Now, we should not in the least object to any well-devised and practical legislation that would do away with drunkenness entirely, if that were possible, which it unfortunately is not; nor will it ever be the case so long as the human race exists upon earth. The question, then, arises, What would be practical legislation in the matter? This, in turn, involves an inquiry into the latent causes of the great commotion raised within this generation on the subject. It will be fresh in the memory of reading people in the United States that some two years ago one of our ablest metropolitan journals employed an agent to purchase samples of every possibly adulterable commodity from the most reputable venders in that city, drugs of the same description from the most respectable apothecaries—in short, specimens of everything on sale that was capable of deterioration by admixture of foreign substances; and that, on handing them over to a competent chemist for analysis, there was not a single instance of an article so purchased and tested that was not found adulterated to the last extent. All, without exception, whether articles of food, drink, medicine, or products of the arts and manufactures, were debased and corrupted—always, of course, with an inferior and cheaper, frequently with an absolutely injurious, and in some instances with a poisonous, admixture. The exposure occupied the columns of the paper referred to for some two weeks, and was then discontinued; not, however, without leaving food for reflection in the minds of the thoughtful. Now, when we consider the still greater temptation, the patent feasibility, and the larger gains resulting from adulteration of the various liquors, owing to the many hands through which they must and do pass before reaching their consumers, and the almost total impossibility, as things are, of detection, we shall have strong reason à priori to believe that such adulteration takes place. But we have before us at this moment a book of some two hundred pages, entitled the Bar-keeper’s Manual, in which the facts are laid down, the method explained, the ingredients unblushingly named, the manipulations described, and a clear reason thus afforded why the use of liquors nowadays is so ruinous to health, so productive of hitherto comparatively unknown forms of disease, and has become in this century especially such a crying abomination. In this book (which forcibly recalls to our mind an advertisement for “a man in a liquor store” that we once saw, and which wound up by stating that no one need apply who did not understand “doctoring” liquors) recipes are given for making from common whiskey any kind of gin, brandy, rum, arrack, kirschwasser, absinthe, etc., as well as any other desired brand of whiskey; together with full directions for mixing, diluting, coloring, adding strength, bead, and fruitiness, as well as for flavoring them each up to the required mark. When we find among the ingredients recommended (and evidently used, as the result of experience in this diabolical laboratory) nux vomica, cocculus indicus, strychnia, henbane, poppy-seed, creosote, and logwood, to impart strength to the false liquor, we need not inquire after the thousand other less pernicious articles used to supply color, odor, or bead to the noxious compounds. Now, from conversations held with persons who have been engaged in the liquor business in its various forms, as well as from reliable information long since spread before the public, but to quote which in extenso would occupy too much space, we may generalize these facts, which we take to be not only undisputed but indisputable; viz., that wines never, and brandies, gins, etc., rarely, reach our shores in their pure state; that the same assertion is true of every imported liquor; that the subsequent adulteration is something fearful to contemplate; and that the advocates of prohibitory laws are talking within bounds when they call such preparations poisons. We may further learn that rarely indeed do our home-manufactured liquors pass in a pure state into the hands of the first purchaser; and that, after they have passed through two or three subsequent hands, whatever they may have become, they are anything in the world but pure liquors. By the time, then, that they reach the small groceries, drinking-shops, doggeries, and the lowest classes of saloons, all liquors will, on an average, have passed through at least seven or eight hands, each man quite as eager as the last to make all the gain he possibly can upon the article; and adulteration (he has the Manual before him) presenting the safest and easiest plan, it follows that the laborer or artisan, those whose poverty forces them to frequent the lowest and meanest places, will be supplied with the most villanous article possible to be conceived under the name of liquor. Mr. Greenwood, in his work, The Seven Plagues of London, says:
“Where there is no pure liquor—and there is little such in London, even for the wealthy—perhaps nothing used by man as a stimulant is liable to greater and more injurious adulterations than gin; and I assert that it is not to-day to be procured pure (I speak not of merely injurious but) of absolutely poisonous drugs at a single shop in London to which a poor man would go or where he would be served.”
Mr. Nathaniel Curtis, the founder and first Worthy Chief of the Order of Good Templars, has (though his deductions from the facts are entirely different from ours) made it abundantly evident that the adulteration of all liquors, fermented, vinous, and ardent, is carried on in a most reckless manner and without regard to consequences in our own country. His words are:
“From the tramp’s glass of beer, through the sot’s glass of rum, jorum of whiskey, or pull of gin, up to the merchant’s madeira or sherry and the millionaire’s goblet of champagne, we have shown them all to be, not what the drinker supposes—and that were bad enough in all conscience—but universally drugged, most frequently poisoned, and not in one case of ten thousand containing more than a small percentage of the article the purchaser paid for.”
