DRINKING.
WILL THE COMING MAN DRINK WINE?
The teetotalers confess their failure. After forty-five years of zealous and well-meant effort in the "cause," they agree that people are drinking more than ever. Dr. R. T. Trall of New York, the most thoroughgoing teetotaler extant, exclaims: "Where are we to-day? Defeated on all sides. The enemy victorious and rampant everywhere. More intoxicating liquors manufactured and drunk than ever before. Why is this?" Why, indeed! When the teetotalers can answer that question correctly, they will be in a fair way to gain upon the "enemy" that is now so "rampant." They are not the first people who have mistaken a symptom of disease for the disease itself, and striven to cure a cancer by applying salve and plaster and cooling washes to the sore. They are not the first travellers through this Wilderness who have tried to extinguish a smouldering fire, and discovered, at last, that they had been pouring water into the crater of a volcano.
Dr. Trall thinks we should all become teetotalers very soon, if only the doctors would stop prescribing wine, beer, and whiskey to their patients. But the doctors will not. They like a glass of wine themselves. Dr. Trall tells us that, during the Medical Convention held at St. Louis a few years ago, the doctors dined together, and upon the table were "forty kinds of alcoholic liquors." The most enormous feed ever accomplished under a roof in America, I suppose, was the great dinner of the doctors, given in New York, fifteen years ago, at the Metropolitan Hall. I had the pleasure on that occasion of seeing half an acre of doctors all eating and drinking at once, and I can testify that very few of them—indeed, none that I could discover—neglected the bottle. It was an occasion which united all the established barbarisms of a public dinner,—absence of ladies, indigestible food in most indigestible quantities, profuse and miscellaneous drinking, clouds of smoke, late sitting, and wild speaking. Why not? Do not these men live and thrive upon such practices? Why should they not set an example of the follies which enrich them? It is only heroes who offend, deny, and rebuke the people upon whose favor their fortune depends; and there are never many heroes in the world at one time. No, no, Dr. Trall! the doctors are good fellows; but their affair is to cure disease, not to preserve health.
One man, it seems, and only one, has had much success in dissuading people from drinking, and that was Father Mathew. A considerable proportion of his converts in Ireland, it is said, remain faithful to their pledge; and most of the Catholic parishes in the United States have a Father Mathew Society connected with them, which is both a teetotal and a mutual-benefit organization. In New York and adjacent cities the number of persons belonging to such societies is about twenty-seven thousand. On the anniversary of Father Mathew's birth they walk in procession, wearing aprons, carrying large banners (when the wind permits), and heaping up gayly dressed children into pyramids and mountains drawn by six and eight horses. At their weekly or monthly meetings they sing songs, recite poetry, perform plays and farces, enact comic characters, and, in other innocent ways, endeavor to convince on-lookers that people can be happy and merry, uproariously merry, without putting a headache between their teeth. These societies seem to be a great and unmingled good. They do actually help poor men to withstand their only American enemy. They have, also, the approval of the most inveterate drinkers, both Catholic and Protestant. Jones complacently remarks, as he gracefully sips his claret (six dollars per dozen) that this total abstinence, you know, is an excellent thing for emigrants; to which Brown and Robinson invariably assent.
Father Mathew used to administer his pledge to people who knelt before him, and when they had taken it he made over them the sign of the cross. He did not usually deliver addresses; he did not relate amusing anecdotes; he did not argue the matter; he merely pronounced the pledge, and gave to it the sanction of religion, and something of the solemnity of a sacrament. The present Father Mathew Societies are also closely connected with the church, and the pledge is regarded by the members as of religious obligation. Hence, these societies are successful, in a respectable degree; and we may look, with the utmost confidence, to see them extend and flourish until a great multitude of Catholics are teetotalers. Catholic priests, I am informed, generally drink wine, and very many of them smoke; but they are able to induce men to take the pledge without setting them an example of abstinence, just as parents sometimes deny their children pernicious viands of which they freely partake themselves.
But we cannot proceed in that way. Our religion has not power to control a physical craving by its mere fiat, nor do we all yet perceive what a deadly and shameful sin it is to vitiate our own bodies. The Catholic Church is antiquity. The Catholic Church is childhood. We are living in modern times; we have grown a little past childhood; and when we are asked to relinquish a pleasure, we demand to be convinced that it is best we should. By and by we shall all comprehend that, when a person means to reform his life, the very first thing for him to do—the thing preliminary and most indispensable—will be to cease violating physical laws. The time, I hope, is at hand, when an audience in a theatre, who catch a manager cheating them out of their fair allowance of fresh air, will not sit and gasp, and inhale destruction till eleven P.M., and then rush wildly to the street for relief. They will stop the play; they will tear up the benches, if necessary; they will throw things on the stage; they will knock a hole in the wall; they will have the means of breathing, or perish in the struggle. But at present people do not know what they are doing when they inhale poison. They do not know that more than one half of all the diseases that plague us most—scarlet fever, small-pox, measles, and all the worst fevers—come of breathing bad air. Not a child last winter would have had the scarlet fever, if all the children in the world had slept with a window open, and had had pure air to breathe all day. This is Miss Nightingale's opinion, and there is no better authority. People are ignorant of these things, and they are therefore indifferent to them. They will remain indifferent till they are enlightened.
Our teetotal friends have not neglected the scientific questions involved in their subject; nor have they settled them. Instead of insulting the public intelligence by asserting that the wines mentioned in the Bible were some kind of unintoxicating slop, and exasperating the public temper by premature prohibitory laws, they had better expend their strength upon the science of the matter, and prove to mankind, if they can, that these agreeable drinks which they denounce are really hurtful. We all know that excess is hurtful. We also know that adulterated liquors may be. But is the thing in itself pernicious?—pure wine taken in moderation? good beer? genuine Old Bourbon?
For one, I wish it could be demonstrated that these things are hurtful. Sweeping, universal truths are as convenient as they are rare. The evils resulting from excess in drinking are so enormous and so terrible, that it would be a relief to know that alcoholic liquors are in themselves evil, and to be always avoided. What are the romantic woes of a Desdemona, or the brief picturesque sorrows of a Lear, compared with the thirty years' horror and desolation caused by a drunken parent? We laugh when we read Lamb's funny description of his waking up in the morning, and learning in what condition he had come home the night before by seeing all his clothes carefully folded. But his sister Mary did not laugh at it. He was all she had; it was tragedy to her,—this self-destruction of her sole stay and consolation. Goethe did not find it a laughing matter to have a drunken wife in his house for fifteen years, nor a jest to have his son brought in drunk from the tavern, and to see him dead in his coffin, the early victim of champagne. Who would not like to have a clear conviction, that what we have to do with regard to all such fluids is to let them alone? I am sure I should. It is a great advantage to have your enemy in plain sight, and to be sure he is an enemy.
What is wine? Chemists tell us they do not know. Three fifths of a glass of wine is water. One fifth is alcohol. Of the remaining fifth, about one half is sugar. One tenth of the whole quantity remains to be accounted for. A small part of that tenth is the acid which makes vinegar sour. Water, alcohol, sugar, acid,—these make very nearly the whole body of the wine; but if we mix these things in the proportions in which they are found in Madeira, the liquid is a disgusting mess, nothing like Madeira. The great chemists confess they do not know what that last small fraction of the glass of wine is, upon which its flavor, its odor, its fascination, depend. They do not know what it is that makes the difference between port and sherry, but are obliged to content themselves with giving it a hard name.