We conclude with an inductive argument which an eminent physician has recently in conversation urged upon our attention. Throughout the whole world, probably nine men out of every ten use tobacco.[31] Throughout the civilized world, women, as a general rule, abstain from the use of tobacco. Here we have an experiment, on an immense scale, ready-made for us. These three hundred million civilized men and women are subjected to the same varieties of climatic, dietetic, and social influences; their environments are the same; their inherited organic proclivities will average about the same; but the men smoke and the women do not. Now, if all that our hygienic reformers say about tobacco were true, the men in civilized countries should be afflicted with numerous constitutional diseases which do not afflict the women; or should be more liable to the diseases common to the two sexes; or, finally, should be shorter lived than the women. But statistics show that men are, on the whole, just as healthy and long-lived as women. In point of the average number of diseases[32] to which they are subject; in point of liability to disease; and in point of longevity; the two sexes are in all civilized countries, exactly on a par with each other. During the two hundred years in which tobacco has been in common use, it has made no appreciable difference in the health or longevity of those who have used it. This is a rough experiment, in which no account is taken of dosage, and in which the results are only general averages. But to our mind, it is very significant. Taken alone, it shows conclusively that since tobacco first began to be used, its bad effects must have been at least fully balanced by its good effects. Taken in connection with our physiological argument, it shows quite conclusively that the current notion about the banefulness of tobacco is, as we remarked above, simply a popular delusion.
To prove that tobacco, rightly used, is harmless, is to prove that it does pay to smoke. Every smoker, who has not vitiated his nervous system by raw excess, knows that there is no physical pleasure in the long run comparable with that which is afforded by tobacco. If such pleasure is to be obtained without detriment to the organism, who but the grimmest ascetic can say that here is not a gain? But, if, as we have every reason to believe, the stimulant action of tobacco upon the human system is not only harmless but very decidedly beneficial, then it is doubly proved that it does pay to smoke.
II.
The Coming Man will Drink Wine.
Mr. Parton treats alcohol much more respectfully than he treats tobacco. Though equally hostile to it, he apparently considers it a more formidable enemy. Instead of taking for granted from the outset that which it is his business to prove, he now condescends to employ something which to the unpractised eye may look like scientific argument. He has taken pains to collect such evidence as may be made to support his view of the case. And he frequently endeavours to assume an attitude of apparent impartiality by alluding to himself as a drinker of "these seductive liquids,"—although, in point of fact, his whole essay is conceived in the narrowest spirit of radical teetotalism. As for tobacco, it does not seem to occur to him that any one can be found, so obstinate or so deluded as seriously to maintain that there is any good in it; and he therefore writes upon that subject with all the exaggeration of unterrified confidence. But in dealing with alcohol, his violence of statement is evidently due to an uneasy consciousness that there is a vast body of current opinion and of scientific doctrine which may be arrayed in the lists against him. He brushes away, with a contemptuous sneer, (p. 56) the opinions of the medical profession; but he is, nevertheless, unable wholly to ignore them. Propositions of the sort which he formerly alluded to as if no one could think of doubting them, he now thinks it necessary to state at length. The poisonous nature of tobacco could be taken for granted in a subordinate clause; but the poisonous nature of alcohol needs to be asserted in an independent sentence. "Pure alcohol, though a product of highly nutritive substances, is a mere poison,—an absolute poison,—the mortal foe of life in every one of its forms, animal and vegetable." (p. 64.)
This is the way in which the advocates of total abstinence like to begin. A good round assertion about "poison" is calculated to demoralize the inexperienced reader, and to scare him into half giving up the case at once. But it is not all barking dogs that bite. Morphia is a deadly poison; but opium, which contains it, is not "the mortal foe of life in all its forms,"—it is sometimes the only thing which will keep soul and body together.[1] Theine is no doubt a deadly poison, but we manage to drink it with tolerable safety in our tea and coffee. Lactucin is probably a poison, yet people may eat a lettuce-salad and live. Chlorine is eminently a poison, yet we are all the time taking it into our systems, combined with sodium, in the shape of table-salt. Therefore over the verbal question whether a teaspoonful of pure alcohol is a poison, we do not care to wrangle. People do not drink pure alcohol, as a general thing. And as for the beverages into the composition of which alcohol enters, the reader will have no difficulty in understanding that they are poisons in just the same sense in which common salt and oxygen are poisons; i.e., if you take enough of them, they will kill you. This point was sufficiently cleared up in our first chapter.
