5060 BY EDWIN REED. price, 25 Qepts. A NEW VIEW OF THE Temperance Question. BY EDWIN REED. PRICE , TWENTY -FIVE CENTS. BOSTON : PRESS OF SAMUEL USHER, 1 71 Devonshire Street. 1889. ( soc,o Copyrighted, 1889, by Edwin Reed. BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY CHESTNUT HILL, MASS* NOV 14 ’68 403547 I A NEW VIEW OF THE TEMPERANCE QUESTION. The instability of public sentiment on the temper- ance question is almost grotesque. On one point only all are agreed, namely, that the excessive use of intoxicating liquors is a gigantic evil, perhaps the most prolific source of poverty, disease, and crime in modern society. At the risk of adding another dis- sonant note to what it may not be improper to call the public jargon on this subject, it is proposed to consider herein a new remedy, based not on legal, nor even on moral, but on purely physiological con- siderations. The first systematic attempt at temperance reform in this country was made in or about the year 1830. That was a period remarkable for the beginning of profound and far-reaching changes in the constitu- tion of society. No decade of years in our history has been pregnant with so great events. Garrison started the anti-slavery movement in 1832. In the 4 A NEW VIEW OF THE same period the railroad and the telegraph had their birth. It was then, also, that coal came into use, a “black stone,” so called, having been exhibited to the students of Harvard College in 1820 as a curiosity. At the same time the deep-rooted prejudice against private corporations gave way, to the end that the world’s drudgery will yet be performed at the mini- mum of cost, though many a colossus, then in its cradle, is now stalking over the land, as regardless of the rights of individuals as of the vintage which it tramples, “Where the grapes of wrath are stored.” The earliest phase of the temperance movement was moral suasion. Societies in which the members were pledged to total abstinence sprang into being, as if by magic, throughout the northern and eastern States. As in the crusades to the Holy Land, the popular spirit extended even to the children, and thousands of all classes of the people, irrespective of age, sex or social position, joined in one mighty effort to extirpate the curse of rum. So fiery, indeed, became the zeal of its advocates in some quarters, that farmers cut down their orchard trees in furtherance of the righteous cause, and thus that TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 5 king of fruits, the apple, an inestimable blessing to any community, whose crowning virtues have been the theme of song and story since the world began, was banished in disgrace from many a New England table. Moral suasion, however, proved utterly inadequate to accomplish the purpose. The evils it sought to remove increased daily before its face. External bonds placed around the human will, even under all the solemn sanctions of an oath, are of little binding force if the untamed appetites are left to tug and strain within. The pendulum of reform, under a law of social mechanics, then swung to the other extreme, and prohibition became the watchword. The citadel of the enemy was now to be carried by direct assault. The new party has had many things in its favor. It was fortunate in its leader, a man of noble aspira- tions, strong intellectual powers, and indomitable courage. It is a happy circumstance, too, that his t life has been spared through the entire period of the struggle, and that, after nearly forty years, he is still at the head of the column. The cause was fortu- nate, also, in the place of its origin ; not for the rea- son assigned by a governor of Massachusetts when 6 A NEW VIEW OF THE asked how he happened to begin his career in Maine, that it was necessary for him to break into the world somewhere and he chose the weakest spot ; but because the people of that State are of the best class of American citizens, cool, intelligent, thoughtful, and exceptionally free from the disturbances to which a more heterogeneous population is subject. And yet, even in Maine, prohibition is a failure. The traffic is disguised, but it exists. Before every election, the two political parties compete with each other for the support of the liquor-dealers, and pledges of immunity from prosecution are the pawns with which they play their hypocritical game. The statistics of crime and insanity afford no evidence that a prolific source of social demoralization has been even partially closed. In violation of the fun- damental principles of our government, the statute on the subject has been interjected into the state constitution, with no other result than to weaken the foundation on which the structure of society rests. In Massachusetts the people have all the blessings, so far as the sale of intoxicating liquors is concerned, of home rule. The towns themselves vote annually whether they will have prohibition or license for the ensuing year. The result may well amaze the TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 7 student of political economy. The same town often votes one way one year and the other the next, with a rhythm that is truly edifying. The people are all at sea on the question of prohibiting the liquor traffic. They know the stupendous evils to which it leads, but they know, also, that prohibition strikes at the very roots of personal character. It undertakes, not to give a man power to meet and overcome temptation, but to put temptation beyond his reach. It is the discipline of the primary school applied to full-grown men. The manhood of the citizen instinctively rebels against it . 1 It also breeds dis- simulation. The rich man offers a merely perfunc- tory resistance to it, for he can supply his wants elsewhere ; and the politician rides it as a hobby into office. As a policy it is a failure, and only the noble, self-sacrificing zeal of its advocates entitles it to respect. Another method of handling this evil, perhaps the most popular one at present, is to tax it to death. A large division of the temperance army has sud- denly become sappers and miners, and they propose 1 The same stricture applies to voluntary pledges of abstinence. Ralph Waldo Emerson says in his journal : “No; I shall not deprive my example of all its value by abdicating my freedom on that point. It shall be always my example, the spectacle to all whom it may concern, of my spontaneous action at the time.” 8 A NEW VIEW OF THE to blow up the works of the enemy with the dyna- mite of taxation. This is all egregious folly. The polluted stream is only turned by such means into other and deeper channels. In effect, the State enters into partnership with the liquor-dealers, receiv- ing a fixed sum as its share of the profits. The number of saloons, to be sure, is diminished, and vast amounts of money are gathered into the public treasury, but whether the consumption of liquors is thereby materially, if at all, reduced, is extremely doubtful. So far as the teachings of experience go, particularly in Switzerland where the experiment has had a trial, they incline strongly to the negative. One result is evident from the beginning : the dealers will find the tax “bitter in the mouth,” but “sweet in the belly.” They will certainly gain by means of it a still firmer hold on the community. An oak drives its roots deeper with every impact of the gale. Many a ship makes her best record for speed on the wind, rather than before it. The imposition of a heavy tax will simply force the busi- ness, the most lucrative in the world, into the hands of a few, who must satisfy the claims of their silent partner either by extending the limits of their trade or by adulterating their liquors. They will probably TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 9 do both. Viewed purely as a matter of business, the State makes a good bargain. It filches from the liquor-dealers a large fund with which to meet in part the enormous drafts made by them on its treas- ury through the medium of court-houses and jails. Of the ethics of the transaction, however, we cannot speak so favorably, for the reason, perhaps, that there is no ethics in it. It will either degenerate into a scheme for revenue, pure and simple, or undertake in the future, by discriminate duties, to shift the centre of gravity to the lighter beverages. As it is, it bribes every- taxpayer with the promise of a lib- eral discount on his bills. It betrays the cause of good government with thirty pieces of silver . 