GIFT OF THOMAS RUTHERFORD BACON MEMORIAL LliRAKY THE POISON PEOBLEM OR THE CA USE AND CURE OF INTEMPERANCE BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D. AUTHOR OF "PHYSICAL EDUCATION," "HOUSEHOLD REMEDIES, 11 ETC. " Light is Help from Above." Q. E. LESSINO. KEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1887 COPTBIQHT, 1886, Br D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. All rights reserved. UNIV PEEFAOE "WHAT shall we do to be saved?" is a question "which must force itself upon the thoughts of all who believe in the correlation of health and happiness, when they reflect upon the facts established by the North American and "West European statistics of in- temperance. In Great Britain the consumption of fermented and distilled liquors has increased since 1850 at the average yearly rate of three and one third per cent ; in France, two per cent ; in Switzerland, five and a half per cent ; in northern Germany (in- cluding Saxony and Alsace-Lorraine) the manufacture of malt liquors has doubled since 1866 ; and even in the United States the consumption of intoxicating drinks of all kinds has advanced at a rate exceeding that of our rapid growth in population by one fifth. In Norway, Poland, Galicia, and the Danubian prin- cipalities, the production of distilled liquors is the only growing branch of industry; and in European Turkey the habitual use of alcoholic stimulants is no longer confined to the trinitarian subjects of the sul- tan. Since the harvest-time of 18T3, while Ireland and eastern Brazil were struggling with famine, and thousands of our fellow men in Persia, Armenia, Cash- 4: PREFACE. mere, and Greenland actually died for want of bread, between 390,000,000 and 400,000,000 tons of bread- stuffs have been converted from a blessing into a curse. In England and Scotland alone the produc- tion of alcoholic drinks has consumed half a billion bushels of cereals, every handful of which has strewn the path of coming generations with the seeds of .mis- ery and disease. The pious belief that the excess of every social evil tends to insure its abolition, seems, indeed, to have been almost disproved by the history of the alcohol habit. When the yoke of despots had made deliver- ance more desirable than life itself, despotism had reached the term of its power. When the rule of priests had made the hatred of shams burn hotter than the fire of the stake, no Jesuitical intrigues could prevent the triumph of the Protestant revolt. But, though the evil of intemperance has long been recog- nized as the blighting curse of modern civilization, the sore-felt need of relief seems thus far to have re- vealed no remedy. In spite of all our philanthropists have done to stem or deflect the current, the Gift- qudle, the dire poison-fountain of social life, has over- flowed its ancient banks, and threatens to submerge the sanitaria of the primitive highlands. In coun- tries of Christendom where the ebb of all other in- dustries has enforced a degree of frugality unknown to the revival periods of mediaeval asceticism, the liquor traffic still swells the tide of revenue and dis- ease. Remedy after remedy has been proposed, tested, and changed for another, doomed to a similar failure. And yet the general tendency of those changes PREFACE. 5 reveals an advance in the right direction. Philoso- phers have long thought it probable that the histo- rians of the future will deal with the records of legis- lative reforms rather than with the bulletins of battles and bombardments, and the value of such records in characterizing the spirit of the age is strikingly illus- trated by the chronicle of temperance legislation. The necessity of controlling the grosser excesses of intemperance was always more or less recognized, but until lately the efforts to that purpose were di- rected to the suppression of the symptoms rather than to the removal of the cause. There was a time when the belief in the necessity of alcoholic stimu- lation would have proved a wholly unassailable axiom, even if legislators could have been induced to waste their time on such secular vanities as the preservation of health. It was the millennium of madness, when the promotion of sanitary habits was thought of far less importance than the enforcement of insane cere- monies ; when the images of miracle-mongers lodged in gilded domes while the image of God rotted in a hovel ; when men were tortured to death for whisper- ing a doubt against the pretensions of their spiritual taskmasters, but were freely permitted to poison them- selves and their neighbors with spirituous abomina- tions. In that golden age of antiphysical doctrines, temperance had no chance whatever. Cavaliers and commoners vied in " wassail " ; nay, the moral exem- plars of Christendom outguzzled the thirstiest lay- men: " monachi, vestri stomach! sunt amphorae Bacchi, Vos estis, Deus est testis, turpissima pestis," 6 PREFACE. rhymed Ulric Hutten, and there is no doubt that for centuries every large convent had a private wine-cel- lar. The monastery of Weltenburg, on the Danube, operated the largest brewery of the German Empire, and thousands of prelates owned both breweries and vineyards. Spiritual tyranny and spirituous license went hand in hand. Yet, even then, communities had to legislate against the bestial abuse of that li- cense ; and there were voluntary friends of temper- ance, men of higher ideals, scholars and philanthro- pists, who abhorred drunken riots, though they loved their wine, and recommended a self-denial which they found often more easy to preach than to practice. Their motto was "Moderation." Be temperate in all things. Keep the safe middle course. A dangerous fallacy lurks in those precepts. It may be safe to compromise conflicting duties, as chari- ty and economy, patriotism and domestic obligations ; but where is the golden mean of virtue and vice? How keep a safe middle course on the slippery road to ruin ? After opening the flood-gate, not one man in a thousand can stay the progress of a besetting vice, and of all besetting vices the alcohol habit is the most inevitably progressive. An unnatural appetite has no natural limits. For weeks, sometimes for months, young topers have to struggle against the protests of a better instinct, but the final surrender of that monitor marks the incipience of a morbid craving, which every gratification makes only more exorbitant. For, by and by the jaded organism fails to respond to the spur ; the stimulant palls, but the hankering for stimulation remains, and the toper has PREFACE. 7 to satisfy his thirst either by increasing the quantum of his tipple or by resorting to stronger poisons. After kindling the flames of alcoholism it is in vain to urge the advantage of a moderate conflagration ; one might as well recommend a moderate use of the privilege to ignite a barrel of gunpowder. We can not tolerate the use of intoxicants and hope to prevent intoxication. The lessons of experience, if not of physiology, gradually taught the friends of temperance to relin- quish that hope. A strong party of the Reform League declared in favor of total abstinence from al- coholic beverages, and devised plans for the effective propaganda of their tenets. They doubted the ex- pediency of coercion in " a matter of private habits," but shrank from no sacrifice in braving the odium of personal intolerance, in advocating their principles in public lectures, in printing and distributing millions of eloquent pamphlets. Their own habits were gen- erally distinguished by a strict conformity to their principles. They hoped to cure the alcohol-habit by illustrating in theory and practice the advantages of uncompromising abstinence. Their motto was " Re- pudiation." A good deal of learning has lately been paraded in demonstrating the legal necessity of distinguishing between crimes and vices, between direct and indirect offences against the statutes of the moral code. But the recognized interests of public welfare have al- ways been pursued across the boundaries of such dis- tinctions ; or, more properly speaking, the varying definitions of good and evil have ever biased the pre- 8 PREFACE. vailing theories as to the proper sphere of legislation. "When the eternal welfare of millions was supposed to depend on their conformity to certain mysterious dogmas, and the degradation of the body was thought to be rather conducive to spiritual advantages, it seemed perfectly logical to give a health-destroying habit free rein and curb the freedom of conscience. Those theories have since been greatly modified ; but that modern moralists hesitate to coerce rum-sellers and hasten to coerce gamblers and the venders of un- clean literature, means, after all, nothing else but that they are still inclined to consider intemperance, on the whole, a lesser evil than a passion for gaming or lascivious novels. Is that bias a relic of the times when the natural temptations of the sexual instinct were dreaded more than the unnatural temptations of the poison-vice, and the financial resources of a tithe-paying Christian were thought of more impor- tance than his health ? Judging from secular stand- ards, we should be inclined to think that alcohol is doing more mischief in a single year than obscene literature has done in a century. And, while game- sters may be indemnified by an occasional gain, there is no doubt that the passion of the toper in- volves the inevitable loss of time, money, and repu- tation, as well as of health. And, unhappily, it also involves the loss of self-respect, and. thus destroys the basis on which the advocate of appeals to the moral instinct would found his plan of salvation. The power of moral resistance is weakened with every repetition of the poison-dose, and we might as well besiege a bed-ridden consumptive with ap- PREFACE. 9 peals to resume his place at the head of an afflicted family. Nor can the purposes of prohibitive legislation be furthered by compromise measures. "We must banish alcohol from the sick-room as well as from the banquet-hall. Dr. N. S. Davis, ex-President of the American Medical Association, confesses to having found " no case of disease, and no emergency arising from accident, that could not be treated more success- fully without any form of fermented or distilled liquor than with." Dr. James E. Nichols, editor of the Boston " Journal of Chemistry," records his convic- tions that " the banishment of alcohol would not de- prive us of a single one of the indispensable agents which modern civilization demands." "In no in- stance," he adds, " of disease in any form, is it a medi- cine which might not be dispensed with and other agents substituted." Then why, for mankind's sake, not confine ourselves to such substitutes ? Have the experiments of homoeopathy not abundantly proved that the disorders of the human organism can be cured, not only as well, but more easily and more per- manently, without the use of any drastic stimulants whatever ? Is it not mere mockery to prohibit the sale of small beer, and permit any enterprising dis- tiller to deluge the country with poison by selling his brandy as a " digestive tonic," and elude the inconven- ience of the Sunday law by consigning his liquor to a drug-store? Wherever the laboring-classes find a chance for healthier recreations the army of topers would die out from want of recruits, if the causes of intemperance were limited to the temptations of the 10 PKEFACE. rum-shop, with its garish splendor and its sham prom- ises of social pleasures. But the tempter comes in more subtle disguises. The elixirs of death are sold as panaceas. "Brandy-doctors," as Benjamin Rush used to call them, abuse the confidence of their pa- tients by inoculating them with the seeds of a life- blighting vice. Thousands of topers owe their ruin to a prescription of " tonic-bitters." In many of our smaller cities drug-stores, rather than coffee-houses and beer-gardens, have become the preparatory schools of the rum-shop. Taught by the logic of snch experiences, the friends of reform will at last recognize the truth, that the " temperate use " of alcohol is but the first stage of a progressive and shame-proof disease, and that, moderation and repudiation failing, we must direct our blows at the root of the upas tree and adopt the motto of " Eradication." Truce means defeat in the struggle against an evil that will reproduce its seed from the basis of any compromise. The removal of (the cause is easier than the suppression of the symp- toms, by just as much as abstinence is easier than tem- perance. FELIX L. OSWALD. TALLULAH, GA., October, 1886. OO^TEITTS. CHAPTEE I. THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL-HABIT. PAGE A physiological enigma Origin of the poison-vice All evil abnor- mal God made man upright Protective instincts A popular fallacy The key of the enigma Unnatural habits The secret of their persistence Every poison can become a second nature " Mild stimulants "Claude Bernard's discovery Tea and coffee Tobacco Small-beer The road to ruin paved with so-called temperance drinks Cider and beer Suggestive statistics A lesson from Nature Total abstinence the only safe plan . .18 CHAPTEE II. THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. The exegesis of vice Antiquity of the poison-habit Wine probably the first stimulant Haller's conjecture National poisons A suggestive fact Interchangeable vices Narcotics and alcoholic drinks Identical in their essential effects Self-deceptions An ethnological conjecture Predisposing causes ot intemperance A radical misconception Oriental tipplers Soma-juice Opium Hydromel Koumiss Chinese topers A sensible proposition Poisonous mushrooms Moral influences The war against Nature Asceticism An open secret 28 CHAPTEE III. PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF THE POISON-HABIT. The stimulant vice History of human degeneration Half-made men Effects of the alcohol-vice Upon savages Upon civilized men Alcohol epidemics Indigestion The after-effects of intoxica- tion Daily poison doses Predisposing causes of disease Lon- gevityPhysical degeneration Ancient athletes Hereditary transmissions Insanity statistics Shah Nahum's secret Ab- stinent nations Turks and Nubians Their physical vigor Topers' sophistry" Climatic influences "Suggestive facts The age of confirmed habits Eousseau's climacteric . . . 