Smoking and Drinking

by James Parton

INEBRIATE ASYLUMS, AND A VISIT TO ONE.

There are two kinds of drunkards,—the Regular and the Occasional. Of each of these two classes there are several varieties, and, indeed, there are no two cases precisely alike; but every drunkard in the world is either a person who has lost the power to refrain from drinking a certain large quantity of alcoholic liquor every day, or he is one who has lost the power to refrain from drinking an uncertain enormous quantity now and then.

Few get drunk habitually who can refrain. If they could refrain, they would; for to no creatures is drunkenness so loathsome and temperance so engaging as to seven tenths of the drunkards. There are a few very coarse men, of heavy, stolid, animal organization, who almost seem formed by nature to absorb alcohol, and in whom there is not enough of manhood to be ashamed of its degradation. These Dr. Albert Day, the superintendent of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, sometimes calls Natural Drunkards. They like strong drink for its own sake; they have a kind of sulky enjoyment of its muddling effect upon such brains as they happen to have; and when once the habit is fixed, nothing can deliver them except stone walls and iron bars. There are also a few drunkards of very light calibre, trifling persons, incapable of serious reflection or of a serious purpose, their very terrors being trivial and transitory, who do not care for the ruin in which they are involved. Generally speaking, however, drunkards hate the servitude into which they have had the misfortune to fall; they long to escape from it, have often tried to escape, and if they have given up, it is only after having so many times slidden back into the abyss, that they feel it would be of no use to climb again. As Mrs. H. B. Stowe remarks, with that excellent charity of hers, which is but another name for refined justice, "Many a drunkard has expended more virtue in vain endeavors to break his chain than suffices to carry an ordinary Christian to heaven."

The daily life of one of the steady drunkards is like this: upon getting up in the morning, after a heavy, restless, drunkard's sleep, he is miserable beyond expression, and almost helpless. In very bad cases, he will see double, and his hands will tremble so that he cannot lift to his lips the glass for which he has a desire amounting to mania. Two or three stiff glasses of spirituous liquor will restore him so far that he can control his muscles, and get about without betraying his condition. After being up an hour, and drinking every ten or fifteen minutes, he will usually be able to eat a pretty good breakfast, which, with the aid of coffee, tobacco, and a comparatively small quantity of liquor, he will be able to digest. After breakfast, for some hours he will generally be able to transact routine business, and associate with his fellows without exciting their pity or contempt. As dinner-time draws near he feels the necessity of creating an appetite; which he often accomplishes by drinking some of those infernal compounds which are advertised on the eternal rocks and mountain-sides as Bitters,—a mixture of bad drugs with worse spirits. These bitters do lash the torpid powers into a momentary, morbid, fierce activity, which enables the victim to eat even a superabundant dinner. The false excitement subsides, but the dinner remains, and it has to be digested. This calls for an occasional drink for three or four hours, after which the system is exhausted, and the man feels dull and languid. He is exhausted, but he is not tranquil; he craves a continuation of the stimulant with a craving which human nature, so abused and perverted, never resists. By this time it is evening, when all the apparatus of temptation is in the fullest activity, and all the loose population of the town is abroad. He now begins his evening debauch, and keeps up a steady drinking until he can drink no more, when he stumbles home to sleep off the stupefying fumes, and awake to the horror and decrepitude of a drunkard's morning.

The quantity of spirituous liquor required to keep one of these unhappy men in this degrading slavery varies from a pint a day to two quarts. Many drunkards consume a quart of whiskey every day for years. The regular allowance of one gentleman of the highest position, both social and official, who made his way to the Inebriate Asylum, had been two quarts of brandy a day for about five years. The most remarkable known case is that of a hoary-headed man of education and fortune, residing in the city of New York, who confesses to taking "fifty drinks a day" of whiskey,—ten drinks to a bottle, and five bottles to a gallon. One gallon of liquor, he says, goes down his old throat every day of the year. Before he is fit to eat his breakfast in the morning he has to drink twelve glasses of whiskey, or one bottle and one fifth. Nevertheless, even this poor man is able, for some hours of the morning, to transact what people of property and leisure call business, and, during a part of the evening, to converse in such a way as to amuse persons who can look on and see a human being in such bondage without stopping to think what a tragedy it is. This Old Boy never has to be carried home, I believe. He is one of those most hopeless drunkards who never get drunk, never wallow in the gutter, never do anything to scare or startle them into an attempt to reform. He is like a certain German "puddler" who was pointed out to me in a Pittsburg iron-works, who consumes exactly seven dollars' worth of lager-bier every seven days,—twenty glasses a day, at five cents each. He is also like the men employed in the dismal work of the brewery, who are allowed as much beer as they can drink, and who generally do drink as much as they can. Such persons are always fuddled and stupid, but seldom drunk enough to alarm their neighbors or themselves. Perhaps they are the only persons in all the world who are in any degree justified in passing their lives in a state of suspended intelligence; those of them at least whose duty it is to get inside of enormous beer barrels, and there, in darkness and solitude, in an atmosphere reeking and heavy with stale ale, scrape and mop them out before they are refilled. When you see their dirty, pale faces at the "man-hole" of the barrel, down in the rumbling bowels of the earth, in one of those vast caves of beer in Cincinnati, you catch yourself saying, "Drink, poor devils, drink! Soak what brains you have in beer!" What can a man want with brains in a beer-barrel? But then, you think again, even these poor men need their brains when they get home; and we need that they should have brains on the first Tuesday in November.