1 A fourth method remains still to be considered. It has the double advantage of being sanctioned by the Massachusetts State Board of Health and Miss Kate Field. It proposes a compromise, a sort of Mason and Dixon’s line, projected through the terri- tory of sin. Jove with his thunderbolts may terrify us on one side, but smiling Bacchus will welcome us on the other. This scheme of the savant and the dilettante consists in substituting, either by moral 1 Let any right-minded man consider the probable effect of licensing other social evils on the basis of large payments into the public treasury ! IO A NEW VIEW OF THE suasion or the pressure of a discriminate tax, the use of wine, ale, and beer, which are comparatively harm- less, for those spirituous liquors that invariably fire the brain and impair the tissues of their miserable victims. In 1870, the Massachusetts State Board of Health sent out circulars into all parts of the world, chiefly to our consuls and other officials abroad, asking information concerning the drinking habits of the people in their respective localities, and particularly the influence, if any, of those habits on the existing conditions of pauperism and crime. The replies, as published in the annual report of 1871, constitute a most interesting symposium on this subject. The able critique thereon, by Dr. Bowditch, the chairman of the board, included in the report of the following year, seems to foreshadow a cosmic law, by virtue of which degrees of intemperance in the use of stimu- lating drinks follow isothermal lines, the evil increas- ing, in more or less direct ratio, with the distance from the equator. The discussion of this most interesting branch of our inquiry will come later, but the subject is mentioned now simply to show that a general law, like an angel with a drawn sword, stands in the TEMPERANCE QUESTION. I 1 path of our compromising reformers. Climate is an all-important factor in the solution of the prob- lem. In the warm countries of the Mediterranean light wines are more freely used than water as a beverage, and with no appreciable effect, so far as public records show, on the moral or material wel- fare of the people. In the countries bordering on the North Sea, however, we find the heavier drinks in popular use, and the worst evils of the traffic unmistakably exhibited. The difference is not acci- dental. It lies in the depths of human nature, as modified and controlled in some way by physical environment. To talk of changing these conditions of national life without an examination into the causes that have produced them, and that are still operative to produce them, to ignore the underlying principles that give diversity of character and taste and habit to the peoples of the world, and expect to revolutionize society by importing into one country an article of consumption suited to the needs of another, implies a course of procedure as superficial as it is impracticable and absurd. These, then, are the methods, and the only methods, thus far devised by the ingenuity of man to stay the mighty flood of intemperance that 12 A NEW VIEW OF THE threatens to engulf us. Two of them have been thoroughly tested in practical experience, under the most favorable conditions for success, and have been found to be utterly wanting. The third is morally defective, and in the end will aggravate the evils it is intended to suppress. Occasionally, a remedy is worse than a disease. The Earl of Derby was troubled with the gout, and a friend sent him a case of a certain kind of wine as a specific for the malady. The next day his lordship returned it, saying, “ I have tried the wine and prefer the gout.” The fourth remedy can never reach the dignity of becoming historic. There is much reason, in- deed, to fear that the world is going the other way. In several of the wine-producing and beer-drinking districts of Germany, alcohol is gradually supplant- ing the lighter beverages. In the meantime the tide of intemperance, a sea “Whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears,” is steadily rising at our very feet. Many a Canute, and, alas ! many a Mrs. Partington, have tried to stay its destructive waves, but in vain. Since 1840, TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 13 the consumption of malt and spirituous liquors in this country has increased from four to twelve gal- lons, per capita, of the population. From 1878 to 1883 inclusive, the consumption of distilled liquors made an absolute gain of 44.5 per cent., and that of malt liquors, 60.2 per cent. At this rate the com- ing century may well exclaim, with the king of France, “ After me, the deluge!” In England, the law forbidding solemnization of marriage after twelve o’clock meridian is still retained on the statute books, on the ground, it is alleged, that the masses of the people are not generally sober enough, after that hour, to enter the holy bonds of matrimony. The Irish are natural politicians, and therefore easy victims of that strange affinity existing between politics and “perpendicular drinks.” The Scotsman is a theologian by birth ; his mind delights to soar into the empyrean ; but whoever has had the misfortune to spend Saturday night in Glas- gow or Edinburgh will carry with him, as long as he lives, a picture of social degradation of which, it is not too much to say, the civilized world furnishes no parallel. It is a curious psychological fact that, in the contemplation of a subject from any point of view, the human mind naturally seeks, in a tentative H A NEW VIEW OF THE way, exactly the opposite. It makes an instinctive effort to grasp the whole truth. The theory of complementary colors is based on this tendency. A learned divine in New England, in the early part of the present century, who was extremely penurious, preached the ablest sermon of his life on the bless- ings of benevolence. And so, perhaps, with like inspiration, the poet Burns, familiar with the weekly debauch of his countrymen to which we have al- luded, and himself not averse to taking part in it, has given us, with those sacred hours that precede the day of rest as his theme, a Christian idyl over which, from time to time, succeeding generations will reverently and affectionately linger while time lasts . 1 The use of stimulants of one kind and another 1 Sheriff Alison is authority for the statement that, in the city of Glasgow alone, 30,000 people get drunk every Saturday night, and crime has increased six times faster than population. The convictions for drunkenness in England and Wales are also alarm- ingly on the increase, as shown by the following figures : — Per annum. Ratio to population. 1857-60 .... 52,100 2.5 per 1,000 inhabitants. 1867-70 .... 90,600 4 „ „ » 1875-78 . . . 204,000 8 „ ,, „ The consumption of alcohol per head is almost 38 per cent, more than it was in i860. It is no wonder Mulhall exclaims, “ Something must be done to check this evil.” * TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 15 in the world is, therefore, a phenomenon of the first importance. Unlike food, which repairs the wastes of the body by assimilating to it the material sub- stances necessary for its growth and sustenance, stimulants directly augment the waste of the tissues. They fan the flame that burns within us, now mak- ing it a consuming fire, now keeping it alive when it flickers low in the socket, and at all times, taken moderately, suffusing the system with a generous glow that beguiles the heart of its sorrows and inspires, often with subtle and mysterious power, the imaginative faculties of the intellect. Under their influence, the whole internal machinery of mind and body is driven to quicker action. Instead of furnishing nutriment, they create a demand for more. At the same time, unfortunately, the slight- est excess in their use disturbs the functions by which nutriment, otherwise provided, is made to serve its purpose, and thus, in the end, partial or total collapse becomes inevitable. With the exception of wine and beer, all the beverages and drugs of the world, ranked as stimu- lants, are the products of modern civilization. Even coffee and tea (pure stimulants) were unknown in Europe previous to the fifteenth century. Opium i6 A NEW VIEW OF THE and tobacco are also of comparatively recent intro- duction. They all escaped from Pandora’s box at about the same time, and all forced themselves into general use against the instincts of humanity. Coffee-houses, first established in London in 1652, were condemned by the government as a source of corruption to public morals. Jonas Hanway, who had the honor of being mobbed as the first man to carry an umbrella in the public streets, was espe- cially solicitous over the effects of tea on the welfare of the people. He declared that men were losing their stature, and women their beauty, on account of it. Noted physicians pronounced the beverage to be as destructive to the animal economy as opium. Tobacco was first introduced under false pretences, as a medicine. It was thought to possess almost miraculous healing powers. William Lilly referred to it as “our holy herb,” and Spenser called it “ divine.” Outside of the pharmacopoeia, however, it encountered the most violent hostility of priest and king. Its patrons had to run the gauntlet of the pillory, the whipping-post, and the gallows. And yet, it is evident, tobacco must have met some kind of want in the social economy, for, like Admiral Van TEMPERANCE QUESTION. I 7 Tromp with his broom, it finally swept all opposition before it. Opium, aside from its medicinal properties, would seem to have little to commend it to general favor. It leaves its victim as much of a physical wreck as did the thumbscrews of the Inquisition. On the other hand, it ministers to a craving that defies restraint. In China, the severest penalties of the law, even transportation and death, could not stay its progress ; and in the most enlightened communi- ties of Europe and America publicists are calling attention to its insidious and growing power. The annual consumption of these beverages and drugs, as well as of distilled and fermented liquors, not one of which, to say the least, is valuable for the sustenance of life, and all of which expend their entire force on the nervous and vascular systems, has become, during the past three centuries, simply enor- mous. Since 1850 even, the consumption of tobacco has increased 40 pei cent., coffee 84 per cent., and tea 275 per cent. From data furnished by Mulhall, our best authority in statistical literature, we give the following table of quantities and values for each, for the year 1881, limited to the countries of Europe and the United States : — 18 A NEW VIEW OF THE Quantity. Value. Spirits . 400,000,000 galls . $600,000,000 Wine . . 2,200,000,000 9 9 3,500,000,000 Beer . 3,300,000,000 9 9 1,500,000,000 Coffee . . 1,320,000,000 lbs. 236,000,000 Tea . . . 400,000,000 9 9 100,000,000 Opium . . . 4,000,000 • 9 9 64,000,000 Tobacco . . . . . 