44 12 CONTEXTS. CHAPTER IV. THE COSTS OF INTEHPERANCE. Increase of the poison-habit Statistics of intemperance Suicidal vices Rum and crime A political economist's estimate Turn- ing breadstuffs into poison Stimulants and narcotics New poi- sons Nature's ultimatum " Tolerance " The indirect costs of the poison-habit Lager beer Startling facts The poison-habit in all its forms an unmixed evil Sophisms of the compromise plan 64 CHAPTEE V. ALCOEOLIC DRUGS. Obsolete doctrines Theory and practice Untenable dogmas Our medical text-books Practical tests The lessons of homoeopathy A medical dilemma Obstinate facts The safest way An ugly alternative Dr. Sewall's argument Medical prescriptions as a cause of alcoholism Rekindling smothered fires Isaac Jen- nings' s appeal Dr. Mussey's case A last resort Alcohol dis- pensable Safest substitutes A crucial test The physiological action of alcohol Dr. N. S. Davis' s definition . . . .78 CHAPTER VI. PROHIBITION. The problem of ages History of the temperance movement Zoro- aster, Pythagoras, Mohammed The sphere of legislation Vices and crimes Varying definitions of crime Prevention easier than suppression Magnitude of the evil The poison-traffic not a self-correcting abuse Lesser evils Efficacy of prohibitive legislation Prohibition in Sweden Local experience Mayor flamh'n's testimony The price of success 91 CHAPTER VH. SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES. Educational reforms Futility of half-way measures Total absti- nenceTemperate nations Spain under the Saracens Instruc- tion Temperance text-books Lecture bureaus Chances of co- operation Pamphlets and tracts Conditions of Success Pro- scription A social remedy Healthier pastimes A lesson from history The Olympic games The pleasure resorts A lesser evil Reform fallacies Saturday afternoon Half-holidays Temperance gardens Gymnasia Physical education A sug- gestion Health the means, as well as the end, of temperance Prospects Regenesis 105 APPENDIX .... 121 THE POISON PROBLEM. CHAPTER I. THE SECEET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. " Consistency is the test of truth." Wilberforce. AMONG the strange legends of the middle ages there are certain traditions which have evidently a figurative significance, and whose origin has often been traced to the allegorical mythology of an earlier age. An allegory of that sort is the legend of the " Marvel of Nikolsburg," near Yienna ; a miraculous image that appeared always an inch higher than the person standing before it. "It overtopped a giant, and all but condescended to the stature of a dwarf," says the tradition. That image is a symbol of Nature. The lowest savage must dimly recognize the fact that man can not measure his cunning against the wisdom of the Creator, and the highest development of science has only revealed its own incompetence to imitate, or even comprehend, the structural perfection of the simplest living organism. The Author of life deals only in masterpieces ; the marvelous fitness of his contrivances 2 14 THE POISON PROBLEM. is as infinite in his smallest as in his greatest works, and the apparent exceptions from that rule can nearly- all be traced to the influence of abnormal circum- stances. Our own interference with the order of Nature has caused the discords in the harmony of creation which furnish the chief arguments of pes- simism. The winter torrents which devastate the valleys of Southern France with a fury which Con- dorcet calls the "truculence of a vainly worshiped heaven," flowed in harmless brooks till the hand of man destroyed the protecting forests that absorbed and equalized the drainage of the Alpine slopes ; the same imprudence has turned the gardens of the East into deserts, and obstructed with sand-bars the chan- nels of once navigable rivers. The wanton exter- mination of wood-birds has revenged itself by insect plagues. Consumption, that cruel scourge of the hu- man race, is the direct consequence of the folly which makes us prefer the miasma of our tenement prisons to the balm of God's free air. We are too apt to con- found the results of our sins against Nature with the original arrangements of Providence. But the strang- est instance of that mistake is the fallacy which has long biased our dealings with the curse of the alcohol habit. Drunkards plead their inability to resist the promptings of an imperious appetite. Their friends lament the antagonism of nature and duty, the weak- ness of the flesh frustrating the resolves of a willing spirit. Even temperance orators dwell on the dangers of "worldly temptations," of "selfish, sensual indul- gences," as if the alcohol habit were the result of an innate propensity deplorable in its collateral conse- THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 15 quences, but withal entitled to the compromising con- cessions which ascetic virtue owes to the cravings of an impetuous natural instinct. In other words, we palliate a flagrant crime against the physical laws of God, as if Nature herself had lured us to our ruin ; the votaries of alcohol plead their ignorance, as if the Providence that warns us against the sting of a tiny insect, and teaches the eye to protect itself against a mote of dust, had provided no adequate safeguards against the greatest danger to health and happiness. And yet those safeguards would abundantly an- swer their protective purpose if persistent vice had not almost deadened the faculty of understanding the monitions of our physical conscience. It is true that the stimulant-thirst of the confirmed drunkard far exceeds the urgency of the most impetuous instincts ; but by that very excessiveness and persistence the far- gone development of the alcohol habit proves what the mode of its incipience establishes beyond the pos- sibility of a doubt namely, the radical difference of its characteristics from those of a natural appetite. For 1. Under normal circumstances the attractive- ness of alimentary substances is proportioned to the degree of their healthfulness and their nutritive value. To the children of Nature all hurtful things are repulsive, all beneficial things attractive. Provi- dence has endowed our species with a liberal share of the protective instinct that teaches our dumb fellow- creatures to select their proper food, and even in this age of far-gone degeneration the dietetic predilections of children and primitive men might furnish the cri- 16 THE POISON PROBLEM. teria of a general food-reform. No creature is misled by an innate craving for unwholesome food, nor by an instinctive aversion to wholesome substances. Our natural repugnance to nearly all kinds of " medicines," i. e., virulent stimulants, has already begun to be rec- ognized as a suggestive illustration of that rule. A child's hankering after sweetmeats is only an appar- ent exception, for, as Dr. Schrodt observes, the con- ventional diet of our children is so deficient in saccha- rine elements that instinct constantly strives to supply an unsatisfied want. Human beings fed chiefly on fruit-syrups would instinctively hanker after farina- ceous substances. The savages of our northwestern prairies are as fond of honey as their grizzly neigh- bors. Nurslings, deprived of their mothers' milk, instinctively appreciate the proper component parts of artificial surrogates. Sailors in the tropics thirst after fruit, after refrigerating fluids, after fresh vege- tables. In the arctic seas they crave calorific food oil or fat. But in no climate of this earth is man afflicted with an instinctive hankering after alcohol. To the palate of an unseduced boy rum is as repulsive as cor- rosive sublimate. I do not speak only of the sons of nature-abiding parents, but of the children of vice, left to the guidance of their enfeebled but not inten- tionally perverted instincts. The intuitive bias even of such is in the direction of total abstinence from all noxious stimulants, for Nature has willed that all her creatures should begin the pilgrimage of life from beyond the point where the roads of purity and vice dvierge. In their projects for the abolition of the THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 17 stimulant habit, temperance people are, indeed, rather inclined to underrate the difficulties of a total cure of a confirmed poison-vice, but equally apt to overrate the difficulty of total prevention. The supposed ef- fects of an innate predisposition can generally be traced to the direct influence of a vicious education. Jean Jacques Rousseau expressed his conviction that \ a fondness for intoxicating liquors is nearly always contracted in the years of immaturity, when the def- erence to social precedents is apt to overcome the warnings of instinct ; but that those who have escaped or not yielded to the temptations of that period would ever afterward be safe. Dr. Zimmerman, too, admits that " home influences are too often mistaken for he- reditary influences." And boy-topers are not always voluntary converts. The year before I left my native town (Brussels) I found a drunken lad on the platform of the railway-depot, and carried him to the house of a medical friend, who put him to bed and turned him over to a policeman the next morning. The little fellow was recognized as an old offender, but when the court was going to send him to a house of correc- tion my friend offered to take him back, and, on con- dition of keeping him away from his parents, was permitted to take care of him, and finally made him his office-boy. His parents were ascertained to be both habitual drunkards, but their son (aged eleven years) showed no inclination to follow their example, and voluntarily abstained from the light wines which now and then made their appearance on the doctor's table though he never missed an opportunity to re- join his old playmates, and, as his patron expressed it, 18 THE POISOX PROBLEM. " was a dangerous deal too smart to be intrusted with the collection of bills." Six months after his last scrape I found him alone in the doctor's office, where he had collected a private library of picture-papers and illustrated almanacs. "What made you get so drunk last Easter ? " I asked him ; " are you so fond of brandy ? " " Nenni, mais pa rrfen fitpi*endre" he replied " father made me drink it." 2. The instinctive aversion to any kind of poi- son can be perverted into an unnatural craving after the same substance. Poisons are either repulsive or insipid. Arsenic, sugar-of-lead, and antimony belong to the latter class. To the first-born children of earth certain mineral poisons were decidedly out-of-the-way substances^ against which Nature apparently thought it less necessary to provide special safeguards. But, though less repulsive than other poisons, such sub- stances are never positively attractive, and often (like verdigris, potassium, etc.) perceptibly nauseous. Vege- table poisons are either nauseous or intensely bitter. Hasheesh is more unattractive than turpentine. Opium is acrid caustic. Absinthe (wormwood-extract) is as bitter as gall. Instinct resists the incipience of an insidious second nature. But that instinct is plastic. If the warnings of our physical conscience remain unheeded, if the offen- sive substance is again and again forced upon the un- willing stomach, Nature at last chooses the alternative of compromising the evil, and, true to her supreme law of preserving existence at any cost, prolongs even a wretched life by adapting the organism to the exi- THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 19 gencies of an abnormal habit. She still continues her protest in the feeling of exhaustion which follows every poison-debauch, but permits each following dose of the insidious drug to act as a temporary reinvigor- ant, or at least as a spur to the functional activity of the exhausted organism ; for the apparent return of vital vigor is, in fact, nothing but a symptom of the morbid energy exerted by the system in its efforts to rid itself of a deadly intruder, for each new applica- tion of the stimulus is as regularly followed by a dis- tressing reaction. And only then the slave of the unnatural habit becomes conscious of that peculiar craving which is entirely distinct from the prompt- ings of a healthy appetite a craving uncompromis- ingly directed toward a special, once repulsive, sub- stance ; a craving defying the limiting instincts which indicate the proper quantum of wholesome foods and drinks ; a craving which each gratification makes more irresistible, though for the time being each indulg- ence is followed by a depressing reaction. The appe- tite for wholesome substances however palatable is never exclusive. A child may become passionately fond of ice-cream, yet accept cold water and fruit- cake as a welcome substitute. A predilection for honey, strawberries, or sweet tree fruits will not tempt the admirers of such dainties to commit forgery and highway robbery to indulge their penchant so long as their kitchen affords a supply of savory vegeta- bles. Only natural appetites have natural limits ; the art of the best pastry-cook would hardly induce his customers to stupefy and bestialize themselves with his compounds. There are no milk-topers, no suicidal 20 THE POISON PROBLEM. potato-eaters, no victims of a chronic porridge-passion. In spite of occasional surfeits, tlie craving for aliment- ary substances increases and decreases with the needs of the organism, while that of the poison-drinker yields only to the temporary extinction of conscious- ness. In a state of Nature every normal function is as- sociated with a pleasurable sensation, and, instead of resulting in agonizing reactions, a feast of wholesome food is followed by a state of considerable physical comfort "the beatific consciousness of perfect di- gestion," as Baron Brisse describes the pleasures of the after-dinner hour. But no length of practice will ever save the poison-slave from the penalties of his sins against Nature. Each full indulgence is followed by a full measure of wof ul retributions, while a half- indulgence results in a half -depression to the verge of world-weary despondency, or fails to satisfy the lin- gering thirst after a larger dose of the same stimulant. And every poison known to modern chemistry can beget that specific craving. " Entirely accidental cir- cumstances, the accessibility of special drugs, imita- tiveness and the intercourse of commercial nations, the mere whims of fashion, the authority of medical recommendations, have often decided the first choice of a special stimulant, destined to become a national beverage " and a national curse. The contemporaries of the Yeda-writers fuddled with so?na-wine, the juice of a narcotic plant of the Himalaya foot-hills. Their neighbors, the pastoral Tartars, get drunk on koumiss, or fermented mare's-milk, an abomination which in Eastern Europe threatens to increase the list of ini- THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 21 ported poisons, while opium is gaining ground in our Pacific States as fast as lager beer, chloral, and pat- ent "bitters " on the Atlantic slope. The French have added absinthe to their wines and liquors, the Turks hasheesh and opiates to strong coffee. North Ameri- ca has adopted tea from China, coffee from Arabia (or originally from Ceylon), tobacco from the Carib- bean savages, high-wines from France and Spain, and may possibly learn to drink Mexican aloe-sap, or chew the coca-leaves of the South American Indians. Ar- senic has its votaries in the southern Alps. Cinnabar and acetate of copper victimize the miners of the Pe- ruvian sierras. The Ashantees are so fond of sorghum beer that their