The Seven Sisters of Sleep / Popular History of the Seven Prevailing Narcotics of the World

by M. C. Cooke

Another inveterate opium-smoker makes his “confession,” that after his quantity is consumed, he feels no desire for sleep until twelve or two in the morning, when he falls into disturbed slumbers, which last till eight or nine. When he awakes, his head is giddy, confused, and painful—his mouth is dry, he has great thirst, he has no appetite, can neither read nor write, suffers pains in all his bones and muscles, gasps for breath; he wishes to bathe, but cannot stand the shock. This state continues till he gets his morning pipe, when he can eat and drink a little, and after that attend to his business. The force of example taught him this habit, and he knows no class of people exempt from it except Europeans. “Look,” says he, appealing to himself, “I was, ere I gave way to this accursed vice, stout, strong, and able for anything. I loved my wife and children, attended to my business, and was happy; but now I am thin, meagre, and wretched. I can receive enjoyment from nothing but the pipe, my passions are gone, and if I am railed at, and abused like a dog, I return not an angry word.”

Although opium-smoking is carried to such an excess among some of the Chinese coolies, yet there is no gambling amongst them at the opium shops at Singapore. It is true that this vice has been suppressed, but it is not secretly indulged in; and a gentleman who was formerly the opium farmer, says, “that the consumption of opium is but little affected by gambling, from arrack or samshu being the intoxicating medium used, a much better instrument for raising excitement and stimulating to excessive play than opium, whose effects are much more sedative than exciting.”

The consideration of the morals and influence of these customs leads us to a remarkable passage in one of M. Quetelet’s works, it refers to the certainty of natural laws in states as well as individuals:——“All those things which appear to be left to the free will, the passions, or the degree of intelligence of men, are regulated by laws as fixed, immutable, and eternal as those which govern the phenomena of the natural world. No one knows the day or the hour of his own death; and nothing appears more entirely accidental than the birth of a boy or of a girl in any given case. But how many out of a million of men living together in one country, shall have died in ten, twenty, forty, or sixty years, how many boys and girls shall be born in a million of births; all this is as certain, nay, much more certain, than any human truth.”

The statistics of courts of justice have disclosed to us the regular repetition of the same crimes, and have established the fact—incomprehensive to our understandings, because we do not know the connecting links—that in every large country, the number of offences, and of each kind of offence, may be predicted for every coming year, with the same certainty as the number of the births and of the natural deaths. Of every 100 persons accused before the supreme tribunal in France, 61 are condemned; in England, 71. The variations, on an average, amount hardly to 1/100th part of the whole. We can predict with confidence, for fifteen years to come, the number of suicides generally—that of the cases of suicide by fire-arms, and that of the cases of suicide by hanging.

Every large number of phenomena of the same kind, which rise and fall periodically, leads to a fixed proportion. This is the law of large numbers to which all things and all events without exception, are subject. These laws have nothing to do with the essence of vice and virtue in the moral world, but with the external causes, and the effects they produce in human society. No one denies the influence of education, and of habits of labour and order on the conduct of men, but no one thinks of regarding this moral conduct as a mere result of those habits. Good education and improved cultivation diminish the number of offences, as well as that of the annual deaths in our tables of mortality.

The results, therefore, of a collection of statistical information carefully arranged for Singapore, one of the most inveterate of opium localities, should, on comparison with the results obtained from other quarters, show that the per centage of deaths is greater, the per centage of births less; the per centage of criminals higher, and of suicides larger, in this population of opium-smokers, than in any other equally conditioned country in which opium is indulged, or it is not proven that the habit tends to shorten life, decrease production, increase crime, and induce suicide, all of which charges have been made against it.

With this evidence we are not at present satisfactorily supplied. That opinion has an influence, though probably only a minor one, on moral and social development, is not to be denied. Because man is so entirely a creature of relation, that nothing is unimportant to him. “If the movements of the remotest star that glitters in the heavens affect those of our earth, assist in determining its position in space, its climate, its productions, and thus influence the lot of man, who is the creature of these circumstances; what combinations subsisting upon the surface of the earth, or developing themselves in the bosom of society, can be deemed wholly indifferent to his conduct, and without power over his well being and happiness?”

If, as Dr. Lyon Playfair recently noticed, it is worthy of observation, that the character of the nations through which Dr. Livingstone passed in his recent travels, depended upon the habits of the people, in the acquisition of their food, as well as upon the food itself, we may expect to find opium exerting also its influence. If, for instance, the Kaffirs who lived by hunting, and were flesh-eaters, were wild and warlike; and the Wampoos, who lived principally on grain, were of a more quiet and peaceable disposition. Then again, the Bechuanos, who lived upon grain, were more civilized than the Kaffirs, and the Macololas, who combined as their food both grain and flesh, did not lose the warlike character, and made incursions upon their more feeble neighbours. It was an axiom amongst the latter people, that if it were not for the gullet (alluding to their appetites) there would be no war or fighting amongst mankind. In those parts, such as Loando, where the people lived upon starchy varieties of food, they had become diminutive in their stature; and this applied not merely to the natives, but also to the Portuguese settlers there, for they had lost the physical characters of their ancestors, and had become feminine in their frames and habits, and this extended even to their handwriting. Where more nitrogenous food was taken, the physical character of the people had not undergone that very marked change. If food exerts this influence upon the people of a country or district, we cannot doubt that any habit, such as smoking tobacco or opium, chewing betel or coca, must exert some influence upon the nations so indulging, whether that influence be good or bad.

Who will say that tobacco has no portion in the formation of the German character? Yet the subtle and profound Germans exhibit no extraordinary evidence in their national character of the baneful influences on their moral and social development, by their indulgence in this habit. Compare with them the Turks and Chinese, and let the balance be shown in favour of the most elevated in the ranks of civilization. Yet the most deficient must claim the influence of other equally potent circumstances in extenuation, for neither opium nor tobacco moulds the entire national character, it is only one of many influences. Let the Papuan stand beside the Chinaman and the Turk, and in spite of opium, the Papuan standard will exhibit a woeful short-coming. The waters of the great Amazon river must exert some influence on the currents of the Atlantic, but none will venture to assert that therefore the influx of such a body of water, vast in itself, but small in comparison to the whole, is the cause of the gulf stream. The drinking of tea will bear just such a relation to the currents in the life of nations who indulge in that luxury, but who will declare that the Chinese soldiers fly from the points of the British bayonets, or are expert in the carving of ivory balls, because they indulge in a beverage admired by other old ladies who can neither run nor carve. Neither because certain Javanese or Malays, under the influence of an over dose of opium, will “run amok,” or other Arabs, intoxicated with “haschish,” have made the name of assassin to become an object of dread, is it to be concluded hence that all men who indulge in the use of either of these narcotics will be dangerous members of society, or that they will rush into the jaws of death without a shudder at the sight of his fangs?

Is it because the Scot loves whisky that he is generally so cautious and shrewd in his business transactions as to win himself a name? Is it because the Cockney imbibes sundry deep potations of London porter or gin, that the enterprise and commerce of those great citizens of the world have become the envy of surrounding nations? Or is it because the Russian persisted in his love of raw turnip and sour quass, that the Malakoff and Sebastopol passed into the hands of the frog-eating Frenchman, and the beef-eating Englishman?