1,750,000,000 9 9 300,000,000 Total cost to consumers $6,300,000,000 These astounding figures require explanation. They represent, not only what would appear to be, on the face of it, useless expenditure on the largest scale, but a great evil, in the presence of which society stands aghast and helpless. Food men must have daily, and several times a day, and they expend for it, on the average, 35 per cent, of their earnings. Clothing they must also have, at an out- lay of 12 per cent. more. The support of govern- ment requires 14 per cent. Houses and house- furnishings, 5 per cent. The amount unconsumed, and added in various forms to the world’s wealth, is 14 per cent. 1 Out of the remainder, which should all be devoted to the pleasures and amenities of life, to domestic enjoyment, to the gratification of taste, the increase of knowledge, the development of the 1 The rate of accumulation in the United States exceeds 25 per cent, of the earnings. TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 19 higher moral and spiritual capabilities of the soul, in a word, to all that makes life worth living, men take 18 per cent, for narcotics and exhilarating drinks! Only two per cent, left of their hard earnings for recreation of mind and body and for social progress ! What can be the meaning of it ? What can cause an infatuation so widespread and so incontestably at war with the happiness and best interests of mankind ? It cannot be said to lie in the brutality of human nature, for the evil is greatest precisely in those portions of the world where man is most highly civilized. To account for it, two theories have been advanced, which we must briefly consider. One is that the craving for exhilarating drinks is an instinct. This is the theory of the Massachusetts State Board of Health. It goes upon the imaginary presumption that the craving in question is universal. We know that the craving is not universal. Every community is full of examples to the contrary. Children give no evidence of it. In behalf of a moiety of the human race, we enter an indignant protest. The merest tyro can see within the horizon of his own acquaintance abundant proof that the taste for exhil- arating drinks is an acquired one. The advocates of 20 A NEW VTEAV OF THE this theory, in their eagerness to jump at a cause that shall be coextensive with the effect, ignore the differences of climate. If instinct be at the bottom of this great evil, why is it that the people of the warm countries, the children of nature as it were, are almost universally temperate, while those further north, where the intellectual and moral faculties are most highly developed, exhibit in the worst degree the fatal degeneracy ? The theory is a makeshift, a scientific leap in the dark. Like the famous savants who were summoned one day to view some extraordinary bones, exhumed from a pit in Scotland, and who pronounced them to be the bones of fallen angels, “for,” said they, “if they are not the bones of fallen angels, what are they ? ” our friends of the Massachusetts State Board of Health presume upon our ignorance. They illustrate the danger that lurks in all a priori modes of reasoning. They utter a libel on human nature itself. The second theory is put forward by Dr. Strong, author of the widely read, but somewhat hysterical little book, “Our Country.” It is not without plaus- ibility, and but for the fact that it places the horse at the wrong end of the vehicle, it would have the addi- tional advantage of being true. Dr. Strong is a TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 2 I geographer, as well as a casuist. He has constructed a map of the world on a scale of projection of which Mercator never dreamed. In striking likeness to the planet Jupiter, the earth, also, on this theory, has a belt, a sort of z/ztemperate zone, marked off from the more fortunate regions on either side, not by physical peculiarities, but by the mental character- istics of the inhabitants. It is called the “ nervous belt,” because, within its limits, the wear and tear of life shows itself in the abnormal development of the nervous organization. The strata of society are, as it were, put on edge. The equilibrium of the physical powers is disturbed, and excessive indul- gence in intoxicating drinks is the natural conse- quence. In this view of the matter, the influence of climate is not wholly ignored. The dry air of the United States does its whole duty and more than its duty in preparing the system for this extreme tension of the nerves and the deplorable evils that follow it ; but as England and Scotland, with their humid atmospheres, are located in the same belt, and are conspicuous examples of the spirit that makes it kin, it is not easy to see how climatic considerations play their part in this novel theory. It is to be noted, also, that Holland, with Schiedam for its 22 A NEW VIEW OF THE rightful capital, is in the very centre of this new ter- ritory, though it is somewhat startling to be told that the Dutch are a nervous people. The world has hitherto regarded that national misnomer as a syno- nym of the phlegmatic. In still another respect this theory is defective. It is not broad enough to cover all the conditions under which the evil exists. It breaks down when applied to countries outside the intemperate zone. The bedquilt which, on the instinct theory, was short at one end of the couch, now leaves the other mercilessly exposed. Clearly, the nervous belt theory, a figment of the imagina- tion, must be dismissed. The question now recurs, and it must be answered : why, at so stupendous a sacrifice of the common blessings of life, do men so generally and, in some parts of the world, so intemperately, commit them- selves to the use of stimulants ? There is but one rational answer, and it is this : they are driven to it from the want of proper and sufficient nutriment as food. Nature is a vast laboratory for the production of food for man. “Every clod feels a stir of might, An instinct within it ” I TEMPERANCE QUESTION. that has but one aim, the sustenance of the human body, the growth and perfection of the human spirit. For the purpose of this inquiry it is not necessary to consider the ultimate limits to which the food- producing capacity of the soil can be extended. The theory of Malthus on this point is an impertinent dogmatism. Instead of population gaining on the means of subsistence, the economic result, thus far, is just the reverse. This is proved by the fall in the prices of grain, meat, and other agricultural products in the markets of the world, averaging about 32 per cent, since the beginning of the present century. The celebrated formula in which Malthus enunciated his creed, based upon a fixed mathematical ratio sup- posed to exist between the natural increase of popu- lation and that of the supply of food, is as false as it is pedantic. In the nature of things there can be no such ratio. As well expect an earthquake to dis- turb a theorem in Euclid, or the guns of an ironclad to shake the rule of three. The productive capacity of the soil, under the most favorable influences of heat and moisture, finds apt illustration in the case of ancient Egypt. Herodotus tells us that in his time there were thousands of inhabited cities in the valley of the Nile. Diodorus Siculus confirms this 24 A NEW VIEW OF THE extraordinary statement, and fortifies it with the remark that a child could be brought up from infancy to manhood in that country at a total cost (in our currency) of less than four dollars. The wonderful fecundity of the banana-tree is well known, being capable, it is said, under the easy conditions of life that prevail where it grows, of supporting fifty per- sons to the acre, or thirty thousand per square mile. No empire has ever flourished in tropical countries that has not run its roots down into cheap and abun- dant food. The Tree of Knowledge is something more than a figure of speech ; it stands for that spir- itual energy that transmutes dead, inert matter into the flowers and fruits of organic life ; into the hues of the violet, the song of the nightingale, the Ode to Immortality. The powers of nature at the service of man are yet but dimly apprehended. Like the cataract of Niagara, they impress us on all sides with a sense of vast reservoirs of force lying behind. Let us have, on this point certainly, no misgivings for the future of the human race. Even with the arts of husbandry at the high watermark of to-day, intelli- gently applied throughout the world, a population exceeding ten times what it now is would have ample means of support. TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 25 Notwithstanding the fruitfulness of nature, how- ever, it is a painful fact that the world has hitherto existed, and to a great extent it still exists, in a state of semi-starvation. To the masses of mankind the struggle for life is, substantially, a struggle for food. The shocking mortality among children, sufficient, if it were deemed avoidable, to create a panic in any community, is acknowledged to be due almost wholly to errors in diet, chief of which is want of the mother’s milk. In no country of the civilized world, not even in England or the United States, is the percentage of deaths to births among children under five years of age less than twenty-five ; while in France, it is thirty ; in Spain, thirty-six ; in Italy, thirty-nine ; and in Russia, forty-eight. Nor is this, terrible as it is, the worst record which the bills of infantile mortality present to us. In some parts of Europe the ratio of deaths to births, during the first year alone, exceeds thirty per cent . 