chieftains have to keep special bamboo cages for the benefit of quarrelsome drunkards. The pastor of a Swiss colony in the Mexican state of Oaxaca told me that the mountaineers of that neigh- borhood befuddle themselves with cicuta syrup, the inspissated juice of a kind of hemlock that first ex- cites and then depresses the cerebral functions, exces- sive garrulity being the principal symptom of the ex- alted stage of intoxication. A decoction of the com- mon fly-toadstool (agaricus maculatus) inflames the passions of the Kamtchatka natives, makes them pug- nacious, disputative, but eventually splenetic (Chamis- so's " Reisen," p. 322). The Abyssinians use a prepa- ration of dhurra corn that causes more quarrels than gambling. It is a favorite beverage at festivals, and is vaunted as a remedy for various complaints, though Belzoni mentions that it makes its votaries more sub- ject to the attacks of the Nile fever. According to Prof. Yambery, the Syrian Druses pray, though ap- 22 THE POISON PROBLEM. parently in vain, to be delivered from the tempta- tion of foxglove tea. Comparative pathology has multiplied these analogies till, in spite of the argu- ments of a thousand specious advocates, there is no valid reasonto doubt that the alleged innate crav- ing for the sUfnulns of fermented or distilled bever- ages is wholly abnormal, and that the alcohol habit is characterized by all the peculiarities of a poison vice. 3. All poison habits are progressive. There is a deep significance in that term of our language which describes an unnatural habit as growing upon its dev- otees, for we find, indeed, a striking analogy between the development of the stimulant habit and that of a parasitical plant, which, sprouting from tiny seeds, fastens upon, preys upon, and at last strangles its vic- tims. The seductiveness of every stimulant habit gains strength with each new indulgence, and it is a curious fact that that power is proportioned to the original repulsiveness of the poison. The tonic in- fluence of Chinese tea is due to the presence of a stimulating ingredient known as the'ine, in its concen- trated form a strong narcotic poison, but f orming only a minute percentage of the component parts of com- mon green tea. On the Pacific coast of our country thousands of Chinese immigrants carry their thrift to the degree of renouncing their favorite beverage, but neither considerations of economy nor of self-preserva- tion will induce the same exiles to break the fetters of the opium habit. Not one hasheesh-eater in a hun- dred can hope to emancipate himself from the thral- dom of his vice. The guests of King Alcohol, too, THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 23 would make their reckoning without their host in hoping to take in the fun of intoxication as a votary of pleasure would engage in a transient pastime : his palace is an Armida castle, that rarely dismisses a vis- itor. " In describing the effects of the alcohol habit," says Dr. Isaac Jennings, " I want to impress the reader with another feature of it its perpetuity. It can never be put off during the lifetime of the individ- ual ; it may be covered up to appearance, but it can not be effaced. ... It seems to be a common impres- sion that alcohol circulates through the body, excites the action of the heart and liver, quickens and en- livens the animal spirits, and then passes off and leaves no trace of its visitation, or at most only a temporary loss of power, which is soon restored by a self-moved power-pump. This is a great and fundamental error. Every drop of alcohol that enters the stomach inflicts | an injury that will continue as long as the old stock ' lasts, and reach even to the young sprouts. It may / not be enstamped on them in precisely the same way, but it will affect essentially the same parts." (" Medi- cal Keform," pp. 173-175.) " If a man were sent to hell," says Dr. Eush, " and kept there for a thousand years as a punishment for drinking, and then returned, his first cry would be, * Give me rum ! give me rum ! ' " "The infernal powers blindfold the victims of their altars," says Lessing, and the stimulant vice seems, in fact, to weaken not only the physical constitution of its votaries, but their moral power of resistance, and often even the faculty of real- 24 THE POISON PROBLEM. izing the perils of their practice, as if the poison had struck its roots into the very souls of its vic- tims. But the alcohol habit grows outward, as well as inward. "We have seen that each gratification of the poison vice is followed by a depressing reaction. But this feeling of exhaustion is steadily progressive, and the correspondingly increased craving for a repetition of the stimulant dose forces its victim either to in- crease the quantity of the wonted tonic, or else to resort to a stronger poison. The experience of individual drunkards probably corresponds to the international development of the alcohol habit. Its first devotees contented themselves with moderate quantities of the milder stimulants must, hydromel, and light beer. But such tonics soon began to pall, and the jaded ap- petite of the toper soon resorted to strong wines, to hard cider, and finally to brandy and rum. Others increased the quantity, and learned to drink horse- pails full of beer, in which "diluted and harmless form" many German students manage to absorb a quart of alcohol per day. (Appendix I.) "People sometimes wonder," says Dr. Jennings, " why such and such men, possessing great intellect- ual power and firmness of character in other respects, can not drink moderately and not give themselves up to drunkenness. They become drunkards ~by law fixed, immutable law. Let a man with a constitution as perfect as Adam's undertake to drink alcohol, moder- ately and perseveringly, with all the caution and delib- erate determination that he can command, and if he could live long enough he would just as certainly be- THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 25 come a drunkard get to a point where he could not refrain from drinking to excess as he would go over Niagara Falls when placed in a canoe in the river above the falls and left to the natural oper- ation of the current. And proportionately as he descended the stream would his alcoholic attraction for it increase, so that he would find it more and more difficult to get ashore, until he reached a point where escape was impossible." (" Medical Reform," p. 1Y6.) "Now and then the votaries of the stimulant habit exchange their tonic for a stronger poison. Claude Bernard, the famous French pathologist, noticed that the opium vice recruits its female victims chiefly from the ranks of the veteran coffee drinkers. In Turkey, too, strong coffee has prepared the way for tobacco and opium. In Switzerland arsenic eaters have ex- changed their fcirschwasser for a more potent tonic. Many French and Russian hard drinkers have learned to prefer ether to brandy. But no poison-vice can be cured by milder stimu- lants. The Beelzebub of alcohol does not yield to weaker spirits ; hence the fallacy of the antidote plan. Nothing was formerly more common with temperance people of the compromise school than to comfort con- verted drunkards with stimulating drugs and strong coffee, in the hope that the organism might somehow be induced to acquiesce in the quid pro quo. That hope is a delusion. The surrogate may bring a tem- porary relief, but it can not satisfy the thirst for the stronger tonic, and only serves to perpetuate the stimulant diathesis the poison-hunger, which will S 26 THE POISON PROBLEM. sooner or later revert to the wonted object of its pas- sion. Unswerving loyalty to the pledge of the total abstinence plan is not at first the easiest, but event- ually the surest way; for, even after weeks of suc- cessful resistance to the importunities of the tempter, a mere spark may rekindle the smothered flames. "What takes place in the stomach of a reformed drunkard?" says Dr. Sewall "the individual who abandons the use of all intoxicating drinks? The stomach, by that extraordinary self-restorative power of Nature, gradually resumes its natural appearance. Its engorged blood-vessels become reduced to their original size, and a few weeks, or months, will accom- plish this renovation, after which the individual has no longer any suffering or desire for alcohol. It is nevertheless true, and should ever be borne in mind, that such is the sensibility of the stomach of the re- formed drunkard, that a repetition of the use of alco- hol in the slightest degree, and in any form, under any circumstances, revives the appetite; the blood- vessels again become dilated, and the morbid sensi- bility of the organ is reproduced." The use of any stimulating drug may rewaken the dormant propensity, and it will not change the result if the stimulant has been administered in the form of a medical prescription. Strong drink is a mocker, in disease as well as in health, and the road to the rum-shop leads through the dispensary as often as through the beer garden. The logical conclusion of all these premises thus reveals the two-fold secret of the alcohol habit : the anomaly of its attractiveness and the necessity of its THE SECRET OF THE ALCOHOL HABIT. 27 progressvveness ; and we at last recognize the truth, that the road to intemperance is paved with mild stimulants, and that the only safe, consistent, and ef- fective plan of reform is total abstinence from all stimulating poisons. CHAPTEE H. THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. " The discovery of the cause is the discovery of the remedy." Bichat. THE undoubted antiquity of the poison-vice has induced several able physiologists to assume the hy- gienic necessity of artificial stimulation. But the not less undoubted fact that there have been manful, industrious, and intelligent nations of total abstainers, would be an almost sufficient refutation of that infer- ence, which is sometimes qualified by the assertion that the tonic value of alcoholic drinks is based upon the abnormal demands upon the vitality of races ex- posed to the vicissitudes of a rigorous climate and the manifold overstraining influences of an artificial civili- zation. For it can, besides, be proved that the alleged invigorating action of alcoholic drinks is an absolute delusion, and the pathological records of contemporary nations establish the fact that endemic increase of in- temperate habits can nearly always be traced to causes that have no correlation whatever to the increased demands upon the physical or intellectual energies of the afflicted community. Potentially those energies have lamentably decreased among numerous races who once managed to combine nature-abiding habits with a plethora of vital vigor. THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 29 The physiologically unavoidable progressiveness of all stimulant habits is a further argument in favor of the theory that the poison- vice has grown up from very small beginnings, and the genesis of the fatal germ has probably been supplied in the hypothesis of Fabio Colonna, an Italian naturalist of the seventeenth cen- tury. "Before people used wine," says he, "they drank sweet must, and preserved it, like oil, in jars or skins. But in a warm climate a saccharine fluid is apt to ferment, and some avaricious housekeeper may have drunk that spoiled stuff till she became fond of it, and learned to prefer it to must." Avarice, aided perhaps by dietetic prurience, or indifference to the warnings of instinct, planted the baneful seed, and the laws of evolution did the rest. But the tendency of those laws has often been checked, and as certainly often been accelerated, by less uncontrollable agencies. The first venders of toxic stimulants (like our quack-medicine philanthropists) had a personal in- terest in disseminating the poison-habit. Reform attempts were met by appeals to the convivial inter- ests of the stimulant-dupe, by the seduction of minors, by charges of asceticism ; later, by nostnim puffs and opium wars. More than two thousand years ago the worship of Bacchus was propagated by force of arms. The disciples of Ibn Hanbal, the Arabian Father Mathew, were stoned in the streets of Bagdad. The persecutions and repeated expulsions of the Gre- cian Pythagoreans had probably a good deal to do with the temperance teachings of their master. In Palestine, in India, in mediaeval Europe, nearly every 30 THE POISON PROBLEM. apostle of Nature had to contend with a rancorous opposition, inspired by the most sordid motives of self-interest^ and our own age can in that respect not boast of much improvement. In spite of our higher standard of philanthropic principles, and their numer- ous victories in other directions, the heartless alliance of Bacchus and Mammon still stands defiant. In our own country a full hundred thousand men, not half of them entitled to plead the excuses of poverty or igno- rance, unblushingly invoke the protection of the laws in behalf of an industry involving the systematic prop- agation of disease, misery, and crime. Wherever the interests of the poison-traffic are at stake the nations of Europe have not made much progress, since the time when the sumptuary laws of Lorenzo de Medici were defeated by street riots and a shrieking proces- sion of the Florentine tavern-keepers. The efforts of such agitators are seconded by the instinct of imitation. " In large cities," says Dr. Schrodt, " one may see gamins under ten years grub- bing in rubbish heaps for cigar-stumps ; soon after, leaning against a board fence, groaning and shuddering as they pay the repeated penalty of Nature, yet, all the same, repeating the experiment with the resignation of a martyr. The rich, the fashionable, do it ; those whom they envy, smoke ; smoking, they conclude, must be something enviable." Without any intentional arts of persuasion, the Chinese business men of San Francisco have dissemi- nated a new poison-vice by smoking poppy-gum in the presence of their Caucasian employes, and accustoming them to associate the sight of an opium debauch with THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 31 the idea of enjoyment and recreation. Would the opponents of prohibition attempt to deny that anal- ogous influences (the custom of "treating" friends at a public bar, the spectacle of lager-beer orgies in public gardens, etc.) have a great deal to do with the initiation of boy-topers ? Ignorance does not lead our dumb fellow-creatures to vicious habits, and prejudice is therefore, perhaps, the more correct name for the sad infatuation which tempts so many millions of our young men to defy the protests of instinct and make themselves the slaves of a life-destroying poison. Ignorance is nescience. Prejudice is malscience, miscreance, trust in erro- neous teachings. Millions of children are brought up in the belief that health can be secured only by abnor- mal means. A pampered child complains of headache, want of appetite. Instead of curing the evil by the