Women frequently acquire the vice by drinking porter and ale while nursing. These stimulants are usually recommended to them, from well-meant but mistaken motives, by their female attendants. Many fine young women are ruined by this pernicious practice. Their persons become gross, their milk unhealthy, and a foundation is too often laid for future indulgence in liquor.
The frequent use of cordials, such as noyau, shrub, kirsch-wasser, curaçoa, and anissette, sometimes leads to the practice. The active principle of these liqueurs is neither more nor less than ardent spirits.[6]
Among other causes, may be mentioned the excessive use of spirituous tinctures for the cure of hypochondria and indigestion. Persons who use strong tea, especially green, run the same risk. The latter species is singularly hurtful to the constitution, producing hysteria, heartburn, and general debility of the chylopoetic viscera. Some of these bad effects are relieved for a time by the use of spirits; and what was at first employed as a medicine, soon becomes an essential requisite.
Certain occupations have a tendency to induce drunkenness. Innkeepers, recruiting-sergeants, pugilists, &c., are all exposed in a great degree to temptation in this respect; and intemperance is a vice which may be very often justly charged against them. Commercial travellers, also, taken as a body, are open to the accusation of indulging too freely in the bottle, although I am not aware that they carry it to such excess as to entitle many of them to be ranked as drunkards. “Well fed, riding from town to town, and walking to the houses of the several tradesmen, they have an employment not only more agreeable, but more conducive to health than almost any other dependant on traffic. But they destroy their constitutions by intemperance; not generally by drunkenness, but by taking more liquor than nature requires. Dining at the traveller’s table, each drinks his pint or bottle of wine; he then takes negus or spirit with several of his customers; and at night he must have a glass or two of brandy and water. Few commercial travellers bear the employ for thirty years—the majority not twenty.”[7]
Some writers allege that unmarried women, especially if somewhat advanced in life, are more given to liquor than those who are married. This point I am unable from my own observation to decide. Women who indulge in this way, are solitary dram-drinkers, and so would men be, had not the arbitrary opinions of the world invested the practice in them with much less moral turpitude than in the opposite sex. Of the two sexes, there can be no doubt that men are much the more addicted to all sorts of intemperance.
Drunkenness appears to be in some measure hereditary. We frequently see it descending from parents to their children. This may undoubtedly often arise from bad example and imitation, but there can be little question that, in many instances at least, it exists as a family predisposition.
Men of genius are often unfortunately addicted to drinking. Nature, as she has gifted them with greater powers than their fellows, seems also to have mingled with their cup of life more bitterness. There is a melancholy which is apt to come like a cloud over the imaginations of such characters. Their minds possess a susceptibility and a delicacy of structure which unfit them for the gross atmosphere of human nature; wherefore, high talent has ever been distinguished for sadness and gloom. Genius lives in a world of its own: it is the essence of a superior nature—the loftier imaginings of the mind, clothed with a more spiritual and refined verdure. Few men endowed with such faculties enjoy the ordinary happiness of humanity. The stream of their lives runs harsh and broken. Melancholy thoughts sweep perpetually across their souls; and if these be heightened by misfortune, they are plunged into the deepest misery.
To relieve these feelings, many plans have been adopted. Dr. Johnson fled for years to wine under his habitual gloom. He found that the pangs were removed while its immediate influence lasted, but he also found that they returned with double force when that influence passed away. He saw the dangerous precipice on which he stood, and, by an unusual effort of volition, gave it over. In its stead he substituted tea; and to this milder stimulus had recourse in his melancholy. Voltaire and Fontenelle, for the same purpose, used coffee. The excitements of Newton and Hobbes were the fumes of tobacco, while Demosthenes and Haller were sufficiently stimulated by drinking freely of cold water. Such are the differences of constitution.