1 This is, indeed, a slaughter of the innocents, and considering that it is caused by want of natural or proper food is a 1 The highest death-rate of infants in the world is at Liverpool, where 46 of every 100 born die before reaching 12 months. In New York, the rate is 31 per cent. Dr. Playfair states that in England 18 per cent, of children in the upper classes, 36 per cent, of those of tradespeople, and 55 per cent, of workmen’s children die before reaching their fifth birthday. 26 A NEW VIEW OF THE foul blot on our boasted civilization. Barbarism itself presents no counterpart to it. Catlin informs us that when he first visited the Indian tribes of the West, before the introduction of “fire-water” among them, the death of an infant, unless from some acci- dental cause like the bite of a serpent or the kick of a horse, was practically unknown. For this astonishing disparity it is not difficult to account. The laboring masses of the present age, particularly on the continent of Europe, are, to all intents and purposes, industrial slaves. No intelli- gent man who had to choose for himself between the life of a Russian peasant of to-day and that of an American Indian as it was two hundred years ago would hesitate for a moment where to cast his lot. The service of a master had no charms for the lean and hungry wolf when he saw, around the neck of the well-fed mastiff, the marks of a collar. Un- like the dog in the fable, however, the Russian peas- antry are without compensation of any kind for their miserable bondage. They are not even well-fed. On the contrary, they are generally half-starved. “None but a Russian,” says an eminent writer “could subsist on such poor fare.” Mulhall, re- ferring to the enormous waste of life in that coun- TEMPERANCE QUESTION. o'] try, attributes it to insufficiency of food. If Russia, he says, could reduce her infant mortality to the level of Great Britain, she would save nearly one million lives per annum. Unhappily, however, half the mothers cannot nurse their children. The whip and spur of poverty drives them into the fields, where they often follow the plow three days only after confinement. The ordinary death-rate is forty- eight per thousand, or two and a half times that of England. In many parts of Western Europe the dietary condition of the working classes is almost equally deplorable. Want of wholesome and nutritious food is the salient feature everywhere. It is difficult to account on any other ground for the moral and physical decline that has overtaken the people of France. A canker of some sort is gnawing at the vitals of the nation. Dr. Cenveilhier declares that the people are, as a rule, insufficiently nourished. “ Many a factory hand has nothing better for his breakfast than a large slice of common sour bread, rubbed over with an onion to give it flavor.” The French do not emigrate. They find no other part of the world so attractive and beautiful as their own sunny land. And yet the population in numbers is 28 A NEW. VIEW OF THE practically stationary. The birth-rate has fallen twenty per cent., while the rate of infanticide has doubled, and that of insanity quadrupled, within recent years. Under the system of land tenure prevailing there, based on the delusive theory that while the plow is silver the spade is gold, farms have been divided and subdivided to such an extent that the cost of production, under a well-known law of economics, is materially enhanced. The aggre- gate wealth of the country is increasing, but even that, unfairly distributed, is itself a sign of national decadence. It is the crest of the wave, “ere it break in pearl.” Belgium has the unenviable notoriety of being the “classic land of pauperism.” Two hundred and fifty thousand cottier families have to subsist on farms averaging one and one-quarter acres each. Their ordinary food is blackbread, potatoes, and butter- milk ; and on Sundays, bacon. The poor farmer often harnesses his wife to the harrow in the open field. The distress of the Italians is, perhaps, most piti- able of all. Of a naturally robust physique, the poorer classes are rapidly breaking down under the miserable diet to which their poverty restricts them. TEMPERA iVCE Q UES TION. 2 9 Thirty-eight per cent, of the conscripts are rejected for bodily defects. The average duration of life is only twenty-eight years. With the ambition of the frog that tried to inflate itself into the dimensions of an ox, Italy aspires to be one of the Great Powers. She seeks to restore to the Plternal City something of that stern look which once awed the nations of the world, but which has become, in modern times, little more than a vacant stare. Her military and naval establishments, out of all proportion to the means of her people, are at once the wonder and the disgust of mankind. Several of her ironclads have cost five million dollars each, an expenditure that should consign some one to the front rank of the world’s criminals. Incredible as it may appear, the people are forced to pay thirty-five per cent, of their income into the public treasury. As a natural consequence they fall an easy prey to the money-lenders. The whole kingdom is mortgaged up to half its value, and at rates of interest (averaging nine per cent, in Piedmont, sixteen per cent, in Naples, and twenty- four per cent, in Sardinia) which cannot fail to make the career to national ruin, short, sharp, and decisive. A member of the German Reichstag said recently, the Germans have but one want, and that is, money 30 A NEW VIEW OF THE enough to get to America. The same may be said of the people of Italy, for they are fleeing the country, “as swallows fly from a farmer’s barn, when lightning stabs the roof.” 1 In the language of political scientists every com- munity has two limits of subsistence, the natural and the economic. The natural limit is the lowest stand- ard of living to which men can be forced without fatal consequences. In Ireland, it is fixed, so far as food is concerned, at the potato ; in Scotland, at . oatmeal ; in Italy, at the acorn ; in Germany, at blackbread. The poorer the kind of food capable of sustaining life, the lower the limit, and, with every turn of the industrial screw, the greater the degradation and mis- ery of the people. The correct rule of family expend- iture applicable to all classes, according to Baron Bunsen, is, above one’s means in the table, with 1 An idea of the extent to which the working population of Italy are oppressed by penury may be obtained from the investigations made by the government into the spread of the terrible disease known as the pellag)-a. First clearly described as an Italian disease by Frapolli in 1771, the pellagra has within the present century gradually become more common' and severe. In I839 it was estimated that the number of pellagra patients was 20,282 in the compartment of Lombardy, and in 1856 it has increased to 38,777. According to the returns of 1879 it appears that there were 97,855 patients in the kingdom. The disease has many forms and not unfrequently ends in insanity. And to what are its ravages to be ascribed? To insufficient and unwholesome food. — Encyclopedia Bntannica, TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 31 one’s means in the dress, below one’s means in the house and house-furnishings. With the dietary mini- mum pitched at the potato, and a kind of potato so inferior that the pigs could not fatten on it, is it any wonder that half of the Irish people were living, but a few years ago, in mud cabins of one room each, averaging less than ten feet square, without window, chimney, or floor ? It needed only the crowding of several families into a single hut, as by actual official count was the fact in thousands of cases, to deter- mine the deepest deep into which a people, possess- ing the elements of a splendid nationality, and governed by professedly Christian laws, can sink and yet survive. The economic limit of subsistence, on the other hand, is the lowest standard of living consistent with the maintenance of the mental and bodily powers in full natural vigor. In no country of Europe is there any pretence that the working classes rise above this limit. They are everywhere below it. There are probably one hundred millions of people in Europe to-day who do not eat meat more than once a week ; and the number is not inconsiderable- — it must be reckoned in millions — who have that privilege not oftener than once or 3 2 A NEW VIEW OF THE twice a year . 1 As a matter of fact, the human machine runs down, on the average, in about thirty years. A variety of causes contributes to this result, but the want of nutritious food is the one that dwarfs all the others in any proper consideration of the subject. Arnold contended that conduct is three fourths of life ; nutriment, in all that makes for health and good bodily habits, is more than three fourths. 