removal of the cause, in the way so plainly indicated by the monitions of instinct, the mother sends to the drug-store. The child must " take something." Help must come through anti-natural means. A young rake, getting more fretful and dyspeptic from day to day, is advised to " try something " an aloe pill, a bottle of medicated brandy, any quack " specific," rec- ommended by its bitterness or nauseousness. The pro- tests of Nature are calmly disregarded in such cases. A dose of medicine, according to the popular impres- sion, can not be very effective unless it is very repul- sive. Our children thus learn to mistrust the voice of their natural instincts. They try to rely on the aid of specious arts, instead of trusting their troubles in the hands of Nature. Boys whose petty ailments have 32 THE POISON PKOBLEM. been palliated with stimulants, will afterward be tempted to drown their sorrow in draughts of the same nepenthe, instead of biding their time, like Henry Thoreau, who preferred to "face -any fate, rather than seek refuge in the mist of intoxication." Before the friends of temperance can hope for a radi- cal reform, they must help to eradicate the deep-rooted delusion of the stimulant fallacy the popular error which hopes to defy the laws of Nature by the magic of intoxicating olrags, and thus secure an access of hap- Ipiness not attainable by normal means. Our text- I books, our public schools, should teach the rising gen- leration to realize the fact, that the temporary advantage dned by such means is not only in every case out- weighed by the distress of a speedy reaction, but that the capacity for enjoyment itself is impaired by its repeated abuse, till only the most powerful stimulants can restore a share of that cheerfulness which the spontaneous action of the vital energies bestows on the children of Nature. "We have seen that the milder stimulants often form the stepping-stones to a passion for stronger poisons. A penchant for any kind of tonic drugs, nicotine, narcotic infusions, hasheesh, the milder opi- ates, etc., may thus initiate a stimulant habit with an unlimited capacity of development ; and there is no doubt that international traffic has relaxed the vigil- ance which helped our forefathers to guard their house- holds against the introduction of foreign poison-vices. Hence the curious fact that drunkenness is most preva- lent, not in the most ignorant or despotic countries (Russia, Austria, and Turkey), nor in southern Italy THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 33 and Spain, where alcoholic drinks of the most seduc- tive kind are cheapest, but in the most commercial countries, western France, Great Britain, and North America. Hence also the fallacy of the brewer's ar- gument, that the use of lager beer would prevent the dissemination of the opium habit. No stimulant vice has ever prevented the introduction of worse poisons. Among the indirect'causes of intemperance we must therefore include our mistaken toleration of the minor stimulant habits. The poison-vice has become a many-headed hydra, defying one-sided attacks, and it is no paradox to say that we could simplify our work of expurgation by making it more thorough. Polydipsia is a derangement of the digestive or- gans characterized by a chronic thirst, which forces its victims to swallow enormous quantities of stimulat- ing fluids. The biographer of Richard Porson, the great classic scholar, says that his poison-thirst was " so outrageous that he can not be considered a mere willful drunkard ; one must believe that he was driven into his excesses by some unknown disease of his con- stitution." ..." He would pour anything down his throat rather than endure the terrible torture of thirst. Ink, spirits of wine for the lamp, an embroca- tion, are among the horrible things he is reported to have swallowed in his extremity." Polydipsia is not always due to the direct or indirect (hereditary) influ- ence of the alcohol habit, and the origin of the dis- order was long considered doubtful ; but it has since been traced to a morbid condition of the kidneys, in- duced by the use of narcotic stimulants (tea, coffee, tobacco), but often also by gluttony. 34 THE POISON PROBLEM. Like certain poison plants, the stimulant habit flourishes best in a sickly soil. Whatever tends to un- dermine the stamina of the physical or moral consti- tution, helps to prepare the way for an inroad of intemperance, by weakening the resistance of the pro- tective instincts. Hence the notorious fact that gam- bling-dens and houses of ill-fame are rank hot-beds of the alcohol-vice. Asceticism has not yet ceased to be an indirect obstacle to the success of temperance reform. The children of Nature need no special holidays ; to them life itself is a festival of manifold sports. Hunting, fishing, and other pursuits of primitive nations become the pastimes of later ages. For the abnormal condi- tions of civilized life imply the necessity of providing special means of recreation, out-door sports, competi- tive gymnastics, etc., in order to satisfy the craving of an importunate instinct ; and too many social reform- ers have as yet failed to recognize the truth, that the suppression of that instinct avenges itself Try its per* version, by driving pleasure-seekers from the play- ground to the pot-house, as despotism has turned free- men into bandits and outlaws. " Every one who con- siders the world as it really exists," says Lecky, " must have convinced himself that in great towns, where multitudes of men of all classes and all characters are massed together, and where there are innumerable strangers, separated from all domestic ties and occu- pations, public amusements of an exciting order are absolutely necessary, and that to suppress them is sim- ply to plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest depths of vice." (Appendix II.) THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 35 " I am a great friend to public amusements," says Boswell's Johnson, " for they keep people from vice." A home missionary in the character of a promoter of harmless recreations would double the popularity of our tenets, and, by vindicating our people against the charge of joy-hating bigotry, deprive our opponents of their most effective weapon. The free reading-rooms and gymnasiums of the New York Young Men's Asso- ciations have done more to promote the cause of tem- perance than the man-hunts of Sir Hudibras and all his disciples. We must change our tactics. "While our anchorite allies have contrived to make virtue re- pulsive, our opponents have proved themselves con- summate masters of the art of masking the ugliness of vice ; they have strewn their path with roses, and left us the thorns. Yet I hope to show that we can beat them upon their own ground, for it is not difficult to make health more attractive than disease. But the most obstinate obstacle to a successful prop- agation of total abstinence principles is the drug fallacy, a delusion founded on precisely the same error which leads the dram-drinker to mistake a process of irritation for a process of invigoration. During the infancy of the healing art all medical theories were biased by the idea that sickness is an enemy whose attacks must be repulsed a main forte, by suppressing the symptoms with fire, sword, and poison not in the figurative but in the literal sense the keystone dogma of the primitive Sangrados having been the following heroic maxim : " What drugs won't cure, must be cured with iron " (the lancet) ; " if that fails, resort to fire." (Quod medicamenta non cur ant ferrum cur at , quod 36 THE POISON PROBLEM. non curatferram ignis curat.) But with the progress of the physiological sciences the conviction gradually gained ground that disease itself is a reconstructive process, and that the suppression of the symptoms re- tards the accomplishment of that reconstruction. And ever since that truth dawned upon the human mind the use of poison drugs has steadily decreased. A larger and larger number of intelligent physicians had begun to suspect that the true healing art consists in the removal of the cause, and that where diseases have been caused by unnatural habits, the reform of those habits is a better plan than the old counter-poison method ; when homoeopathy proved practically (though not theoretically) that medication can be entirely dis- pensed with. The true effect of the more virulent drugs (opium, tartar emetic, arsenic, etc.) was then studied from a physiological standpoint, and experi- ments proved what the medical philosopher Asclepia- des conjectured eighteen hundred years ago, namely, that if a drugged patient recovers, the true explanation is that his constitution was strong enough to overcome both the disease and the drug. Bichat, Schrodt, Ma- gendie, Alcott, R. T. Trail, Isaac Jennings, and Dio Lewis arrived at the conclusion that every disease is a protest of Nature against some violation of her laws, and that the suppression of the symptoms means to si- lence that protest instead of removing its cause ; so that we might as well try to extinguish a fire by silencing the fire-bells, or to cure the sleepiness of a weary child by pinching its eyelids in short, that drastic drugs, instead of " breaking up " a disease, merely interrupt it, and lessen the chance of a radical cure. THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 3T Are there reasons to suppose that alcohol, or any other poison, makes an exception from that general rule ? We must reject the idea in toto, and I hope to show that it is refuted : 1. By the testimony of our instincts. 2. By experience. 3. By the direct or indirect concessions of the ablest physiologists. Our instincts protest against medication. Against ,| ninety-nine of a hundred " remedial drugs " our sense of taste warns us as urgently as against rotten eggs, verdigris, or oil of vitriol. Shall we believe that Nature repudiates the means of salvation? or that our protective instincts forsake us in the hour of our sorest need in the hour of our struggle with a life- endangering disease? And the same instincts that protest against other poisons warn us against all kinda of alcoholic drugs. Is it an exception to that rule that the depraved taste of a drunkard may relish a glass of medicated wine, or a bottle of " Hostetter's Bitters" (rye brandy)? 'If it is certain beyond all limits of doubt that the health of the stoutest man is no safeguard against the bane of the wretched poison, shall we believe that he can encounter it with impu- nity when his vital strength is exhausted by disease ? Has the stimulus of alcoholic beverages any re- medial or prophylactic effect? How does alcohol counteract the contagion of climatic fevers ? In pre- cisely the same way as those fevers arrest, or rather suspend, the progress of other disorders. The vital process can not compromise with two diseases at the same time. A fit of gastric spasms interrupts a tooth- 38 THE POISON PROBLEM. ache. A toothache relieves a sick headache. The severest cold in the head temporarily yields to an attack of small-pox. Temporarily, I say, for the ap- parent relief is only a postponement of an interrupted process. During the progress of the alcohol fever (the feverish activity of the organism in its effort to rid itself of a life-endangering poison) Nature has to suspend her operations against a less dangerous foe. But each repetition of that factitious fever is followed by a reaction that suspends the prophylactic effect of the stimulus, and sooner or later the total exhaustion of the vital energies not only leaves the system at the mercy of the original foe, but far less able to re- sist his attacks. "There is but one appalling con- clusion to be deduced from hospital records, medical statistics, and the vast array of facts which bear upon the subject," says Prof. Youmans ; " it is, that among no class of society are the ravages of contagious dis- eases so wide- spread and deadly as among those who are addicted to the use of alcoholic beverages." Is alcohol a digestive tonic ? Can we cure an in- digestion by the most indigestible of all chemical products ! If a starving man drops by the roadside, we may get him on his legs by drenching him with a pailful of vitriol, but after rushing ahead for a few hundred steps he will drop again, more helpless than before, by just as much as the brutal stimulus has still further exhausted his little remaining strength. Thus alcohol excites, and eventually tenfold exhausts, the vigor of the digestive system. "We can not bully Nature. We can not silence her protests by a fresh provocation. Fevers can be cured by refrigeration ; THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 39 indigestions by fasting and exercise ; and, at any rate, the possible danger of a relapse is infinitely prefer- able to the sure evils of the poison-drug. A few repetitions of the stimulant process may initiate the alcohol- vice and sow the seeds of a life-long crop of woe and misery. A single dose of alcoholic tonics may revive the fatal passion of half-cured drunkards, and forfeit their hard-earned chance of recovery. That chance, and life itself, often depend on the hope of guarding the system against a relapse of the stimu- lant-fever, and I would as soon snatch a plank from a drowning man as that last hope from a drunkard. Alcohol lingers in our hospitals as slavery lingers in South America, as torture lingers in the courts of eastern Europe. Quacks prescribe it because it is the cheapest stimulant; routine doctors prescribe it be- cause its stimulating effect is more infallible than that of other poisons ; empirists prescribe it at the special request of their patients, or as a temporary prophy- lactic ; others because they find it in the ready-made formulas of their dispensatories. There is another reason which I might forbear mentioning, but I hold that a half-truth is a half-untruth, and I will name that other reason : Ignorant patients demand an im- mediate effect. They send for a doctor, and are to pay his bill ; they expect to get their money's worth in the form of a prompt and visible result. Instead of telling the ^m-patient that he must commit himself into the hands of Nature, that she will cure him in her own good time, by a process of her own, and that all art can do for him is to give that process the best possible chance, and prevent a willful interruption of 4:0 THE POISON PROBLEM. it instead of saying anything of the kind, Sangrado concludes to humor the popular prejudice and to pro- duce the desired prompt and visible effect. For that purpose alcohol is, indeed, the most reliable agent. It will spur the jaded system into a desperate effort to expel the intruder, though the strength expended in that effort should be ever so urgently needed for better purposes. The dose is administered ; the pa- tient can not doubt that a u change" of some kind or other has been effected ; the habitual drunkard per- haps feels it to be a (momentary) change for the bet- ter ; at all events, the doctor has done something, and proved that he can " control the disease." In some exceptional cases of that sort the influence of imagi- nation may help to cure a believing patient, or Nature may be strong enough to overcome the disease and the stimulant at one effort. And if a doctor can rec- oncile it with his conscience to risk such experiments, " how shall we prevent it ? As a first step in the right ? direction, we can refuse to swallow his prescription. Physicians have no right to experiment on the health of their patients. They have no right to expect that we shall stake our lives on the dogmas of the old stimulant theory till they have answered the objec- tions of the naturalistic school. Drastic drugs are not wholly useless. There are two or three forms of disease which have (thus far) not proved amenable to any non-medicinal cure, and can hardly be trusted to the healing power of Nature the lues venera, scabies, and prurigo because, as a French physiologist suggests, "the cause and the symptoms are here, for once, identical, the probable THE CAUSES OF INTEMPEKAtfCE. 