We might multiply authorities, chemical, medical, and purely statistic, on this subject to an indefinite extent, but it would occupy too much space; besides which, reading men are already sufficiently convinced of the facts. Within the last few years such a mass of damning evidence has been put before the public on this subject that the man must be wilfully blind who does not admit adulteration of the most injurious sort to be the rule in all the various branches and phases of the liquor-traffic. One quotation, however, we must make from the pages of the Dublin Review, July, 1870, article “Protestant London,” in which the writer suggests something very like our own view, though he seems to have an idea that the wholesale adulteration was, in England, confined to fermented liquors, which is indeed a grave mistake, whether as regards England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, or in fact any of the countries peculiarly afflicted by this demon of drink. The writer says:
“Yet the effects of beer in England are confessedly far worse than those of wine in France. We believe the real explanation of this to be its adulteration. It is by drinking, at first in moderation, adulterated beer that the habit of intoxication becomes a slavery, by which men are afterwards led on to the abuse of gin. There are at this moment thousands of habitual drunkards among us who would never have been drunkards at all, had they not been betrayed into the snare by drinking in moderation adulterated beer—that is, if the beer sold in public-houses were not universally adulterated. This evil, at least, law well administered might meet and uproot. Government should not allow men both to cheat and poison their neighbors with impunity.”
It is, then, not at all surprising that mania a potu, delirium tremens, and other disorders arising from the abuse of good or the use of drugged liquor should have become so common in this country as to furnish a good or, at any rate, a plausible reason why many conscientious persons have attributed to the use of liquor effects due, either solely or in great measure, to the stupefying and poisonous decoctions vended under that name. But while this would have been, at all times as it is now, an excellent and an all-sufficient reason for trying to induce people to refrain, whether by pledge or otherwise, from such infernal compounds, and for having analysts appointed by law to examine and test the liquors sold in every tavern, we insist that it is no argument at all for doing away by law with the use of liquor in toto. We believe sincerely that no single measure (that can be carried out) would do more to lessen the national curse of drunkenness than the appointment of competent chemists to see to the purity of the liquors vended. And, considering the advanced state of chemical science among us, is it absurd to suppose, that if the government were determined that so it should be, the selling of adulterated liquor might not easily be made so dangerous a trade as to be very soon given over? It is lamentable that people are so eager for gain that they will and do adulterate everything capable of the process. Physicians tell us that it is nearly impossible to get at the ordinary drug-stores any of the higher-priced medicines in their pure state; that opium, quinine, etc., are nearly always impure, mixed with foreign ingredients; and that, for this reason, their prescriptions often fail of the intended effect. This, certainly, is no good reason for enacting a law to abolish entirely the use of adulterable drugs; nor because tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, mace, mustard, and pepper are rarely found pure should we therefore abandon their use altogether.
Here, of course, it will be contended that the cases are not parallel; that whereas the abuse of liquor, or the use of the drugged article going by that name, renders man like the brute, degrades and obliterates the image of God in us, yet such is not the case with the adulterated commodities of food or with the drugs referred to. True, the analogy does not hold equally good throughout in each case, but the principle is exactly the same in all. We will go further, admitting that liquor is in very few cases an absolute necessity; but what a large number of mankind regard it as of prime importance to their well-being, to their comfort, or, finally, to their enjoyment! How few of the great mass of humanity, on the other hand, are of that unfortunate constitution of mind, of body, or of both that they cannot restrain themselves within the bounds of moderation in the use of liquor vinous or fermented! Suppose even that the passage of a prohibitory law by the majority were consonant with church and Scriptural teachings, would it be fair or reasonable that for the lamentable weakness of the very few the comfort and enjoyment of the vast mass of humanity should be lightly set aside as an unconsidered trifle? That Anglican bishop who said he “would rather see England free than England sober” expressed a noble sentiment, and we think, with him, that enforced sobriety (as would be that produced by such a law) would be dearly purchased at the expense of virtual slavery. Some one pithily condemns that false system of morality that begins by pledges of total abstinence, but the falsity of such a scheme is trifling compared with that which would invite us to come and admire a nation sober, enforcedly sober, de par la loi! As well ask us to applaud the sobriety of the convicts in the penitentiary. We are not placed in the world to be free from temptation, but to resist it. All theologians assure us that this is a state of probation, nor is it the business of the civil code either to abolish property lest many may steal, or to suppress the manufacture of liquor lest some