1 That a large portion of the wage-laboring class are kept below the economical limit of subsistence there can be no doubt. — Walker's Political Economy. To-day in the West of England it is impossible for an agricultural laborer to eat meat more than once a week. — Prc /essor Fawcett. Of the Devon peasantry Canon Girdlestone writes : “ The laborer break- fasts on teakettle broth (hot water poured on bread and flavored with onions) ; dines on bread and hard cheese, with cider very washy and sour; and sups on potatoes or cabbage, greased with a tiny bit of fat bacon." Meat is rarely tasted by the working classes in Holland. It forms no part of the bill of fare for the man or his family. — Locock. Wurtemburg has been said to present a “ charming picture of cultiva- tion," and yet, in this “ Garden of Germany,” the poor colliers live on black- bread and potatoes, with meat once a year only. The farmers of Saxony, holding about thirty acres each, manage to live comfortably, but the condition of the colliers is deplorable. Even in good years the consumption of meat in Saxony is only fifty pounds per head per annum, but it frequently falls to twenty pounds, being only one ounce a day to each inhabitant. — Mulhall. Regarding the Canton of Berne we have the following testimony from Dr. Schuler : “ The food of the poorer classes is unusually insipid and innu- tritious. The fare consists of execrable coffee, unsubstantial soups, por- ridge, and cabbages. The consumption of meat is slightly on the increase, yet the prices are beyond the means of the lower classes, who must be content with cheap horseflesh or the miserable sausage. Happily the TEMPERANCE Q UES TION. It may seem surprising that, with all the resources of modern skill by means of which the plague, the pestilence and famine, once terrible scourges of mankind, have been banished from the civilized world, we find no greater improvement in that important test of true civilization, the span of human life. Wars are less numerous and less bloody ; estates are now sold without carrying in a common title, like the trees, the peasantry that till them ; the pillory and the whipping-post have yielded to a higher sense of the dignity of human nature ; the death penalty is inflicted for two only consumption of milk is increasing, but that of cheese is still very small in this greatest of cheese-producing cantons. The nourishing quality of these foods is very little. As a consequence, small lunches are frequently taken between meals and invariably accompanied by potations of whiskey. Children even are being early trained to the use of ardent spirits.” “ Particu- larly is this the case among all workers in factories who are compelled to drudge early and late for a mere pittance. Here all the horrors of modern industrialism combine to drive the laborer to the use of whiskey.” “ It is found that throughout countries comprising a large part of the human race, the wages given and taken not only provide subsistence so scanty and so little nourishing that the population become stunted and more or less deformed and ineffective in labor, but that even a large part of all who are born die in infancy and early childhood from ’the effects of privation. The horrible infant mortality of many districts is not accounted for solely by neglect of sanitary precautions, but is largely due to the low diet of mothers and children.” Want of wholesome and adequate food docks one quarter, one third, or one half from the natural term of the industrial force for all those who come to man’s estate. — Walker. The Americans are the best fed and the soberest of nations. — Mulhall. 34 A NEW VIEW OF THE of the criminal offences which society finds it neces- sary to forbid, and in the consideration of more humane methods of infliction is certain to be abol- ished altogether ; great disasters by fire and flood appeal to world-wide sympathies ; a man is caught and held a few hours on a rock amid the rapids of Niagara, and immediately thousands of people in the chief centres of population on both sides of the Atlantic gather about the bulletin boards, intent on every detail of the struggle to save him ; and yet with what composure do we, who have passed the pitfalls of infancy and youth, look on and see the immense majority of our fellow-beings as they fol- low us cut off in early life, from causes perfectly obvious and remediable ! Food is the natural, universal, and only proper stimulant. It not only repairs the daily waste of the tissues in the ordinary wear and tear of life, but, rightly administered, it is probably equal to every emergency in which stimulation of the vital powers is required. Experience, for instance, has proved that soldiers on a forced march are sustained on “meat extracts ” better than on coffee or any kind of alcoholic liquors. Canadian lumbermen, living in holes dug in the snow in winter and sleeping TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 35 on hemlock boughs covered with robes, allow no spirits in their camps and destroy any that may be found there. Dr. Kane, in his expedition to the polar regions, also prohibited the use of spirits as a beverage, though the thermometer sometimes registered yo° below zero, and the fatigues of the sledge journeys were exhausting to the' last ex- treme . 1 On the question whether alcohol is in any proper sense or not a food physiologists differ. The best view undoubtedly is that alcohol is merely a drug, not oxidized in the body. By quickening the circu- lation, however, it accelerates oxidation and thus indirectly, from the stores in reserve, becomes the means of furnishing a larger temporary supply of nutriment to the tissues. It acts like a draft of air on a furnace, giving more heat for the moment, but extinguishing the fire by quicker combustion. Tea 1 A few years ago a learned judge in Maine came to the conclusion, after much study and reflection, that under no circumstances whatever is alcohol, in any of its artificial forms, of the slightest benefit to mankind. He re- garded its use, as a medicine even, wholly unnecessary and unjustifiable. He was fond of adducing medical testimony of the highest character in support of his views. One day, however, the strength and sincerity of his sentiments were put to a severe test. His only son lay critically ill, and the consulting physicians begged the privilege, as a last resort, of trying a dose of brandy. The father was inflexible. His faith in simple, nourishing foods, even in that terrible crisis of his life, remained unshaken. The brandy was not given, and the son recovered. 36 A NEW VIEW OF THE and coffee are in the same category ; containing no nutritive properties, they are pure stimulants. Insufficiency of food, therefore, leads naturally, and perhaps in the long run inevitably, to the use of exhilarating drinks. It creates the craving in which the intemperate habit as a disease has its root. Baron Liebig, the eminent chemist, observes that drunkenness is not the cause, but the effect, of pov- erty. “It is an exception to the rule,” he says, “when a well-fed man becomes a spirit drinker.” Unfortunately, it is also an exception to the rule when, unable to restore his working powers with pala- table, well-cooked, nutritious food, he is not impelled to find a substitute in alcoholic beverages. It may be stated then, as a general rule, that the greater the deficiency in the supply of proper nutri- ment, the greater will be the tendency to resort to the use of drugs and stimulants. And this accords precisely with the universal experience of mankind. In climates where bodily exertion is least required for the support of life, where food is abundant and the daily waste of the tissues most easily and nat- urally provided for, intoxication is at a minimum. In countries, on the other hand, where nature does less and man must do more to provide sustenance TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 37 for the body, where a larger percentage of animal food, more difficult to obtain, is a necessity, and where prudence and foresight to meet the conditions imposed by the changes of the seasons must have constant exercise, we find just the circumstances out of which intemperate use of intoxicating drinks is most likely to grow. The popular demand for alcohol as a diet is in inverse ratio to the supply of nutritious and wholesome food. The cosmic law, by virtue of which degrees of intensity in the drinking habit follow isothermal lines, finds here its true interpretation. In 1820, Italy was a land of beggars. The people were so poor that in a city of 20,000 inhabitants a traveler was unable to purchase a pair of gloves, or, in one of 11,000, a cake of soap. And yet a drunkard was almost unknown among them. The wants of the physical nature were less exacting, and even when unsatisfied, unlike the bees described by the great classical poet of that country, they left no sting in the wound. At the same time, the people of Sweden were consuming enormous quantities of potato- brandy, averaging nine gallons per capita annually, or a pint a day to each adult male inhabitant. Drunkenness was so general that it converted one 38 A NEW VIEW OF THE out of every one hundred and thirty-four of the pop- ulation into a criminal. The cause of this terrible state of things was wholly a matter of diet. Owing to a failure of crops, almost continuous, from 1801 to 1812, the peasants were obliged in their extremity to grind the inner bark of the pine-tree for material to mix with their rye for bread. This they baked twice a year only, breaking the loaves from day to day as they were wanted with an axe. It may well be imag- ined that, in the cold climate of Sweden, from saw- dust as food to brandy there ’s but a step! 1 The question resolves itself into one of physiol- ogy. Variation in climate requires variation in food. To a certain extent man is a carnivorous animal. He cannot live in health and strength, certainly for more than one generation, without meat. The abor- igines on this continent subsisted chiefly on fish and game. They were an exceptionally long-lived and sturdy race. A death, except from the casualties of war, accident, or old age, was an event so rare as to 1 What a complete introversion of facts is found in the following from Montesquieu, quoted approvingly by Blackstone in his Commentaries : “ A German drinks through custom, founded upon constitutional necessity ; a Spaniard drinks through choice, or out of the mere wantonness of luxury : and drunkenness ought to be more severely punished where it makes men mischievous and mad as in Spain and Italy than where it only renders them stupid and heavy as in Germany and more northern countries ! ” TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 39 be a tradition among them. At the same time they suffered the penalties of a too exclusively animal diet. They lacked those finer and more humane