41 proximate cause being the agency of microscopic parasites, which oppose to the action of the vital forces a life-energy of their own." Antidotes and certain anodynes will perhaps also hold their own till we find a way of producing their effects by mechanical means. But, with these rare exceptions, it is by far the safer as well as shorter way to avoid drugs, reform our habits, and not interrupt the course of Nature, for, properly speaking, " disease itself is a healing pro- cess" " It is not true," says Dr. Jennings, " that the human system, when disturbed and deranged in its natural operations, becomes suicidal in its action ; . . . such a view presents an anomaly in the universe of God's physical government. It is not in accordance with the known operations and manifestations of other natural laws" ("Medical Keform," p. 129). "The idea that the symptoms of disease must be sup- pressed," says Bichat, " has led to innumerable falla- cies and blunders." Dr. Benjamin Rush said in a public lecture : " I am here incessantly led to make an apology for the instability of the theories and practice of physic, and those physicians generally become the most eminent who have the soonest emancipated themselves from the tyranny of the schools of physic. Dissections daily convince us of our ignorance of disease, and cause us to blush at our prescriptions. "What mischief have we done under the belief of false facts and false theories ! We have assisted in multiplying diseases ; we have done more, we have increased their mor- tality. I will not pause to beg pardon of the faculty for acknowledging, in this public manner, the weak- 42 THE POISON PEOBLEM. ness of our profession. I am pursuing Truth, and am indifferent whither I am led, if she only is m j leader." " Our system of therapeutics," says Jules Yirey, " is so shaky (vacillant) that the soundness of the basis itself must be suspected." " The success of the homoeopathic practice has as- tonished many discerning minds," says Dr. Jennings. " It is unnecessary for my present purpose to give a particular account of the results of homoeopathy ; . . . what I now claim with respect to it is, that a wise and beneficent Providence is using it to expose a deep delusion. In the result of homoeopathic practice we have evidence in amount, and of a character sufficient, most incontestably to establish the fact that disease is a restorative process, a renovating operation, and that medicine has deceived us. The evidence is full and complete. It does not consist merely of a few isolated cases, whose recovery might be attributed to fortui- tous circumstances, but it is a chain of testimony forti- fied by every possible circumstance. All kinds and grades of disease have passed under the ordeal, and all classes and characters of persons have been con- cerned in the experiment as patients or witnesses ; . . . while the process of infinitesimally attenuating the drugs was carried to such a ridiculous extent that no one willy on sober reflection, attribute any portion of the cure to the medicine. I claim, then, that homoe- opathy may be regarded as a providential sealing of the fate of old medical views and practices " (" Medi- cal Keform," p. 247). Since physiology was first studied methodically, an overwhelming array of facts has, indeed, proved THE CAUSES OF INTEMPERANCE. 43 that the disorders of the human organism can be cured more easily without poison-drugs ; more easily in the very degree that would suggest the suspicion that our entire system of therapeutics is founded upon an er- roneous view of disease. The homceopathists cure | their patients with milk-sugar, the exponents of the movement-cure with gymnastics, the hydropathists with cold water, the disciples of Dr. Schrodt with ex- ercise and mountain-air, the primitive Christians with prayer ; Nature cures her children with rest and a par- tial suspension of the digestive process (the fasting cure, indicated instinctively by a loss of appetite). But all repudiate alcohol, and all can record swifter, more numerous, and more permanent cures than the disciples of the nostrum school. Considered in connection with the foregoing re- marks, these facts admit only of one conclusion, and, after giving the above-mentioned exception the bene- fit of a (temporary) doubt, we can assert with perfect confidence that drastic drugs have no remedial value, and that every drop of alcohol administered for me- dicinal purposes has not decreased but increased the weight of human misery. There is no doubt but that these views will awaken the anathemas of the poison- worshippers ; but it is equally certain that, before the end of this century, they will become truisms. "We should regard the drift of the main current rather than the incidental fluctuations of scientific theories ; and all the ripple of conflicting opinions can not conceal the progress of a strong tendency toward total abstinence from all viru- lent drugs. CHAPTEK III. PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF THE POISON-HABIT. " The stimulant- vice is the principal cause of human degeneration." Ealler. SCIENCE tells us that there is a general progres- sive tendency in Natura According to the opinion of some modern biologists, all plants and animals have been developed from lower and less perfect organ- isms, and still continue their upward progress. We may reject that view, or accept it with considerable modifications ; but one thing remains certain Nature does not go backward of her own accord. Wherever the harmony of creation has not been willfully disturbed, the trees are as tall as of yore, the fruits as sweet, and the flowers as fragrant. The eagle soars as high as ever ; the song-thrush has not forgotten her anthems, nor the swallow her swift flight; the ostrich still scorneth the horse and his rider; it still requires a Samson to rend a young lion. How, then, can it be explained that the noblest work of Nature makes a sad exception to that rule ? How is it that man alone is sinking in misery and disease, growing weaklier and sicklier from century to century, from generation to generation ? War has not dealt us those wounds ; famine and pestilence can not explain our " ailments PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 45 and pains, in form, variety, and degree beyond de- scription." The influence of all transient causes of evil is counteracted by the healing agencies of Na- ture. See the children of the wilderness, how soon they recover from hurts and wounds, how completely from the effects of protracted starvation, their off- spring as sound as their ancestors in Eden. No, the cause of our degeneracy must be a permanently active cause, and, with the assurance of a clear and perfect conviction, we can say, That restless enemy of human health and happiness is the poison-vice. Without the redeeming influence of Nature, the balm of sleep and the regenesis of every new birth, alcohol alone would have effected the destruction of the human race. During the gradual development of the vice, the adaptive faculties of the human sys- tem have somewhat modified its influence, but its real significance reveals itself when its flood-gates are opened upon an unprepared race. In Siberia, in Polynesia, and among the aborigines of our own con- tinent, the alcohol plague has raged with the destruct- iveness of the Black Death ; wigwams, villages, nay, entire districts, have been depopulated in the course of a single generation. Among the Caucasian na- tions, where the vice has gradually progressed from half-fermented must to brandy, its baneful effects are less sudden, but not less certain. From age to age I the form created in the image of God has decayed, | has shrunk like a building collapsing under the prog- ress of a devouring fire. Wherever intemperance has increased, manhood and strength have decreased. The Anaereons of antiquity indulged in wine only at 46 THE POISON PROBLEM. occasional festivals. The peasants of the Middle Ages were generally too poor to use intoxicating drinks of any kind. But by and by wages improved. Strong ale and brandy were added to the home-brewed bev- erages of the working-classes. Habitual stimulation, once the ruin of the idle aristocrat, became the curse of the masses. The poison marasmus became a pan- demic plague. The yeomen of ancient England would not recogonize their gin-drinking descendants ; a Norman knight could have crushed a Stockholm dandy with a single grip of his fist. Challenge the .. apostles of lager beer ; take them to Nuremberg, to ! the armory of the old City Hall ; let them pick their champion from the ranks of the bloated and sickly- I looking citizens ; defy them to find a single man able 5 to wield the weapons that were toys in the hands of the old burghers. Or the advocates of " good, cheap, country wine " take them to Spain, and let them see what the best wine has done for the manliest race on earth. The inhabitants of Castile, of Aragon, Ya- lencia, Barcelona, and Leon are the descendants of the old Yisigoths, a race of rude warriors who over- powered the disciplined legions of Rome as easily as the Romans would have quelled a rabble of African rebels. Gibbon describes their first encounter with the Roman armies ; how the imperial general invited the Gothic chieftains to a banquet, where he intended to assassinate their guards and attack their camps during the confusion, and how the Goths were saved by the intrepidity of their leaders : " At these words, Fritigern and his companions drew their swords, opened their passage through the unresisting crowd, PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 47 and, mounting their horses, hastily vanished from the eyes of the astonished Romans. The generals of the Goths were saluted by the fierce and joyful acclama- tions of the camp ; war was instantly resolved, the banners of the nation were displayed according to the custom of their ancestors, and the air resounded with the march-signals of the barbarian trumpet." No paint- er's magic could more vividly evoke the forms of that giant race, their chieftains making their way through a crowd' of shrinking cowards, the tumult of the camp, and the iron-fisted warriors receiving their leaders with exultant shouts ! And those men were the ancestors of the modern Spaniards lions shrunk into cats, eagles into mousing hawks ! It is idle soph- istry to ascribe that result to climatic influences. In a warmer climate than Spain, the abstemious Arabs, the Afghans, and the Moors, have preserved the vigor of their earliest ancestors. The soil that now pro- duces lazzaroni and musici was once trod by the con- querors of three continents. In the snow-bound wig- wams of the North American Indians a cold climate has not prevented the ravages of the alcohol plague. Poison has filled more graves than the sword, more than famine, and the plague, and all the hostile powers of Nature taken together. The poison-vice hsa shortened our average longevity by twenty years,* has turned athletes into cripples, giants into dwarfs. * Since the end of the seventeenth century i. e., since a time when medical delusions made every hospital a death-trap longevity has B-ightly increased, but, as compared with the first century of our chronological era, it has enormously decreased. Peasants outlive men 4:8 THE POISON PBOBLEM. Yet that result does not prove the vindictiveness of Nature, but her patience, the infinite patience that has prevented our utter self-destruction by mitigating the consequences of our suicidal follies. At night, while the drunkard sleeps his torpor sleep, the hand of our All-mother cools his fevered brow, the subtle alchemy of the organism allays the effects of the poison while the system performs at least a portion of its vital functions. In every child the influence of ancestral sins is modified by the tendency of redeem- ing instincts. If it were not for the restless activity of those remedial influences, fire-water alone would have caused more havoc than the Deluge. From a pessimistic point of view, the study of the physical effects of the poison-vice might almost justify the conjecture of the biologist Hoffmann. " Nature," says he, " has set limits to the over-increase of every species of animals. Insects prey upon smaller in- sects, minnows upon midges, trouts upon minnows, pikes upon trouts, the fish-otter upon pikes, and man himself upon the fish-otter. Man himself has no earthly rival, but Providence (die Vorsehung) has met that difficulty by making him a self-destructive animal ! " If that shocking idea were not at variance with of letters, and yet the records of the ancients show that more than two thirds of their poets, statesmen, and philosophers were octogena- rians. If the years of the patriarchs were solar years, their average longevity was two hundred and eighty years ; if they were seasons (of six months), at least one hundred and twenty years. The Bible years were certainly not months, for men who " saw their children and chil- dren's children " can not have died before their thirtieth year. PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 49 other facts, one might, indeed, admire the ingenious adaptation of means to ends ; for, if it were the in- tention of God to limit our prosperity and afflict ns with every possible evil short of absolute annihila- tion, he could certainly not have chosen a more effi- cient agent than alcohol. Alcohol, the rectified product of the vinous fer- mentation (i. e., decomposition) of various saccharine fluids, and included by chemists among the narcotic poisons, exercises a metamorphosic effect on every organ of the human body ; and no fact in physiology is more incontestably established than that all its ap- preciable effects are deleterious ones. The advocates of alcohol base their claims upon vague theories. The opponents of alcohol base their claims