Every Wednesday evening, after prayers, a kind of temperance meeting is held in the chapel. It is the intention of the superintendent, that every inmate of the Asylum shall become acquainted with the nature of alcohol, and with the precise effects of alcoholic drinks upon the human system. He means that they shall comprehend the absurdity of drinking as clearly as they know its ruinous consequences. He accordingly opens this meeting with a short lecture upon some one branch of the subject, and then invites the patients to illustrate the point from their own experience. At the meeting which I happened to attend the subject of Dr. Day's remarks was suggested (as it often is) by an occurrence which had just taken place at the institution, and had been the leading topic of conversation all that day. At the last meeting, a young man from a distant State, who had been in the Asylum for some months and was about to return home, delivered an eloquent farewell address to his companions, urging them to adhere to their resolution, and protesting his unalterable resolve never, never, never again to yield to their alluring and treacherous foe. He spoke with unusual animation and in a very loud voice. He took his departure in the morning, by the Erie Road, and twelve hours after he was brought back to the Asylum drunk. Upon his recovery he related to the superintendent and to his friends the story of his lamentable fall. When the train had gone three hours on its way, there was a detention of three hours at a station that offered little entertainment to impatient travellers. The returning prodigal paced the platform; found it dull work; heard at a distance the sound of billiard-balls; went and played two games, losing both; returned to the platform and resumed his walk; and there fell into the train of thought that led to the catastrophe. His reflections were like these: "How perfect is my cure! I have not once thought of taking a drink. Not even when I saw men drinking at the bar did it cross my mind to follow their example. I have not the least desire for whiskey, and I have no doubt I could take that 'one glass' which Dr. Day keeps talking about, without a wish for a second. In fact, no man is perfectly cured till he can do that I have a great mind to put it to the test. It almost seems as if this opportunity of trying myself had been created on purpose. Here goes, then, for the last glass of whiskey I shall take as long as I live, and I take it purely as a scientific experiment." One hour after, his friend, who was accompanying him home, found him lying in a corner of a bar-room, dead drunk. He had him picked up, and placed in the next train bound for Binghamton.
This was the text of Dr. Day's discourse, and he employed it in enforcing anew his three cardinal points: 1. No hope for an inebriate until he thoroughly distrusts the strength of his own resolution; 2. No hope for an inebriate except in total abstinence as long as he lives, both in sickness and in health; 3. Little hope for an inebriate unless he avoids, on system and on principle, the occasions of temptation, the places where liquor is sold, and the persons who will urge it upon him. Physicians, he said, were the inebriate's worst enemies; and he advised his hearers to avoid the tinctures prepared with alcohol, which had often awakened the long-dormant appetite. During my stay at Binghamton, a clergyman resident in the town, and recently an inmate of the Asylum, had a slight indisposition resulting from riding home from a meeting ten miles in the rain. One of the physicians of the place, who knew his history, knew that he had been an inebriate of the most pronounced type (quart of liquor a day), prescribed a powerful dose of brandy and laudanum. "I dare not take it, doctor," he said, and put the damnable temptation behind him. "If I had taken it," said he to me, "I should have been drunk to-day." The case, too, required nothing but rest, rice, and an easy book. No medicine was necessary. Dr. Day has had under his care a man who, after being a confirmed drunkard, had been a teetotaler for eighteen years, and had then been advised to take wine for the purpose of hastening a slow convalescence. His appetite resumed its old ascendency, and, after drinking furiously for a year, he was brought to the Asylum in delirium tremens. Dr. Day expressed a strong hope and belief that the returned inmate mentioned above had now actually taken his last glass of whiskey; for he had discovered his weakness, and was in a much more hopeful condition than he had been before his lapse. The Doctor scouted the idea that a man who has the misfortune to break his resolution should give up the struggle. Some men, he said, must fall, at least once, before the last rag of self-confidence is torn from them; and he had had patients who, after coming back to him in Boston four times, had conquered, and had lived soberly for years, and were still living soberly.