elements of character which are essential to the existence of society and which would have come to them with cultivation of the soil. The first tragedy in the history of the human race illustrates the fiercer instincts that belong to the keeper of flocks compared with those of the tiller of fields. The health of a community depends, so far as diet is concerned, upon a proper admixture of the two classes into which all alimentary substances are divided. The colder the climate, the greater the demand of nature for consumption of animal, com- pared with vegetable, products. Careful experiments go to show that, for the maximum efficiency of mind and body of the working population in the northern countries of Europe and in the United States, meat or animal products of some kind should constitute at least two thirds of the total supply. Among the Eskimos the proportion is necessarily greater than two thirds. A people in one latitude may there- fore consume more animal food than their neighbors in another, and yet the relative deficiency among them be more marked and consequential. We meas- 40 A NEW VIEW OF THE ure the deviation of a body, intended to move in the circumference of a circle, not in terms of feet or inches, but in degrees. If two ships come into port equally damaged, says Carlyle, we should inquire, be- fore visiting judgment upon them, whether one may not have circumnavigated the globe, and the other, only the Isle of Dogs. In this consideration we find the key to the prob- lem that confronts us. The people of northern Europe consume more alcohol, per capita, than their neighbors in the south, for the reason that, relatively, they are not so well-fed. Reducing the various bev- erages to a common scale, we find the difference in consumption between the two localities to be, on the average, twenty-five per cent. Climate as a factor accounts for part of it ; the industrial system of the age, requiring expenditure of nervous force to the point of exhaustion, is responsible for the rest. It is not maintained that high living and hard drinking are incompatible. The beef-eaters of Eng- land are often grossly intemperate. Cases of this kind, however, are evidently sporadic, and quite out of line with the deep underlying current that is sweeping through humanity. Social custom, itself a survival of what was once a dietary want ; hereditary TEMPERANCE Q UES TION. 41 predispositions, widespread and deep-seated in every community ; errors of diet in the midst of plenty ; the utterly false and pernicious doctrine that spirit- uous liquors are an appetizer and a digester, 1 — these count for much in the constitution of society. The mysteries of life are too complex for the use of a single key. Physicians treat kleptomania as an intel- lectual malady, without a thought of preventing indi- vidual cases of theft. What we are dealing with here, is the general craving for stimulants among the masses : and until the underlying cause is discovered it will be impossible intelligently to apply a remedy. If the diagnosis of a disease be faulty, if the probe fail to go deep enough, or (as in a recent noted case in this country) in the right direction, the skill of the physician is useless. The patient is at the mercy of IThe medicinal use of spirituous liquors is a prolific source of ine- briety. A few years ago a gentleman of high social standing in one of our large cities, eminent in the legal profession, mayor, bank president, and judge, became addicted to the use of gin as a medicine. Under the advice of his medical practitioner he took his dose daily, and several times a day, without thought of harm. Finally, to his surprise and discomfiture, he found himself in the toils of a habit he could not break. With admirable resolution and a strength of will which perhaps few possess, he resigned his offices, committed his practice into the hands of a brother attorney, and at once sought the care of a noted physician in another state. The treatment that followed was as effective as it was unique. A demijohn of the best gin the market afforded was placed at his disposal, to be drawn upon precisely as before, but with the injunction that as often as he took out a glass of gin, he should restore a glass of water ! At the end of a year he was cured. 42 A NEW VIEW OF THE quacks. If it be the cheerless home, for instance, in contrast with the glitter of the saloon, that is at the bottom of the difficulty, then books and pictures and refined conversation are the objects to be striven for. If arbitrary control of the appetites from with- out, as a substitute for self-control, be necessary, then prohibitory laws and self-acting constitutional provisions are the proper panacea. If a universal instinct be the source of the evil, then regulation only must be the object of endeavor, and the balance of account, by debit and credit with High License, the pleasing care of legislators and village statesmen. In the place of these remedies, all of which are unavailing, we offer another, plain, simple, natural, and in the highest degree worthy of the humanita- rian spirit of the age in which we live. It will operate, not merely along the line of the least resist- ance, but in full harmony with the common instincts of our nature. If the mighty cure comes from it, it will come as benignantly “As the crimson streak, on ocean’s cheek, Grows into the great sun.” It will come, also, hand in hand with health. No horn of plenty ever offered choicer blessings ; no garden of flowers ever breathed sweeter fragrance. TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 43 Cheap, abundant, wholesome food for all, this is the remedy. Let us see how it can be best applied. 1. Repeal all laws that tend, in any degree and on any pretext, to enhance market prices. Everything should be made to bend to this one object, the lowest obtainable cost in the supply of food commodities of all kinds to the people every- where. No conceivable interest should stand in the way of it. Varieties of soil and climate in the world are for the distinct purpose, not only of allowing whatever is peculiar to each to be cultivated on the most economical scale, but of promoting the moral, as well as the physical, welfare of mankind by the interchange of their various products. The effect of commercial restrictions is to defeat this purpose and to raise prices, here and there, above the natural level. They are the relics of an age when inter- course among nations was necessarily limited, and independence on one another a military necessity. In time of peace men sought in this way to prepare for war. The high watermark of Christianity at the present day is in the command to the individual to love one’s neighbor as one’s self ; the extension of the golden rule to nations in their intercourse with one another, where it is equally obligatory and equally wise, is yet in the future. 44 A NEW VIEW OF THE Considering the natural selfishness of men, it was inevitable that the protective policy relating to arti- cles of food should bear most heavily upon the poorer classes. Depending as it does on con- sumption, it is a tax, not on property, but on the person. The governing class always escapes with as slight a share as possible of the public burdens. The state of affairs in France preceding the revo- lution of 1789 is a case in point. The people were simply crushed under the weight of taxation, while the great estates of the nobles and the clergy were exempt from it. The cry of the populace, ringing in the ears of the king on that terrible drive from Versailles to Paris, was always for bread ! bread ! Turgot, the ablest prime minister France ever had, had appealed in vain for the only relief, as just as it was imperative, that the situation afforded ; noth- ing more, nothing less than an equitable distribution among all the people of the national expenses. Everybody knows the result. Starvation converted men into tigers. The great estates to the value of seven hundred millions of dollars were confiscated, and the heads of their owners, in most cases', sev- ered from their shoulders. Fifty-seven years later, England stood on the peril- TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 45 ous edge of a similar catastrophe. The landowners, with all the powers of the government behind them, had imposed a heavy duty on imported grain. The effect was to double the price of bread. The amount of money thus annually extorted from the people for the sole benefit of a comparatively few individ- uals was estimated at the enormous sum of three hundred millions of dollars, or more than sixty dol- lars on the average for each family in the kingdom. The condition of the masses became deplorable in the extreme. Drunkenness, as might be expected, increased fearfully. The bills of mortality, which, with an advance of two shillings per bushel of wheat, show an increase generally of about three per cent., told a fearful story of destitution and death. In some parts of the kingdom the people were driven to such an extremity that they made a practice of bleeding their cows to obtain blood as an article of food. They were often obliged to go from farm to farm, and with joint efforts assist the poor, weakened animals to rise to their feet. This was as late as 1846, and in the most enlightened country on earth. The incident is adduced simply to show that import duties on food are in their very essence, at all times and everywhere, a public crime, 46 A AE W VIEW OF THE whether they are eighty per cent., as on sugar in this country, or twelve hundred per cent., as on salt in India. As to the item of salt, an article so clearly essential to the public health that, in the interchanges of the world, it should be as free as the air we breathe, it has been estimated that, whereas