upon obvious facts. It has been asserted that alcohol protects the system against cold, but the exponents of that theory have failed to show how the constituent elements of alcohol can take the place of the natural heat-pro- ducers, the non-nitrogenous foods. They have also failed to explain a fact established by the unanimous testimony of polar travelers, namely, that a low tem- perature can be longer and more easily endured by total abstainers than by those who indulge in any kind of alcoholic drinks. (Appendix III.) Alcohol has been called a "negative food," be- cause it retards the progress of the organic changes ; but it has been demonstrated that that retardation is in every case an abnormal and morbid process, and that its results can not benefit the system in any ap- preciable way, while its deleterious effects are seen in the fatty degeneration of the tissues, the impoverished 5 50 THE POISON PKOBLEM. condition of the blood, and many other symptoms characterizing the influence of insufficient nutrition. Alcohol has been called a positive food, because, for- sooth, it is derived (by a process of decomposition) from grain, fruits, and other nutritive substances. We might as well call mildew a nutritive substance, because it is formed by the decay of wholesome food. " There is no more evidence," says Dr. Parker, " of alcohol being in any way utilized in the body, than there is in regard to ether or chloroform. If alcohol is to be still designated as food, we must extend the meaning of that term so as to make it comprehend not only chloroform, but all medicines and poisons in fact, everything which can be swallowed and ab- sorbed, however foreign it may be to the normal con- dition of the body, and however injurious to its func- tions. On the other hand, from no definition that can be framed of a poison which should include those more powerful anaesthetic agents whose poison- ous character has been unfortunately too clearly mani- fested in a great number of instances can alcohol be fairly shut out." The antiseptic influence of alcohol was long sup- posed to constitute a safeguard against malarial dis- eases, but it has been found that the prophylactic effect of distilled liquors is confined to the period of actual stimulation (the alcohol fever), and that in the long run abstinence is from eight to ten times more prophylactic than dram-drinking. Alcohol has been mistaken for an invigorating tonic; but we have seen that the supposed process of invigoration is a process of stimulation, or rather PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 51 of irritation, and that we might as well try to "in- vigorate" a weary traveler by drenching him with aqua fartis. (Appendix IV.) On the other hand, it has been proved by ocular demonstration that alcoholic liquids, applied to the living tissue, induce redness and inflammation, and cover the mucous lining of the stomach with ulcer- ous patches; that they change the structure of the liver, stud it with tubercles, and disqualify it for its proper functions, though by obstructing its vascular ducts they often swell it to twice, and sometimes to five times, its natural size. The weight of a healthy liver varies from five to eight pounds ; and Dr. You- mans mentions the post-mortem examination of an English drunkard whose liver was found to weigh fifty pounds, and adds that, in spite of this enormous enlargement of the bile-secreting organ, the man died from a deficiency of bile. The records of the Paris- ian charity hospitals have established the fact, that the moderate use of alcoholic drinks during a period of five years is sufficient to permeate the substance of the liver with fatty infiltrations, and that the liver of old drunkards undergoes changes which make it practically a lump of inert matter, a mass of com- pacted tubercles and scirrhous ulcers. Even in the advanced stages of the disorder, a large dose of con- centrated alcohol rouses the diseased organ into a sort of feverish activity, which, however, soon subsides into a deeper and more incurable torpor. Hence the temporary efficacy and ultimate useless- ness (to say the least) of alcoholic "liver regula- tors." 52 THE POISON PROBLEM. It lias also been proved that alcohol inflames the brain, obstructs the kidneys, impoverishes the blood, and impairs the functional vigor of the respiratory organs. The infallible necessity of all these results can be more fully realized by a clear comprehension of the proximate causes, which may be summed up in a few words : "While the organism has to waste its strength on the elimination of the poison, it must neglect its normal functions, or perform them in a hasty, per- functory way. Let me illustrate the matter by an apologue. A family of poor tenants occupy a cottage at the edge of the woods. They are honest, hard- working people, trying their best to live within their means, but at a certain hour they are every day at- tacked by a bear. Before the good man can mend his jacket, before the good wife has cooked her din- ner, before the boys have finished their spelling-lesson, they have to rally and fight that brute. Sometimes the bear comes twice a day. They generally man- age to hustle him out of the premises, but when they return to their cottage the father's jacket is torn into shreds, the dinner is burned, and in the excitement of the row the boys have forgotten their lesson. Their clothes are torn, their hands and faces bear the marks of the scrimmage, the whole household is in a state of the wildest disorder. The poor people go to work and try to repair the mischief the best way they can, but before they have finished the job the bear comes back, and another rumpus turns the house upside down. No wonder that things go from bad to worse, no wonder the tenants can not pay their rent ; but a PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 53 very considerable wonder that the landlord does not relieve them by killing that bear. The manliest races of the present world are prob- ably the Lesghian and Daghestan mountaineers, who inhabit the southern highlands of the Caucasus, and who defied the power of the Russian Empire for sixty-five years. From 1792 to 1858, army after army of schnapps-drinking Muscovites attacked them from the north, east, and west, and were hurled back like dogs from the lair of a lion, x&& fifteen hundred thousand Russian soldiers perished in the Caucasian defiles before the Russian eagles supplanted the cres- cent of Daghestan : for the heroic highlanders are Mohammedans, and toted abstainers from intoxicat- ing drinks. The Ossetes, who inhabit the foot-hills of the northern range, are addicted to the use ofstibo- vits (peach brandy) and other stimulants, and their bloated faces present a striking contrast to the clean- cut features of the tribes who have been chosen as the representatives of the white race. They are as stubborn as their southern neighbors, but not as enter- prising; as self-sacrificing in the defence of their country, but not as self-reliant. In spite of their healthy climate they are cachectic and rather dull- witted ; alcohol has stunted their stamina as well as their stature. But there are other forms of physical degenera- tion which can with certainty be ascribed to the influ- ence of the secondary stimulants, tobacco, tea, coffee, and pungent spices. Tobacco makes the Turks indo- lent, tea and coffee make us nervous and dyspeptic ; and the worst is, that those minor vices pave the way 54 THE POISON PROBLEM. to ruin ; a constitution enfeebled by theme poison is less able to resist the influence of fusel poison. It is a great mistake to suppose that abstinence from con- centrated alcoholic liquors could atone for the habit- ual use of other stimulants. The vices of our ances- tors were gross, but one-sided ; ours are more manifold, and in their effects more comprehensive. In France many so-called temperate drinkers indulge in light wine, absinthe, tea, coffee, and chloral, and are weak- lier and sicklier than the Hungarian dram-drinkers who confine themselves to plum brandy, for the sys- tem of the miscellaneous poison-monger has to defend itself against five enemies, and, as it were, sustain the wounds of five different weapons. The mediaeval knights and many Grecian and Roman epicureans could drink a quantity of wine that would kill a mod- ern toper ; but they confined themselves to that one stimulant, and showed sense enough to keep it from their boys, who had a chance to fortify their consti- tutions with gymnastics before they endangered them with alcohol, and not rarely thus fortified their men- tal constitutions to a degree that made them tempta- tion-proof. Pythagoras and Mohammed interdicted wine, and that statute did not interfere with the propa- gation of their doctrines, for voluntary abstainers were by no means rare before the introduction of second- ary stimulants. "We fuddle our schoolboys with coffee and cider, and it is a curious and very frequent conse- quence of that early development of the stimulant- habit that its victim forgets the happiness of his child- hood, and accepts daily headaches and chronic night- mares as some of the "ills that flesh is heir to." PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 55 Rousseau believed that a man would be safe against the poison-vice if he could reach his twentieth year without contracting the habit, because in the mean time observation would have taught him the effects of intemperance. But his safety would be guaran- teed by another circumstance. He would know what health means, and no deference to established customs would tempt him to exchange freedom for chains. But a still greater mistake is the idea that drunk- enness could be abated by the introduction of milder alcoholic drinks. "We can not fight rum with lager beer. All poison-habits are progressive, and we have seen that the beer-vice is always apt to eventuate in a brandy-vice, or else to equalize the difference by a progressive enlargement of the dose. Common brandy contains fifty per cent of alcohol, lager beer about ten ; so, if A drinks one glass of brandy and B five glasses of beer, they have outraged their sys- tems by the same amount of poison, and will incur the same penalty. Total abstinence is the safe plan, nay, the only safe plan, for poisons can not be reduced to a harmless dose. By diminishing the quantities of the stimulant we certainly diminish its power for mis- chief, but as long as the dose is large enough to pro- duce any appreciable effect, that effect is a deleteri- ous one. (Appendix Y.) Various diseases, and that artificial disorder called intoxication, react on certain faculties of the mind (by affecting their corresponding cerebral organ) as regu- larly as on the liver, or any other part of the human organism. Consumption stimulates the love of life : a self-deluding hope of recovery characterizes the ad- 56 THE POISON PEOBLEM. vanced stage of the disease as invariably as the hectic flush that simulates the color of health. Hasheesh excites combativeness. Alcohol first excites and gradually impairs self-reliance, and thus undermines the basis of truthfulness, of private and social enter- prise, of manly courage and generosity. Moral cow- ardice, the chief reproach of our generation, has more to do with the tyranny of the poison-vice than with the despotism of social prejudices. If we should define the chief contrasts in the moral characteristics of our latter-day generations and that of by-gone ages, we could not help includ- ing the deficiency in moral courage, which, like many other moral tendencies, has a purely physical basis. Consumption can turn a taciturn athlete into a queru- lous pedant ; climatic fevers break the steadiest habits of industry ; gluttony begets cynicism and mental in- dolence ; and just as certainly alcohol has turned mill- ions of freemen, descendants of the manliest races of I antiquity, into flunkeys and prevaricating sneaks. I Our ancestors were victims of gross superstitions, but i they shamed their posterity by a loyal devotion to [ their convictions ; by a readiness to sacrifice freedom [ and fortune in the service of what truth their means ! of inquiry had enabled them to recognize. Our so- called tolerance springs often from indifference. Our easy-going, crime-condoning philanthropy is too often something worse than indifference; our aversion to moral and dogmatic controversies is founded chiefly on a preference of non-committal secretiveness or sham conformity. Our nervous dread of "originality " and "eccentricity" is at bottom a dread of mental PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 57 athletics, a timid connivance at half-truth, untruth, and injustice for the sake of " peace." Statistics have proved that the prevalence of idiocy is proportioned to the prevalence of intem- perance. Before the Parliament Committee on Ha- bitual Intemperance, Dr. Charles Anstie testified that "the tendency to drink is a disease of the brain which is inherited. When drinking has been strong in both parents, I think it is a physical certainty that it will be traced in the children. I have no doubt that many persons who were fond of their bottle though never drunk in the old port- wine drinking period, have transmitted very unstable nervous sys- tems to their children." Eefore the same committee, Dr. E. R. Mitchell stated that " the children of habitual drunkards are in larger proportion idiotic than other children, and in larger proportion themselves habitual drunkards ; they are also in a great proportion liable to the ordi- nary forms of acquired insanity- i. e., the insanity coming on in later life." Prof. Morel, in his " Degeneration of the Human Species" (Des degenerescences de Vespece humaine), mentions "the abuse of alcoholic stimulants, and of certain narcotics, under the influence of which there have been produced such disorders in the functions of the nervous system that, in the results, as we have demonstrated, are seen the true symptoms of degen- eration of the present age, whether induced by the direct influence of the poisonous agent, or by the transmission of hereditary dispositions from parent to child." 