shame themselves and sin against God by getting drunk. Again, if you begin this business, where is it to end? Human beings are very full of kinks and crotchets. Each half-century is sure to have its peculiar vagary. What may not be that of the next one? King James considered tobacco as a direct emanation from the devil; and John Wesley was no whit behind him either in the belief or its expression. It is certainly quite as unnecessary, quite as much an article de pur luxe, as beer, wine, or spirits. Who is bail to me that, the principle once established of suppressing human nature by act of Congress, future Good Templars, prospective Rechabites, Sons of Temperance yet to come, nay, the whole Methodistic fraternity, may not revivify the views of Wesley and thunder anathemas against Yaras, Fine-cut, and Cavendish? Or there may arise an expounder of Scripture who shall deduce thence a system of vegetarianism (quite as unlikely doctrines and practices have been deduced from Holy Writ) to his own satisfaction and that of crowds greater than wait on the ministrations of our latest evangelists. Of course then, marshalled to victory by the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” they will soon have a law enacted forbidding to us all beefsteak or mutton-chop! There is, in short, no end to the antics and absurdities that may, nay, that must, arise under the ægis of such a precedent as this law would furnish. We, for our part, fully believe in rendering to Cæsar what belongs to him; but it is the province of the church, representing God upon earth—of religion, in other words—so to dispose man as to enable him to withstand temptation to sin and crime; and the business of the civil power to punish him for offences committed, not to remove all temptation to wrongdoing. In short, the law is not held to an impossibility, which this would plainly be, unless the world were made a tabula rasa. The assumption, therefore, by the civil law, of the divinely-conferred duty and prerogative of the church would, in any case, be a usurpation, were it even practicable. We shall see that in the case before us, at least, it would be purely impossible to carry out the legal mandate by all the power of the government, were it multiplied a hundred-fold.
The heavy tariff on foreign, and the large internal revenue tax on domestic, liquors, necessitated by our civil war, have also been a great inducement to the adulteration of spirits, as well as to the advance of that already too wide-spread practice of cheating the government in matter of revenue, now so common as hardly to be regarded in the light of a moral wrong. Howsoever it may have come about, the fact is that the tone of political morality with us is about as low as it has ever been in any country that the sun shines on. From the Stocking & Leet trial, through the troubles of Tammany’s magnates and the charges of complicity with smugglers pending against some of our most prominent mercantile firms, down to the “crooked whiskey” cases of to-day, as well as the constantly-bandied and the sometimes thoroughly proven charges of bribery against our most highly-placed public men, we see everywhere either a desperate resolution to evade all law, or a serene belief that deception and the withholding of tax and tariff legally due cease to be cheating and swindling when the government is the party of the second part. It is now clearly made out that, since the laying on of high duties and revenue tax, it has cost our government an average of three dollars to collect every two dollars received from that source in the public treasury; while as to the amount of which the government is annually defrauded, no calculation other than an approximate one can, of course, be made, but those whose position gives them the best chance to form an accurate judgment place the yearly sum at the minimum of $80,000,000. Before our late war we had a federal treasury ever full. Indeed, but a very short time before that dismal experience the general government distributed a large surplus among the States; our treasury notes were always above par, and our simple government bonds at high premium. With the advent of war came the necessity for raising a large and an immediate revenue. Taxation, direct and indirect, was resorted to, the like of which has rarely (if ever) been known in civilized countries. Paper money, redeemable at the pleasure of the government, was issued. Gold and silver entirely disappeared. An army of internal revenue officers had to be created, and a supplementary host of detectives to ferret out infractions of the new-made laws. The tax on common whiskey was placed at two dollars and fifty cents per gallon, and corresponding sums on foreign liquors; Cognac, for example, being rated at seven dollars per gallon. Our people were not accustomed to, and did not like, taxation; and the government neither knew how to suggest, nor its officials how to carry out honestly and skilfully, any well-devised plans for the collection of revenue on such a gigantic scale. Here there was a strong inducement at once both to the illicit manufacture and to the increased adulteration of liquors, the latter of which (though existing too largely before) took, from that time, large strides in advance, and both have uninterruptedly continued their progress till the present day, threatening (unless most stringent measures be taken for their repression) to ruin our country, morally, and a large number of her citizens temporally and eternally. It is true that the tax on home-manufactured spirits was largely cut down in 1870, and that on foreign wines and liquors heavily curtailed; but those at all acquainted with the subject know how little this step, taken after eight years of the reverse practice, was likely to interfere with clandestine