It is that going home which makes drunkenness so dire a tragedy. If the drunkard could only shut himself up with a whiskey-barrel, or a pipe of Madeira, and quietly guzzle himself to death, it would be a pity, but it could be borne. He never does this; he goes home to make that home perdition to some good souls that love him, or depend upon him, and cannot give him up. There are men at the Asylum near Binghamton, who have admirable wives, beautiful and accomplished daughters, venerable parents, whose portraits are there in the patient's trunks, and who write daily letters to cheer the absent one, whose absence now, for the firsts time in years, does not terrify them. They are the victims of drunkenness,—they who never taste strong drink. For their deliverance, this Asylum stands upon its hill justified in existing. The men themselves are interesting, valuable, precious, worth every rational effort that can be made to save them; but it is those whom they left at home anxious and desolate that have the first claim upon our consideration.

With regard to these steady, regular drunkards, the point to be noted is this: very few of them can stop drinking while they continue to perform their daily labor; they absolutely depend upon the alcohol to rouse their torpid energies to activity. Their jaded constitutions will not budge without the spur. Everything within them gapes and hungers for the accustomed stimulant. This is the case, even in a literal sense; for it seems, from Dr. Day's dissections, that the general effect of excessive drinking is to enlarge the globules of which the brain, the blood, the liver, and other organs are composed, so that those globules, as it were, stand open-mouthed, empty, athirst, inflamed, and most eager to be filled. A man whose every organ is thus diseased cannot usually take the first step toward cure without ceasing for a while to make any other demands upon himself. This is the great fact of his condition. If he is a true drunkard, i.e. if he has lost the power to do his work without excessive alcoholic stimulation, then there is no cure possible for him without rest. Here we have the simple explanation of Mrs. Stowe's fine remark just quoted. This is why so many thousand wives spend their days in torment between hope and despair,—hope kindled by the husband's efforts to regain possession of himself, and despair caused by his repeated, his inevitable relapses. The unfortunate man tries to do two things at once, the easiest of which is as much as he can accomplish; while the hardest is a task which, even with the advantage of perfect rest, few can perform without assistance.

The Occasional Drunkard is a man who is a teetotaler for a week, two weeks, a month, three months, six months, and who, at the end of his period, is tempted to drink one glass of alcoholic liquor. That one glass has upon him two effects; it rouses the slumbering demon of Desire, and it perverts his moral judgment. All at once his honor and good name, the happiness and dignity of his family, his success in business, all that he held dearest a moment before, seem small to him, and he thinks he has been a fool of late to concern himself so much about them. Or else he thinks he can drink without being found out, and without its doing him the harm it did the last time. Whatever may be the particular delusion that seizes him, the effect is the same; he drinks, and drinks, and drinks, keeping it up sometimes for ten days, or even for several weeks, until the long debauch ends in utter exhaustion or in delirium tremens. He is then compelled to submit to treatment; he must needs go to the Inebriate Asylum of his own bed-room. There, whether he raves or droops, he is the most miserable wretch on earth; for, besides the bodily tortures which he surfers, he has to endure the most desolating pang that a decent human being ever knows,—the loss of his self-respect. He abhors himself and is ashamed; he remembers past relapses and despairs; he cannot look his own children in the face; he wishes he had never been born, or had died in the cursed hour, vividly remembered, when this appetite mastered him first. As his health is restored, his hopes revive; he renews his resolution and he resumes his ordinary routine, subdued, distrustful of himself, and on the watch against temptation. Why he again relapses he can hardly tell, but he always does. Sometimes a snarl in business perplexes him, and he drinks for elucidation. Sometimes melancholy oppresses him, and he drinks to drive dull care away. Sometimes good fortune overtakes him, or an enchanting day in June or October attunes his heart to joy, and he is taken captive by the strong delusion that now is the time to drink and be glad. Often it is lovely woman who offers the wine, and offers it in such a way that he thinks he cannot refuse without incivility or confession. From conversation with the inmates of the Inebriate Asylum, I am confident that Mr. Greeley's assertion with regard to the wine given at the Communion is correct. That sip might be enough to awaken the desire. The mere odor of the wine filling the church might be too much for some men.

There appears to be a physical cause for this extreme susceptibility. Dr. Day has once had the opportunity to examine the brain of a man who, after having been a drunkard, reformed, and lived for some years a teetotaler. He found, to his surprise, that the globules of the brain had not shrunk to their natural size. They did not exhibit the inflammation of the drunkard's brain, but they were still enlarged, and seemed ready on the instant to absorb the fumes of alcohol, and resume their former condition. He thought he saw in this morbid state of the brain the physical part of the reason why a man who has once been a drunkard can never again, as long as he lives, safely take one drop of any alcoholic liquor. He thought he saw why a glass of wine puts the man back instantly to where he was when he drank all the time. He saw the citadel free from the enemy, swept and clean, but undefended, incapable of defence, and its doors opened wide to the enemy's return; so that there was no safety, except in keeping the foe at a distance, away beyond the outermost wall.

There are many varieties of these occasional drunkards, and, as a class, they are perhaps the hardest to cure. Edgar Poe was one of them; half a glass of wine would set him off upon a wild, reckless debauch, that would last for days. All such persons as artists, writers, and actors used to be particularly subject to this malady, before they had any recognized place in the world, or any acknowledged right to exist at all. Men whose labors are intense, but irregular, whose gains are small and uncertain, who would gladly be gentlemen, but are compelled to content themselves with being loafers, are in special danger; and so are men whose toil is extremely monotonous. Printers, especially those who work at night upon newspapers, are, perhaps, of all men the most liable to fall under the dominion of drink. Some of them have persuaded themselves that they rest under a kind of necessity to "go on a tear" now and then, as a relief from such grinding work as theirs. On the contrary, one "tear" creates the temptation to another; for the man goes back to his work weak, depressed, and irritable; the monotony of his labor is aggravated by the incorrectness with which he does it, and the longing to break loose and renew the oblivion of drink strengthens rapidly, until it masters him once more.