the revenue from this tax on the continent of Europe amounts to forty millions of dollars per annum, the loss of wages by reason of illness chargeable to it is ninety millions. Indeed, it is not too much to say that many of the laws, still on the statute-books of the civilized world, seem expressly designed to reduce as large a number of people as possible to the ranks of paupers. On this side of the Atlantic we have a special grievance. It takes us into the domain of interna- tional law, but not less on that account it represents, on this question of food, a great public wrong. The ocean is the common heritage of mankind. Any one may plow its waters and reap its harvests without regard to metes and bounds. Nevertheless, the enjoyment of this right is dependent, more or less, upon the rules and regulations that govern the adjacent shores. Deep-sea fishing carries with it, or ought to carry with it, the right to use neighbor- TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 47 ing ports for all purposes whatsoever necessary for the most successful prosecution of the business, provided only that the equal rights of others are not interfered with. The government controlling these ports holds them in trust for all the world. The fee simple is vested in the human race. The people in possession may regulate, but they cannot forbid. Their power to restrict is limited to what may be suitable and proper for the administration of their local affairs. If they go farther and seek to curtail, or render less valuable, the rights of others on the high seas by local regulations not necessary for the peaceable enjoyment of their own on land, they exceed their jurisdiction. They com- mit an unfriendly act. On the same principle a. strong power, getting possession of the Isthmus of Suez, would be justified, on some plea of self-interest,, in cutting the main artery of the world’s commerce. To compel our vessels fishing on the Grand Banks, to sail a thousand miles to and from their home ports with every catch, when they could so much more economically transship their cargoes in bond over Canadian soil, is a gross outrage on the people of the United States. It enhances unnecessarily the cost of an important article of food. This chap- 48 A NEW VIEW OF THE ter of international law should be rewritten, or rather, the Roman record of the palimpsest restored. The end in view is not a privilege, but a riparian right. Fortunately, our neighbors across the border are not obstreperous in this matter. They offer what we want in one hand and a still greater boon in the other. We have only to tree them, after the manner of getting cocoanuts in the East, and they will pelt us with free fish. 2. Encourage improvement in processes of agricul- ture throughout the world. The economical production of food is everywhere a common interest of mankind. The Roman seer who declared that nothing human was foreign to him uttered a sentiment that will ring through the ages while time lasts. No towering intellect was ever touched with the light of a more glorious truth. The proper study of government is not the force of projectiles, but the application of labor-saving machinery to the arts of life. The Russian still plows his fields with a wooden stick, and, though he works sixteen hours a day, produces only fifteen per cent, as much as a farm-laborer in Dakota, working ten hours. With proper appliances and no increase in population Russia could feed all Europe at prices TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 49 far below the present level. For this purpose farms must be combined in large areas under one manage- ment. In no other way can we obtain the minimum cost of production, the goal to which human industry tends. As an instrument of tillage the spade costs four times as much as the plow. The horse or the ox, as a motive-power, is equally at a disadvantage compared with steam. No sentimental nonsense on the subject of combinations should stand in the way of cheap food. Combinations come as naturally out of the steam-engine as a chicken out of an egg, or a forest of oaks out of a single acorn. They are not in restraint of trade. On the contrary, they increase the volume of trade. They put the products of human industry, the comforts and luxuries of life, within the reach of a larger number of people. In- creased consumption leads always to lower cost of production and higher wages. Selfish considerations may obscure this double fact for a time, but truth is mighty and it will prevail. The popular clamor about monopolies is unreasonable, not because the evils complained of do not exist, but because the proper means to remove them are not resorted to. The Fiji Islanders who beat the tops of their houses at the time of a solar eclipse, thinking to 50 A NEW VIEW OF THE drive away the dragon that is swallowing the sun, are not without their types among us. As well arrest the moon in its orbit as this mighty power that is unifying and fructifying the productive energies of mankind. The answer to cavilers is simple. There is but one possible monopoly in the world, and that is land. Whoever owns the land controls everybody upon it. A dynasty, unsupported by the proprietors of the soil, could not exist a day ; much less could a corporation. In the power to impose taxes on land the community has all the safeguards that it needs. No other measure to meet the exigencies of trade combinations is necessary ; and no other, not fatal to the spring and spirit of industrial life, can possibly be successful. It would not only shear the locks of every modern Samson, but it would keep them shorn, so that no corporate monster could pull down the structure of society upon our heads . 1 1 The power to combine and the power to compete are the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the industrial world. Upon the proper balance be- tween them may be said to depend the existence of civilization itself. Without the one, the individual would be everything and society nothing ; without the other, society would be everything and the individual nothing ; in either case, the result would be barbarism. The two forces will act and react beneficently, on one condition, and one only; and that-is, free play ! Take away the monopoly of natural opportu- nities, the disturbing element, and the infinite diversities of character, habit, and environment throughout the world will operate, as under the law of TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 51 3. Make eight hours a day’s labor. As a rule no man should work continuously, either mentally or physically, more than four hours be- tween meals. That is the limit of maximum effi- ciency, our true unit of measure. The highest pro- ductive capacity naturally commands the highest compensation. Reduction to eight hours means therefore an advance in rate of wages. It means, also, to the laborer a longer life, and thus a higher degree of usefulness as a factor of civilization. The eight hour experiment has been tried for several years in Australia and with complete success. It would be difficult, indeed, to indicate any change in averages, to give steadiness to the whole system. In the multitude of inter- ests there is safety. Profits, like water, seek a common level. The French revolution of ’89 was the bursting of a reservoir dam that concentrated profits in the hands of a privileged few. The existing situation is certainly full of peril. The combining tendency, now so strong, needs the active check of competition. The accumulation of wealth, estimated at 14 per cent, of the gross earnings of mankind, now aggregates $5,000,000,000 per annum, and is increasing, relatively as well as absolutely, from year to year. This amount is divided, we may safely say, among not more than 20 per cent, of the population that earns it. At this rate it will require but a few years to open up an enormous gap between the capitalist and the laborer. In the early days of the present generation of business men, there were in popular estimation but five millionaires in this country; they were William Gray, of Boston, John Jacob Astor and Stephen Whitney, of New York, Stephen Girard, of Philadelphia, and Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati. There are now at least five hundred in the city of New York alone, more than one of whom has an annual income equal to the combined fortunes of all the millionaires of half a century ago. 52 A NEW VIEW OF THE the customs of society which would tend more strongly to ameliorate the condition of the working classes, increase their physical stamina, and promote habits of sobriety among them. Prognostications of evil are to be expected. The selfish and the timid, like the poor, are always with us. The world’s gar- ret is full of old furniture, now consigned to dust and cobwebs, once the proud heirlooms of generations gone by. A short time ago the conductors and drivers of the street-cars in Cambridge, Mass., became dissatis- fied with the conditions under which they were employed and they stopped work. As might be expected of a set of men living in close proximity to Concord and Brook Farm, they struck, not for higher wages, but for shorter hours. It was an attempt to introduce some of the amenities of life into their lot. The men thought, and thought rightly, that a service of ten hours a day was all that could properly be required of them. The sympathies of the com- munity, however, were on the side of the employer. The scholar in politics proved, as usual, faithless to his trust. He sees the wrongs of the people in the dim past, but seldom those that are committed in his own time and at his very door. TEMPERANCE Q UES TION. 53 It is difficult sometimes to comprehend that each generation in turn must fight its battles for popular rights on new lines and new issues. We look down into the craters of old wornout agitations and wonder that society could ever have been upheaved and torn and desolated on questions that now pass unnoticed among the commonplaces of our daily life. No better advice was ever given to young men than that attributed to the poet Whittier, to select some un- popular cause with a principle of truth in its heart, and then stand by it through good report and through evil report till victory is assured ! Any one with youth and courage on his side can thus “ grow up ” with the noblest of all communities, with per- fect assurance that the increment of value, accruing to his character, no searcher of titles in after years can ever challenge. 