manufacture, and how immensely it tended to give a superadded impetus to the practice of adulteration. Our internal revenue officers are now legion, yet they do not collect one-half of the revenue that should be collected; and of that one-half not more than two-fifths inures to the benefit of the treasury. Our detectives swarm everywhere, yet illicit distillation and poisonous adulteration of liquors are on a very rapid increase. Now, a very large number of people, learned and lay, rich and poor, of practical experience in the use of liquor, and deriving their information from the experience of others, or from reading, are strongly of the opinion that the best and most practicable mode of decreasing actual drunkenness, and of mitigating or diminishing the acknowledged evils of drink, would be the furnishing of pure liquors instead of the noxious compounds now on sale. Certainly, to put the matter in the mildest terms, there prevails a very extensive belief, founded, we think, upon good reason, that if pure liquors alone were sold drunkenness would not prevail as it now does. It is not contended that intoxication would thereby be done away with, any more than that the most skilful devices can ever entirely prevent theft, forgery, murder, or other crime; but we insist that the tendency to drunkenness, now so inseparable (as experience shows) from the use of the drugged article, would not exist in a tithe of the instances nor to a hundredth part of the extent that we daily see. Certain it is that in the last century, and until adulteration began to prevail extensively in the present, the terrific effects of liquor-drinking now known to us, under so many different names and forms of disease, did not present themselves with any frequency; and it is equally certain that just in proportion to the universality of adulteration has been the commonness and virulence of mania and delirium resulting from drink. We have said that stringent measures should be taken to guard the interests of the comparatively helpless consumers, so that they may have some reasonable ground for believing that in taking a glass of ale or beer they have not imbibed a dose of cocculus indicus, that a drink of whiskey does not of necessity imply an undefined amount of nux vomica, or that the symptoms resultant from a mixture of brandy and water at dinner are not due to strychnia or creosote. We found it much easier during the war to raise prices on account of the enhanced value of gold than it has since proved to diminish them in accordance with the approximation of greenbacks to coin. So, too, in this matter of suppressing adulteration of drink (which is the remedy we propose, and which will be just so far valuable as it is thorough and uncompromising, while comparatively useless unless rigidly and strenuously carried out), we have called into play a practice, we have evoked a demon, which is not to be abolished or banished by feeble instrumentality. We shall illustrate what may be done here in our own country by what has been successfully accomplished in Sweden (a country in which drunkenness and its attendant evils had attained a magnitude beyond, perhaps, any other of Europe); nor can we do it better than by the following account taken from Dr. Carnegie’s late book, entitled The License Laws of Sweden:
“In the town of Gothenburg, however, these measures (prohibitory laws), partly from local reasons, were not found sufficiently restrictive; and a committee, appointed in 1865, readily traced a concurrent progress between the increasing pauperism and the increasing drink. The laws were evaded, the police set at naught, and nothing remained but to inaugurate a radically new system. This consisted of various measures, all subordinate to one great principle—viz., that no individual, either as proprietor or manager, under a public-house license, should derive any gain from the sale of liquor. To carry out this principle in its integrity the whole liquor-traffic of the town was gradually transferred to a company, limited, consisting of the most highly respected gentlemen of the town, who undertook, by their charter, to carry on the business in the interests of temperance and morality, and neither to derive any profit from it themselves nor to allow any person acting under them to do so. The company now rent all the houses and licenses from the town, paying a moderate interest on the capital invested, and making over the entire profits of the trade to the town treasury. The places for drink—the number of which was immediately curtailed—are of two classes, public-houses and retail shops, both bound to purchase their wine and spirits (analyzed and authoritatively pronounced pure) from the company, to sell them without any profit, to supply good food and hot meals on the premises, and not to sell Swedish brandy except at meals. The public-houses are managed by carefully-chosen men, who derive their profits from the sale of malt liquors (also analyzed before being put on sale), coffee, tea, soda and seltzer water, cigars, etc., and from the food and lodgings. The retail shops are managed entirely by women, who have a fixed salary but no share in the profits. This system began to work in October, 1865. Its effects have been at once perceptible. In 1864 the number of fines paid in Gothenburg for drunkenness was 2,164; in 1870, with a largely increased population, 1,416. Cases of delirium tremens in 1864 were 118; in 1868 but 54. Nor are the financial effects less encouraging. In 1872 the company realized in net profits no less than £15,846, which, being paid over to the town, far more than covers the entire poor-rate. Another pleasant fact is that this large amount of trade is virtually carried on without any paid-up capital, the whole outlay of the company having only amounted to £454.”