Mr. Parton's hostility to this "mortal foe of life in all its forms" has taken shape in six definite propositions. Concerning alcoholic liquor of any kind and in any quantity, he asserts, and attempts to prove, that it does not nourish, that it does not aid digestion, that it does not warm, that it does not strengthen, that it undergoes no chemical change in the system, and that it always injuriously affects the brain. Beginning with the last of these propositions, let us first see what Mr. Parton has to say for it.
"If I, at this ten A.M., full of interest in this subject, and eager to get my view of it upon paper, were to drink a glass of the best port, Madeira, or sherry, or even a glass of lager-bier, I should lose the power to continue in three minutes; or, if I persisted in going on, I should be pretty sure to utter paradox and spurts of extravagance, which would not bear the cold review of to-morrow morning. Any one can try this experiment. Take two glasses of wine, and then immediately apply yourself to the hardest task your mind ever has to perform, and you will find you cannot do it. Let any student, just before he sits down to his mathematics, drink a pint of the purest beer, and he will be painfully conscious of loss of power." Did it ever dimly occur to Mr. Parton that all men may not be constructed on exactly the same plan with himself?
We wonder how many drops of "seductive fluid," unwisely taken at the wrong time of day, are to be held responsible for the following "spurt" of extravagance: "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." Is this the way in which "well-groomed" people are expected to behave? Fancy an audience following this precious bit of advice. When Mlle. Janauschek, for instance, is finishing the third act of "Medea" or the second act of "Deborah," amid the tragic solemnity of the scene, fancy the audience, because of bad air in the theatre, getting up and flinging their canes and opera-glasses on the stage, in the heroic struggle for oxygen or death! Fancy four or five hundred grown-up, educated people behaving in this way! If these are to be the manners of the Coming Man, we trust it will be long before he comes.
Such is one of the "spurts of extravagance" which Mr. Parton apparently thinks will "bear the cold review of to-morrow morning." Having survived this, we may philosophically resign ourselves to the infliction of another, more nearly akin to our subject. "How we all wondered that England should think so erroneously, and adhere to its errors so obstinately, during our late war! Mr. Gladstone has in part explained the mystery. The adults of England, he said, in his famous wine-speech, drink, on an average, three hundred quarts of beer each per annum!" Another choice bit of radical philosophy: if your neighbour happens not to agree with your most cherished opinions, he must be idiotic, immoral, or drugged! The English failed to sympathize with us, because they are such beer-drinkers! What a rare faculty of disentangling causal relations! We believe that the working people, who drink the most beer, were just those who, as a class, were most ready to sympathize with us in the time of need. But Mr. Parton has "grounds" for his opinion. "It is physically impossible for a human brain, muddled every day with a quart of beer, to correctly hold correct opinions, or appropriate pure knowledge." "The receptive, the curious, the candid, the trustworthy brains,—those that do not take things for granted, and yet are ever open to conviction,—such heads are to be found on the shoulders of men who drink little or none of these seductive fluids." Mr. Parton has doubtless forgotten that the head of "the nearest approach to the complete human being that has yet appeared," the head of the "highly-groomed" Goethe—rested upon the shoulders of a man who drank his two or three bottles of wine daily.[2] But we are now rapidly getting into the æthereal region of certainties. "Taking together all that science and observation teach and indicate, we have one certainty: that, to a person in good health and of good life, alcoholic liquors are not necessary, but are always in some degree hurtful." So it is not an open question, after all! Certainty has been arrived at,—by Mr. Parton, at least. And it is so difficult to suppose that any sane mind, after due investigation, can come to a different opinion, that all persons who mean to keep on using alcohol are advised in pathetic language never to look into the facts:
"If ignorance is bliss, 't is folly to be wise."