dispensed with. If there are thirty thousand inhabitants of a parish, and twenty thousand of them should be of opinion that public-houses are a nuisance that should be abolished, the remaining ten thousand may grumble, but they must submit, and either go athirst or betake themselves to an adjoining and more generous parish.
Sir W. Lawson, in moving the second reading of his Bill, said “that no statistics were needed to convince the House of Commons of the amount of drunkenness, and consequent poverty and crime, existing in this country; and even if here and there drunkenness might be diminishing, that did not affect his argument, which rested upon the fact that drunkenness in itself was a fertile and admitted source of evil. The Bill was called a ‘Permissive Bill;’ but had the rules of the House permitted, it might with truth be called a Bill for the Repression of Pauperism and of Crime. The measure was no doubt unpopular in the House, but it was a consolation to him that, although honourable members differed in opinion as to the efficacy of the remedy proposed, they all sympathised with the object its promoters had in view. The trouble to which he feared honourable members had been put during the last few days in presenting petitions and answering letters showed the depth and intensity of the interest taken in the question out of doors. No less than 3,337 petitions had been presented in favour of the Bill. It would be remembered that in the parliament before last a bill similar in its character had been defeated by an overwhelming majority, all the prominent speakers in opposition to it at that time declaring that they based their hopes as to the diminution of drunkenness upon the spread of education. He agreed in that opinion, but the education, to be successful, must be of the right sort; and while an army of schoolmasters and clergyman were engaged in teaching the people what was good, their efforts, he feared, were greatly counteracted by that other army of 150,000 publicans and beersellers encouraging the people to drinking habits. All these dealers in drink had been licensed and commissioned by the Government, and were paid by results; they had, consequently, a direct pecuniary interest in promoting the consumption of as large an amount of drink as possible. Naturally, if a man entered into a trade, he wished to do as large a trade as possible; and he had always felt that the advocates of temperance did more harm than good in using hard language against the beersellers, when it was the law which enabled them to engage in the trade, which was primarily responsible for the result.”