4. Insure to every workingman one day in seven for rest. On this point at least we may agree with the first settlers of Connecticut, who voted to reenact the laws of the Old Testament, till they could make better. Whatever exhausts the bodily energies beyond the limit of easy and natural recuperation lessens the 54 A NEW VIEW OF THE efficiency of labor and shortens life. Excessive or unrepaired waste of the tissues creates a craving for excessive and injurious stimulation. It produces the same effect as deficiency of food. On temper- ance grounds, therefore, a day of rest once a week is a moral and physical necessity of our being. No community can permanently prosper which does not make adequate provision for it. At the same time, it must be confessed, the demands of society for Sunday labor are increasingly aggressive. It is esti- mated that in this country 1,500,000 persons are now engaged in gainful occupations on that day. Every year witnesses large accessions to the number. The Sunday newspaper is the camel’s head, after which body and hump are sure to follow. There should be, accordingly, two days of rest, one for the community at large, and one for those who are forced, by circumstances beyond their control and in the interests of society, to toil while others are resting. The seventh day of the week should be reinstated in its rightful place as sacred to the cause of labor. Corporations requiring the services of employees under proper restrictions on Sunday should be prohibited from engaging the same per- sons for any kind of labor on Saturday. The ar- TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 55 rangement cannot be safely left to voluntary action. A gentleman in Boston thought it necessary in the management of his large estate to spend Sunday, as well as the other days of the week, in his count- ing-room ; in a few years he became incurably insane. What he did for larger profits thousands of others would do unhesitatingly for support of wife and children. The same harsh necessity which drives so many of our fellow-citizens into the coal- mines at eighty cents a day would break down any barrier which considerations of comfort, sobriety, and health could set up in favor of a secondary day of rest. On the other hand, it is not difficult to foresee that an enforced cessation of labor for any consider- able portion of the community on Saturday would gradually disintegrate the day for business purposes. Nor would this be in any sense a public calamity. Five days’ labor per week is a large allowance, under just laws of distribution, for the supply of the world’s needs. Benjamin Franklin declared, even before the era of the steam-engine, that four would suffice for this purpose. It would be easy, indeed, to show that with the armies and navies of the world disbanded, as they must and will be in the 56 A NEW VIEW OF THE enlightened future, and the traffic in intoxicating liquors suppressed, Franklin’s estimate was a liberal one. 1 5. Establish chophouses for the people, in such locations and numbers and at such scales of prices as will ensure for them the widest patronage. It is entirely practicable to do this. Food of good quality and variety, well-cooked, palatable, and nutritious, can be furnished, wholesale and retail, at these restau- rants at far less cost than by the wasteful and dan- gerous methods now too often in vogue in individual homes. It is not necessary, nor is it desirable, that other adjuncts calculated to refine and educate the multitude should be made a feature of these eating- places. Bodily nourishment at the lowest possible expense to the beneficiaries should be the sole aim. Newspapers, books, pictures, and music, heretofore introduced with the most laudable intentions in 1 The expenditure for liquors and narcotics absorbs the net proceeds of one day’s work of the world per week. The military and naval establishments require an expenditure of $950,- 000,000 per annum. Add to this the loss of productive labor of 3,000,000 men, reckoning officers at $2 and privates at 75 cents per day, and we carry the total annual cost of militarism to $1,800,000,000. If we take into account also the indirect damages resulting from the use of intoxicat- ing drinks and from useless wars, that is, disease, insanity, premature death, as well as destruction of property by land and sea, we shall find that the necessary labor of the world can be so reduced as to become, for all men, not a “ curse,” but a blessing. TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 57 schemes of this kind, particularly in London, are out of place and likely in some measure to defeat the object in view. We should be content with apartments well-lighted and scrupulously clean, and not insist upon placing them, like our Protestant churches, on too high a social level. An admirable illustration of what can be accom- plished in this way, even under the present economic conditions, is afforded by the Coffee-house Associa- tion of the city of Toronto. Organized in 1881 with a working capital of $12,000 on which a divi- dend of 6 per cent, has been paid every year, it has maintained several restaurants in various parts of the city for the distinct purpose of combating the evils of intemperance. In one of them alone, known as the St. James, during the last winter 23,000 meals were served at an average charge of less than five cents each. Out of the philanthropy that achieves such results we may yet draw a new prov- erb : Take care of the eating, and the drinking will take care of itself. In conclusion, it is obvious that the intemperate habit, or (what is the root of it) the insatiable crav- ing for stimulants in the world, is a disease, and it should be treated as such. It involves neither more 58 A NEW VIEW OF THE nor less of moral responsibility than any other physical ailment to which flesh is heir. However blame- worthy the victim may be (as in the case of the vio- lation of any natural law), in the precursory stages, there is evidently a limit beyond which he ceases to to be a free moral agent. He becomes as powerless as were Laocoon and his sons in the serpents’ coils. The hospital, and not the penitentiary, is the place for the inebriate . 1 It is evident, also, that whatever may be the cir- cumstances under which the first intemperate acts are committed, the habit, formed by repetition of 1 The legislation of the world on this point has been a curious jumble of inconsistencies. As usual, the Roman law was the most reasonable : it remitted the death penalty in all cases in which the crime was committed under the influence of liquor. In ancient Greece, on the contrary, a law of Pittacus enacted that “ he who commits a crime when drunk shall receive a double punishment ; ” one for the crime itself, and the other for the ine- briety which prompted him to commit it. English law, adopting the Greek rather than the Roman view, regards drunkenness as an aggravation of the offence. The State of Minnesota has recently passed a law, making intoxication, per se, a crime, and affixing the penalty of imprisonment for the third offence ! The same want of perspicacity and sense of justice has marked, up to recent times, the treatment of the insane. During the Middle Ages and down almost to the present century in the administration of criminal law in Eng- land, the plea of insanity, except in extreme cases, was unavailing. The houses where lunatics were confined, were, according to Dr. Tuke in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “ prisons of the very worst description. The un- happy inmates were immured in cells, chained to the walls, flogged, starved, and not unfrequently killed.” It is almost incomprehensible that the prac- tical recognition of insanity in all its stages as a disease should have been so long delayed. TEMPERANCE QUESTION. 59 those acts, is, without exception, the direct or indi- rect result of insufficiency of food. Probably in nine cases out of ten, as the world exists, this is due to impoverishment, for which society at large is mostly responsible. With the masses of mankind the standard of living is too low. The body is. not properly nourished. The appetite is forced to ex- pend itself in artificial stimulation. In the remaining instances, far too familiar, in which the intemperate habit grows out of circum- stances free from compulsion of want, the hygienic effect is precisely the same. Stimulants usurp the natural means of recuperation. Alcohol, which nature everywhere combines with nutriment, is taken separately and under various pretences as a substitute for food. What God has joined together man puts asunder. Nature punishes the guilty alike ; no plea of ignorance or necessity mitigates the sentences pronounced in her courts. Men may hug the chains to which they are condemned to keep them from clanking, but the ever-increasing links will in the end weigh them down. For this class, relatively unimportant in numbers, an enlightened public opinion is the only corrective. J. BOSTON COLLEGE 3 9031 O' 58725 ' 8