When the superintendent had finished his remarks, he called upon his hearers to speak. Several of them did so. One young gentleman, an officer of the army during the war, made his farewell speech. He thanked his companions for the forbearance they had shown him during the first weeks of his residence among them, when he was peevish, discontented, rebellious, and had no hope of ever being able to conquer his propensity, so often had he tried and failed. He would have left the Asylum in those days, if he had had the money to pay his fare on the cars. He felt the importance of what Dr. Day had advanced respecting the occasions of temptation, and especially what he had said about physicians' prescriptions, which he knew had led men to drink. "If," he added, "I cannot live without alcohol, I would rather die. For my part, I expect to have a struggle all my life; I don't think the time will ever come when it will be safe for me to dally with temptation, and I feel the necessity of following Dr. Day's advice on this point." He spoke in a simple, earnest, and manly manner. He was followed by another inmate, a robust, capable-looking man of thirty-five, who also spoke with directness and simplicity. He hoped that fear would help him to abstain. If he could only keep sober, he had the best possible prospects; but if he again gave way he saw nothing before him but infamy and destruction. He spoke modestly and anxiously, evidently feeling that it was more than a matter of life and death to him. When he had concluded, a young gentleman rose, and delivered a fluent, flower address upon temperance; just such a discourse as might precede a lapse into drinking.
On Monday evening of every week, the Literary Society of the institution holds its meeting, when essays are read and lectures delivered. The course of lectures delivered last winter are highly spoken of by those who heard them, and they were all written by inmates of the Asylum. Among the subjects treated were: Columbus, a Study of Character: Goldsmith; The Telegraph, by an Operator; Resources of Missouri; Early English Novelists; The Age, and the Men for the Age; Geology; The Passions, with Poetical Illustrations; The Inebriate Asylum, under the Régime of Coercion. It occasionally happens, that distinguished visitors contribute something to the pleasure of the evening. Mrs. Stowe, the newspapers inform us, was kind enough some time since to give them a reading from Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the copy of the book from which she read was a cheap double-columned pamphlet brought from the South by a freedman, now the porter of the Asylum. He bought it and read it while he was still a slave, little thinking when he scrawled his name across the dingy title-page that he should ever have the honor of lending it to the authoress.
Nearly twelve years have now elapsed since Dr. Day began to accumulate experience in the treatment of inebriates, during which time he has had nearly four thousand patients under his care. What proportion of these were permanently cured it is impossible to say, because nothing is heard of many patients after they leave; but it is reasonably conjectured that two thirds of the whole number were restored. It is a custom with many of them to write an annual letter to Dr. Day on the anniversary of their entering the Home under his management, and the reading of such letters is a highly interesting and beneficial feature of the Wednesday evening temperance meetings. The alcoholic mania is no respecter of persons. Dr. Day has had under treatment twenty-one clergymen, one of whom was a Catholic priest (who had delirium tremens), and one a Jewish Rabbi. He has had one old man past seventy, and one boy of sixteen. He has had a Philadelphia "killer" and a judge of a supreme court. He has had steady two-quarts-a-day men, and men who were subject only to semiannual debauches. He has had men whose "tears" lasted but forty-eight hours, and one man who came in of his own accord after what he styled "a general spree" of three months' continuance. He has had drunkards of two years' standing, and those who have been slaves of strong drink for thirty years.
Some of his successes have been striking and memorable. There was Dr. X—— of Tennessee, at thirty-five a physician of large practice, professor in a medical college, happy in an excellent wife and seven children. Falling into drink, he lost at length his practice, his professorship, his property, his home; his family abandoned him to his fate, and went to his wife's father's in another State; and he became at last a helpless gutter sot. His brother, who heard by chance of the Home in Boston, picked him up one day from the street, where he lay insensible, and got him upon the train for the East. Before he roused from his drunken stupor, he was half-way across Virginia. "Where am I?" he asked. "In Virginia, on your way to Boston." "All right," said he, in a drunkard's drunkenest manner,—"all right! give me some whiskey." He was carried into the Home in the arms of men, and lay for some weeks miserably sick. His health improved, and the man revived. He clutched at this unexpected chance of escape, and co-operated with all his heart with the system. Dr. Day wrote a hopeful letter to his wife. "Speak not to me of a husband," she replied; "I have no husband; I buried my husband long ago." After four months' stay in the institution, the patient returned home, and resumed his practice. A year after, his family rejoined him. He recovered all his former standing, which to this day, after nine years of sobriety, he retains. His ninth annual letter to his deliverer I have read. "By the way," he says in a postscript, "did you receive my letters each year of the war?" Yes, they reached Dr. Day months after they were written; but they always reached him. The secret of this cure, as the patient has often asserted, was total abstinence. He had attempted to reduce his daily quantity a hundred times; but never, until he entered the Home, was he aware of the physical impossibility of a drunkard's becoming a moderate drinker. From the moment when he had a clear, intellectual comprehension of that truth, the spell was broken: abstinence was easy; he was himself again.