58 THE POISON PKOBLEM. " Another potent agency in vitiating the quality of the brain," says Dr. Eay, in his work on " Mental Hygiene," " is habitual intemperance, and the effect is witnessed far oftener in the offspring than in the drunkard himself. His habits may induce an attack of insanity where the predisposition exists, but he generally escapes with nothing worse than the loss of some of his natural vigor and hardihood of mind. In the offspring, however, on whom the consequences of the parental vice may be visited to the third, if not the fourth, generation, the cerebral disorder may take the form of intemperance, of idiocy or insanity, of vicious habits, of impulse to crime, or some minor mental obliquities." Dr. S. G. Howe (" Report on Idiocy," Massachu- setts Legislature, Doc. No. 51) states that " out of three hundred and fifty-nine idiots, the condition of whose progenitors was ascertained, ninety-nine were the chil- dren of drunkards. But this does not tell the whole story, by any means. By drunkard is meant a person known as a habitual and incurable sot. By pretty careful inquiry as to the number of idiots of the lowest classes whose parents were known to be temperate persons, it is found that not one quarter can be so con- sidered. Dr. Carpenter, in a contribution to the " Contem- porary Review" for January, 1873, says: "We have a far larger experience of the results of habitual alco- holic excesses than we have in regard to any other nervine stimulant ; and all such experience points de- cidedly to hereditary transmission of that acquired perversion of the normal nutrition of the nervous PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 59 system which it has induced. That this manifests it- self sometimes in a congenital idiocy, sometimes in a predisposition to insanity which requires but a very slight exciting cause to develop it, and sometimes in a strong craving for alcoholic drinks, which the un- happy victim strives in vain to resist, is the concur- rent testimony of all who have directed their atten- tion to the inquiry." It is true, though, that the manifestation of that morbid instinct always requires an external provoca- tive. Naturally, every child, of whatever parentage, is endowed with a protective instinct begetting a dis- tinct aversion to noxious substances, and protesting against the nauseous taste of alcohol as strongly as against the bitterness of strychnine or the acridity of verdigris. The reformed drunkard can reacquire that instinct, and, after ten years of abstinence, may come to loathe the smell of the liquor-shop. But the taste of that liquor is very apt to rekindle the health- destroying fire of his passion ; and, in a similar way, a few glasses of rum forced upon the reluctant child of an habitual toper may awaken a dormant propen- sity of which the victim himself perhaps did not sus- pect the existence. The children of drunkards are characterized by a sort of chronic despondency, some* times taking the form of suicidal reveries ; and that despondence the barrier of instinct once removed is very apt to seek relief in artificial stimulants. Dr. Bock's observation that the sons of intemperate par- ents are frequently given to sexual excesses, admits, perhaps, of the same explanation. Dr. Norman Kerr, in an address read before the 60 THE POISON PROBLEM. International Congress at Brussels (August, 1880), mentions the case of u a gentleman of position, sixty- four years old, who is an habitual drunkard. One of his sisters (unmarried) is an imbecile through drink- ing, and has often tried to commit suicide when drunk, by hanging, by poison, by jumping from a window. Her insanity has so suicidal a tendency that she can not be left for a moment alone. She will do anything for drink ; will beg, borrow, steal, pawn everything she can lay her hands on. Another sister (married) is also a habitual drunkard, who has fits of ungovernable fury when in drink, and, being dangerous to herself and others, is under restraint. Thus, all the family are dipsomaniacs. The fatal legacy in his case was from both parents. The father shot himself while laboring under alcoholic mania, and the mother was an inveterate drunkard. The grandfather was also a confirmed drunkard." "There is no single habit in this country," says Sir Henry Thompson, " which so much tends to de- teriorate the qualities of the race, and so much dis- qualifies it for endurance in that competition which, in the nature of things, must exist, and in which struggle the prize of superiority must fall to the best and the strongest." Dr. Kathan Allen, in a memorial read before the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, calls attention to many striking proofs that the most " prolific cause of human degeneration is the common habit of taking alcohol into the system, usually as the basis of spirits, wine, or beer. The effects of alcohol upon the senses, and even upon the bodily functions, vary according PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 61 to the medium in which it is conveyed ; but, the basis being the same in all, the constitutional effects are about the same. It is well known, however, that al- cohol acts unequally upon man's nature ; that it stimu- lates the lower propensities and weakens the higher faculties." ... "If this process is often repeated, the lower propensities are strengthened until, by and by, they come to act automatically, while the restrain- ing power, or the will, weakened by disuse, are prac- tically nullified. The man is no longer under control of his voluntary powers, but has come under the do- minion of automatic functions which are almost as much beyond his control as the beating of his heart. And the stimulus of the brain by alcoholized blood, in ever so small doses, must produce the same kind of results, only in a lesser degree." ..." The facts and considerations just named make clear the sad truth, that the children of parents whose systems were tainted by alcoholic poison do start in life under great disadvantages. "While they inherit strong animal propensities and morbid appetites, constantly craving indulgence, they have weak restraining faculties. Their temptation is greater and their power of re- sistance is less than in children of purer stock. They are, therefore, more likely to fall into the pauper or criminal class." The brain-stimulating effect of alcohol decreases with every repetition of the dose, and Dr. Theodore Chambers warns us that "however long the evil re- sults of such habitual overtasking may be postponed, they are sure to manifest themselves at last in thai general breakdown which is the necessary sequence 62 THE POISON PROBLEM. of a long-contimwd excess of expenditure over in- come" Besides, even the temporary results would not jus- tify that expenditure. "Brain-workers should con- fine themselves to metaphysical tonics" says Dr. Bou- chardat. " Alcoholic drinks, at any rate, are unavail- able for that purpose. Even after a single glass of champagne I have found that the slight mental exalta- tion is accompanied by a slight obfuscation. The mind soars, but it soars into the clouds." " ""Wine stirs the brain," says the poet Chamisso, "but not its higher faculties as much as the sediments that muddle it." The Arabs have a tradition that soon after the flood, when Nunus (the Arabian Noah) had resumed his agricultural pursuits, a Ghin, or spirit, appeared to him and taught him the art of manufacturing wine from grape-juice. " This beverage, O son of an earth- ly father," said the Ghin, " is a liquid of peculiar prop- erties. The first bumperful will make you as tame as a sheep. If you repeat the experiment you will be- come as fierce as a rampant lion. After the third dose you will roll in the mud like a hog." If the Ghin had been a spirit of epigrammatic abilities he might have summarized his remarks: "The effects of this liquid, O Nunus, vary, of course, with the amount of the dose ; but if you drink it, you will infallibly make a beast of yourself." In the long list of artificial stimulants, with all their modifications and compounds, there is no such thing as a harmless tonic. Alcohol especially is, in all its disguises, the most implacable enemy of the PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS. 63 human organism. In large quantities it is a lethal poison ; in smaller doses its effects are less deadly, but not less certainly injurious, and the advocates of mod- erate drinking might as well recommend moderate perjury. Our lager-beer enthusiasts might just as well advise us to introduce a milder brand of rattle- snakes. The alcohol-habit, in all its forms and in every stage of its development, is a degrading vice. CHAPTER IY. THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. " Shall we sow tares and pray for bread ? " Abd el Wakab. IF we consider the manifold afflictions which in the after years of so many millions of our fellow-men outweigh the happiness of childhood, we can hardly wonder that several great thinkers have expressed a serious doubt if earthly existence is on the whole a blessing. Yet, for those who hold that the progress of science and education will ultimately remove that doubt, it is a consoling reflection that the greatest of all earthly evils are avoidable ones. The earthquake of Lisbon killed sixty thousand persons who could not possibly have foreseen their fate. In 1282 an ir- ruption of the Zuyder Sea overwhelmed sixty-five towns whose inhabitants had not five minutes' time to effect their escape. But what are such calamities compared with the havoc of wanton wars, or the rav- ages of consumption and other diseases that are the direct consequences of outrageous sins against the physical laws of God ? The cruelty of man to man causes more misery than the rage of wild beasts and all the hostile elements of Nature ; but the heaviest of THE COST OF INTEMPEKANCE. 65 all evils in onr great burden of self-inflicted woe is undoubtedly the curse of the poison-vice. The alco- hol-habit is a concentration of all scourges. In the poor island of Ireland alone one hundred and forty million bushels of bread-corn and potatoes are yearly sent to the distillery. The shipment of the grain, its conversion into a health-destroying drug, the distribu- tion and sale of the poison, are carried on under the protection of a so-called civilized government. Waste is not an adequate word for that monstrous folly. If the grain farmers of Laputa should organize an expe- dition to the sea-coast, and, under the auspices of the legal authorities, equip an apparatus for flinging a hundred million sacks of grain into the ocean, the contents of those sacks would be lost, and there would be an end of it : the sea would swallow the cargo. The distillery swallows the grain, but disgorges it in the form of a liquid fire, that spreads its flames over the land and scorches the bodies and souls of men till the smoke of the torment arises from a million home- steads. "We might marvel at the extravagance of the Laputans, but what should we say if the priests of a pastoral nation were to slaughter thousands of herds on the altar of a national idol, and, in conformity with an established custom, let the carcasses rot in the open fields till the progress of putrefaction filled the land with horror and pestilence ; if, moreover, among the crowd o'f victims we should recognize the milch cows of thousands of poor families whose children were wan with hunger, and if, furthermore, the intelligent rulers of that nation should supervise the ceremonies of the sacrifice, distribute the carcasses, and calmly 66 THE POISON PROBLEM. collect statistics to ascertain the percentage of the re- sultant mortality ? The loss of life caused by the ravages of the alcohol-plague equals the result of a perennial war. The most belligerent nation of modern times, the Russians, with the perpetual skirmishes on their east- ern frontier, and their periodical campaigns against their southern neighbors, lose in battle a yearly aver- age of 7,000 men. The average longevity of the Caucasian nations is nearly thirty-eight years; of their picked men about forty-five years. The average age of a soldier is nowadays about twenty-five years. The death of 7,000 soldiers represents, therefore, a na- tional loss of 7,000 times the difference between twenty-five and forty-five years, i. e., a total waste of 140,000 years. Medical statistics show that in the United States alone the direct consequences of in- toxication cost every year the lives of 6,000 per- sons, most of them reckless young drunkards, who thus anticipate the natural term of their lives by about twenty years. But at the very least, two per cent of our population is addicted to the constant use of some form of alcoholic liquors. Prof. Neeson, of the Brit- ish General Life Insurance Company, estimates that rum-drinkers shorten their lives by seven years, beer- drinkers by five and one half, and " mixed drinkers " by nine and one half years. For the city of London, Sir H. Thompson computes that drinkers of all classes shorten their lives by six years. But let us be quite sure to keep within the limits of facts applying to all conditions of life, and assume a minimum of four years. A total of 4,120,000 years for the population THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 67 of the United States is therefore a moderate estimate of the annual life- waste by the consequences of the poison-vice 1 In other words, in a country of by no means exceptionally hard drinkers, alcohol destroys yearly thirty times as much life as the warfare of the most warlike nation on earth. The first year of the war for the preservation of the Union and the sup- pression of slavery cost us 82,000 lives. When the death-list had reached a total of 100,000, the clamors for peace became so importunate that the representa- tives of our nation were several times on the point of abandoning the cause of the most righteous war ever waged. Yet the far larger life-waste on the altar of the Poison-Moloch continues year after year, and for a small bribe not a few of our prominent politicians seem willing to perpetuate that curse to the end of time. Among all the nations of the Christian world, with the only exception- of the Syrian Maronites, the poison-vice has shortened the average longevity of the working classes by at least five years. Political economists have calculated the consequent loss of pro- ductive force, but there is another consideration which is too often overlooked. The progress of degenera- tion has reduced our life-term so far below the nor- mal average that the highest purposes of individual existence are generally defeated. Our lives are most- ly half -told tales. Our season ends before the harvest time ; before the laborer's task is half done he is overtaken by the night, when no man can work. The secret of longevity would, indeed, solve the chief ricU dle of existence, for the children of toil could then hope to reach the goal of the visible compensation 68 THE POISON PROBLEM. which, on earth at least, is now reserved for the ex- ceptional favorites of fortune. That hope is dimin- ished by everything that tends still further to reduce our shortened span of life, and, besides increasing the burdens of existence, the poison-vice therefore di- rectly decreases the possibility of its rewards. Yet that result is almost insured by the loss of health which all experienced physiologists admit to be the inevitable consequence of the stimulant-habit. Every known disease of the human system is aggra- vated by intemperance. The morbid diathesis, as physicians call a predisposition to organic disorders, finds an ally in alcohol that enables it to defy the ex- purgative efforts of Nature. A consumptive toper will fail to derive any benefit from a change