But even if we were to give up the doctrine that alcohol is a true food, the great indisputed and indisputable fact of its stimulant value would still remain. Tobacco neither nourishes the body nor warms it; yet it enables us to earn our daily bread with less fatigue, and to support the incessant trials of life with a more even spirit. The value of alcohol as a stimulant is inferior only to that of tobacco; or perhaps, for general purposes, it is quite unsurpassed. It compensates for the occasionally inevitable incapacity of ordinary food to maintain due nutrition; and in this way enables us to work longer, and with a lighter heart, and with less fear of ultimate depression. It bridges over the pitfalls which the complicated exigencies of modern life are constantly digging for us. Warm-hearted but weak-headed radicalism may imagine a utopian state of things in which money will grow on bushes and every one mind the moral law, and digestion be always easy, and vexation infrequent, and "artificial" stimulus unnecessary; but this is not the state of things amid which we live. A modern man cannot, if he does his duty, secure to himself the enjoyment of such a state. There are times when he must sacrifice a little of his own round perfection, if it be only to lend a helping hand to his neighbour. A kind of valetudinarian philosophy is now afloat, which says, Look out, above all things, for your own physical welfare. This philosophy contains a truth, but as usually manifested it is nothing but the result of a morbid self-consciousness. Duty sometimes requires that we should cease coddling ourselves, and go to work, unless we would see some cause suffer which interests other men, living and to come, besides ourselves. We must sometimes run to put the fire out, even if we do thereby lose our dinner, and interfere with the stomach's requirements. It is useless, then, to talk about agents which "support us in doing wrong," when, from the very constitution of the world and of society, we can no more go exactly "right" than we can draw a line which shall be mathematically straight. It is useless to speculate about an ideal society in which men can dispense with the agents which economize their nervous strength, when we find as a historical fact that no nation has ever existed which has been able to dispense with those agents. As long as there are inequalities in the daily ratio of waste and repair to be rectified, so long we shall get along better with wine than without it. For this, looked at from the widest possible point of view, is the legitimate function of alcohol,—to diminish the necessary friction of living.
This too is the view of Liebig: "As a restorative, a means of refreshment when the powers of life are exhausted, of giving animation and energy where man has to struggle with days of sorrow, as a means of correction and compensation where misproportion occurs in nutrition, wine is surpassed by no product of nature or of art…. In no part of Germany do the apothecaries' establishments bring so low a price as in the rich cities on the Rhine; for there wine is the universal medicine of the healthy as well as the sick. It is considered as milk for the aged."[35]
This is also the view of Dr. Anstie. Comparing the action of alcohol upon the organism with that of chloroform and sulphuric ether, he observes: "It seems as if the former were intended to be the medicine of those ailments which are engendered of the necessary everyday evils of civilized life, and has therefore been made attractive to the senses, and easily retained in the tissues, and in various ways approving itself to our judgment as a food; while the others, which are more rarely needed for their stimulant properties, and are chiefly valuable for their beneficent temporary poisonous action, by the help of which painful operations are sustained with impunity, are in great measure deprived of these attractions, and of their facilities for entering and remaining in the system."[36] Apart from its implied teleology, this passage contains the gist of the whole matter.
As for the Coming Man, whom Mr. Parton appears to regard as a sort of pugilist or Olympic athlete, we suppose he will undoubtedly have to exercise his brain sometimes, he will have to study, think and plan, he will have responsibilities to shoulder, his digestion will not always be preserved at its maximum of efficiency, his powers of endurance will sometimes be tried to the utmost. The period in the future when "we shall have changed all this" is altogether too remote to affect our present conclusion; which is that the Coming Man, so long as he is a member of a complex, civilized society, will continue to use, with profit as well as pleasure, the two universal stimulants, Alcohol and Tobacco.
APPENDIX.
Bibliography of Tobacco.
For the benefit of those readers who may feel interested in this subject, the following list is added, of the principal works which have been written on the effects of tobacco. The older ones have, of course, little scientific value, yet they are often interesting and suggestive. They usually made the best use of the science of their time, which is more than can be said of some of the later treatises.
Baumann: Dissertatio de Tabaci virtutibus. Basil, 1579.
Everart: De herba Panacea. Antwerp, 1583.
Ziegler: Taback von dem gar heilsamen Wundkraute Nicotiana. Zurich, 1616.
Marradon: Dialogo del uso del Tabaco. Seville, 1618.