Then there was Y——, a Philadelphia street savage,—one of those firemen who used to sleep in the engine-house, and lie in wait for rival companies, and make night and day hideous with slaughter. Fearful beings were those Philadelphia firemen of twenty years ago! Some of them made a nearer approach to total depravity than any creatures I have ever seen that wore the form of man,—revelling in blood, exulting in murder, and glorying in hellish blows with iron implements, given and received. It was difficult to say whether it gave them keener delight to wound or to be wounded. In all communities where external observances and decorums become tyrannical, and where the innocent pleasures of youth are placed under a ban, there is sure to be a class which revolts against the invisible despot, and goes to a horrid extreme of violence and vice. This Y—— was one of the revolters. Once in many weeks he would return to his decent home, ragged and penniless, to be reclothed. It is only alcohol that supports men in a life of wanton violence like this; and he, accordingly, was a deep and reckless drinker. His sister prevailed upon him, after many months of persuasion, to go to the Home in Boston, and he presented himself there one morning, black all over with coal-dust. He explained his appearance by saying that he had come from Philadelphia in a coal-vessel. Dr. Day, who had been notified of his coming, received him with that emphatic politeness which produces such magical effects upon men who have long been accustomed to see an enemy in every one who behaves decently and uses the English language in its simplicity. He was exceedingly astonished to be treated with consideration, and to discover that he was not to be subjected to any disagreeable process. He proved to be a good, simple soul, very ignorant, not naturally intelligent, and more capable, therefore, of faith than of knowledge. The Doctor won his confidence; then his good-will; then his affection. Something that was read in the Bible attracted his attention one day, and he asked to be shown the passage; and this was the beginning of his reading the Bible regularly. It was all new to him; he found it highly interesting; and, this daily reading being associated in his mind with his reform, the book became a kind of talisman to him, and he felt safe as long as he continued the practice. After a six months' residence, he went to work in Boston, but always returned to spend the evening at the Home. At the beginning of the war he enlisted. He was in Colonel Baker's regiment on the bloody day of Ball's Bluff, and was one of the gallant handful of men who rescued from the enemy the body of their slain commander. He was one of the multitude who swam the Potomac amid a pattering rain of bullets, and walked barefoot seven miles to camp, The first man that met him there offered him whiskey, Mistaken kindness! Senseless offer! A man who is sinking with fatigue wants rest, not stimulation; sleep, not excitement. "Don't offer me that," he gasped, shuddering. "I dread that more than bullets." Instead of the whiskey, he took twelve hours' sleep, and consequently awoke refreshed, and ready for another day's hard service. At Antietam he had the glory and high privilege of giving life for mankind. A bullet through the brain sent him to heaven, and stretched his body on the field in painless and eternal sleep. It lies now in a cemetery near his native city; a monument covers it; and all who were connected with him are proud to point to his grave and claim him for their own. What a contrast between dying so, and being killed in a motiveless street-fight by a savage blow on the head with a speaking-trumpet!
Perhaps, long as this article already is, I may venture to give, with the utmost possible brevity, one more of the many remarkable cases with which I became acquainted at the Asylum.
One Sunday morning, a loud ringing of the front-door bell of the Home in Boston induced Dr. Day himself to answer the summons. He found a man at the door who was in the most complete state of dilapidation that can be imagined,—ragged, dirty, his hat awry, torn and bent, spectacles with one eye gone and the other cocked out of place, the perfect picture of a drunken sot who had slept among the barrels and cotton-bales for six months. He was such a person as we thoughtless fools roar at in the theatre sometimes, about 10.30 P.M., and who makes the lives of sundry children and one woman a long and hopeless tragedy up in some dismal garret, or down in some pestilential cellar.
"What can I do for you?" inquired the superintendent.