of cli- mate. A dram-drinking dyspeptic can not be cured by out-door exercise. The influence of alcoholic tonics tends to aggravate nervous disorders into men- tal derangements. But even the soundest constitu- tion is not proof against the bane of that influence. Before the end of the first year habitual drinkers lose that spontaneous gayety which constitutes the happi- ness of perfect health as well as of childhood. The system becomes dependent upon the treacherous aid of artificial stimulants, and the lack of vital vigor soon begins to tell upon every part of the organism. Alcohol counteracts the benefit of all the hygienic ad- vantages of climate and habit, and it is doubtful if the effect of its continued influence could be equaled by the intentional introduction of contagious diseases. A medical expert might collect the most incurable patients in the leper slums of Shanghai, in the laza- THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 69 rettos of Naples, and the fever hospitals of Yera Cruz, and distribute them in the cities of another country ; yet, a year after the dissemination of such diseases, the hygienic condition of a temperate nation would be better than that of a drunkard nation after a year of the strictest quarantine protection. In the sanitary history of the Caucasian nations alcohol has proved a worse plague than the Black Death. The waste of land and the waste of labor must be considered together, in order to comprehend the total amount of the loss which the fourteen most civil- ized nations inflict on themselves by the unspeakable folly of devoting from twenty to twenty-five per cent of their fertile area to the production of stimulating poisons. If the land thus abused were simply neg- lected, if it were abandoned to the weeds and tares, the laborers who now cultivate it in the interest of hell might employ their time in assisting their friends, and help them to cultivate better or larger crops on the soil of the adjoining lands. If they should prefer to emigrate, their abandoned fields might be culti- vated by their neighbors. Even children in the in- tervals of their play might plant cherry-stones, and help the soil to contribute to the welfare of the com- munity. As it is, it contributes only to the develop- ment of diseases, vices, and crimes. The productions of the land, the toil of the husbandmen, are not only utterly lost, but become a curse to the population of the country. Starving Ireland devotes a third of her arable lands to the production of distillery crops. Spain begs with one hand, and with the other flings two fifths of her produce to the poison-vender. The 70 THE POISOX PROBLEM. statistics of the last census show that distilleries de- vour every year 34,300,000 acres of our total farm pro- duce ; breweries, 9,600,000 ; wine-cellars, cider-mills (not to mention tobacco factories), about 5,000,000 more! The old settlers of western Arkansas still remem- ber the excitement caused by occasional raids of preda- tory Indians, who used to cross the Texas border and devastate the farms of the frontiersmen. Near Arka- delphia they once burned three hundred acres of ripe corn, and half a dozen counties joined in the pursuit of the marauders. Imagine the blazing indignation, the mass meetings, the general uprising of an out- raged people, if the Mormons should take it in their heads to burn three million acres of our grain crop. Yet the distillers not only burn up more than the ten- fold amount, but fan the flames to kindle a soul-and- body-consuming conflagration, and shriek about in- fringements of their privileges if a bold hand here and there succeeds in snatching a brand from the burning. The waste of remedial expenditure must be con- sidered under a separate head, for, besides squander- ing their own resources, the votaries of the poison- fiend waste those of their neighbors, who have to de- vise means for mitigating the resulting mischief. The care of drunkards, i. e., of persons picked up in the streets in a state of life-endangering intoxication, costs our hospitals a yearly sum of $5,000,000. A list of the various diseases which can be traced to the direct or indirect influence of intemperance would re- quire the enumeration of nearly all known disorders THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 71 of the human organism ; but, though drunkards be- come a burden to their families oftener than to the charitable institutions of the community, it has been ascertained that they constitute thirty per cent of the inmates of such establishments as county infirmaries, charity hospitals, almshouses, poor-houses, and lunatic asylums. Prisons proper that is, institutions for the cure of moral disorders are filled with patients where derelictions in forty out of a hundred cases have been committed either under the immediate influence of intoxicating liquors, or as a consequence of such di- rect results of intemperance as loss of property, loss of credit, loss of moral or mental integrity. In 1870 the prisons of the United States cost the nation a yearly sum of $87,000,000. By this time their cost probably amounts to a full $100,000,000. The mag- istrates of our city courts have to waste half their time on the trial of drunkards. On the blackboards of our metropolitan station-houses, " D. D. C." after the name of a prisoner means So-and-So locked up for drunkenness and disorderly conduct ; they have to abbreviate the specification of that offence to save a little space for other memoranda. If the indirect consequences of the poison - vice could be traced through all their ramifications, it would be found that the suppression of that vice would relieve our cities from a burden equivalent to a full half of all their municipal taxes. The moral loss is not confined to the direct influ- ence of the brutalizing poison. The liquor traffic defiles all participants of a transaction which involves a sin against Nature, a crime against society and pos- 72 THE POISON PROBLEM. terity, and an outrage against the moral instincts of the veriest savage, for more than five thousand years ago the lawgivers of the Bactrian nomads recorded their protest against the vice of intoxication. A drunkard who flees from the prohibitory laws of his native place can not escape the voice of an inner monitor. The liquor-dealer who points to his license is not the less conscious that he is an enemy of man- kind, and that his servants eat the wages of a soul- and-body-corrupting vice. The lawgiver who can be bribed to connive at that vice not only sins against the laws of political economy, but against Nature and the first principles of natural ethics, and forfeits his claim to the respect of the community. Faith in the sanctity of the law, in the wisdom and integrity of the legislator, is the very corner-stone of public morals ; but that faith is incompatible with a system of legalized crime, and the lawgiver who consents to sanction the outrage of the poison-traffic under- mines the basis of his authority, and thereby the authority of the law itself. It is wholly certain that larceny and perjury combined do not damage the State the hundredth part as much as the curse of the poison-vice ; yet what should we think of the moral status of a legislative assembly devising a plan to in- crease the national revenues by granting license to pickpockets and professional false witnesses ? Imag- ine a Titus Gates offering his services on the public streets, and a chief justice compelling the courts to recognize the legality of his business, and protect him in the enjoyment of its emoluments ! Imagine Jack Sheppard filching the weekly wages of a half-witted THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 73 working man, and flaunting a government license if the wife of his victim should demand the restitution of the plunder ! The absurdity of such an arrange- ment might seem too glaring to imagine its possi- bility. Yet, for the same reason, posterity may refuse to credit the records of our liquor system ; for, trans- lated into plain speech, the contract between the State and the rum-vender means even this : " On condition of receiving a share in the yearly profits of your busi- ness, I herewith grant you the right to poison your fellow-citizens." The loss of wealth, which some of the foregoing considerations will enable us to estimate, has increased with the progress of our national development in a way which in many respects has made that progress a curse instead of a blessing. Thirty-five years ago our brethren in Maine had a hard fight against the cham- pions of the liquor traffic, but they had to deal with whisky alone. Since then our foreign immigrants have introduced ale, lager beer, and French high wines, and threaten to introduce absinthe and opium. The poison- vice has assumed the magnitude of a pan- demic plague. According to the statistics of the Treasury Department, the alcohol drinkers of the United States spent during the last ten years a yearly average of $3TO,000,000 for whisky, $58,000,000 for other distilled liquors, $56,000,000 for wine, and $140,000,000 for ale and beer. Together, $624,000,- 000 a year. Under the head of liquors evading the revenue tax, Prof. "W. Hoyle, of Manchester, adds twenty per cent for Great Britain, Commissioner Halliday fifteen per cent for the United States, and 7 74 THE POISON PROBLEM. Dr. Bowditch eighteen per cent for the State of Mas- sachusetts alone. Let us assume the minimum of fifteen per cent. The total direct cost of the poison- vice (without including tobacco and other narcotic stimulants) is therefore $705,000,000 a year. The in- direct cost eludes computation, except under the three following heads : 1. The loss of productive capacity, as revealed in the difference between the yearly earn- ings of a manufacturing community under the pro- tection of prohibitory laws or under the influence of the license system. 2. The inebriate percentage of patients in our public hospitals, and of convicts in our prisons. 3. The loss sustained by the employers of agents, trustees, clerks, etc., addicted 'to the use of intoxicating liquors. The aggregate of these indirect losses we will assume to be only $350,000,000 a year, though several political economists compute it as equal to ike direct cost. Our estimate does not include the amount of rum-begotten distress relieved by private charity, nor the rum percentage of undetected crime, nor yet the wholly incalculable value of the benefac- tions, reforms, and improvements ^evented by the use of intoxicating liquors among the upper classes. We can therefore be quite sure of understating the truth, if we estimate the aggregate cost of the poison- vice at $1,055,000,000 a year a yearly sum equivalent to the cost value of all our public Hbraries 7 our church prop- erty, school property, steamboats, bridges, and tele- graphs taken together. (Appendix YI.) Prohibition would put a stop to one half of that prodigious waste. We will not delude ourselves with the hope that the deep-rooted habit of the stimulant- THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 75 vice could at once be wholly eradicated by any legis- lative measures whatever. For years to come twenty per cent of the aggregate would undoubtedly be de- voured by liquor-venders finding means to elude the vigilance of the law. Fifteen per cent would be spent on other vices. Fifteen per cent more would probably be wasted for frivolous purposes innocent, as compared with the crime of the poison-traffic, but still, on the whole, amounting to a loss of national re- sources. The waste of the remaining fifty per cent could be prevented by prohibition. In ten years the saving of that sum and its application to useful purposes would transform the moral and physical condition of our country. With $5,000,000,000 we could construct ten bridges over every one of our hundred largest rivers. We could build an interna- tional railroad of a gauge that would enable the deni- zens of snow-bound New England to reach the tropics in twenty -four hours. We could realize Prof. Lexow's project of providing every large city with a system of free municipal railways connecting the cen- ters of commerce with the suburban homes of the workingmen. We could make those suburbs attract- ive enough to drain the population of the slums. We could counteract the temptations of the grop-shops by providing the poor with healthier means of recrea- tion ; city parks with free baths, competitive gymnas- tics and zoological attractions for the summer season, and reading-rooms with picture galleries and musical entertainments for the long winter evenings. We could employ home missionaries enough for a direct appeal to every fallen or tempted soul in the country. 76 THE POISON PROBLEM. We could cover our hillsides with orchards and line our highways with shade-trees ; we could plant forest- trees enough to redeem thousands of square miles in the barren uplands of the West. Each township in the country could have a free school, each village a free public library. We could help the sick by teaching them to avoid the causes of disease; we could prevent rather than punish crime ; we could teach our home- less vagrants the lessons of self-support, and found asylum colonies for the lost children of our great cit- ies. And, moreover, we could increase the savings of the next decade by the endowment of a National Kef or m College, with a corps of competent sanitarians and political economists, for the training of temper- ance teachers, with local lecturers, traveling lecturers, and free lecture - halls in every large city of the country. Only thus could prohibition be brought to answer its whole purpose, for we should remember that the practical efficiency of all government laws depends on the consensus of the governed. Without the co-opera- tion of the teacher, the mandates of the legislator fall short of their aim. But it is equally certain that in the field of social ethics the teacher can not dispense with the aid of the legislator, and that our lawgivers can not much longer afford to ignore that truth, for the penalty of the neglect already amounts to the equivalent of the average yearly income of seven mill- ion working people. In the South a million men, women, and children of farm laborers earn less than $100,000,000 a year i. e., $500 for every family of five persons. In the manufacturing districts of THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. 77 the North they would earn less than $200,000,000. We can therefore again be wholly certain of not overstating the truth, if we assert that in the United States alone the poison-vice devours every year the aggregate earnings of more than fourteen hundred thousand families. In one-dollar bank-notes of the United States Treasury, one billion dollars could be pasted together into a paper strip that would reach up to the moon. Stacked up in bundles, they would form a paper pile a hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and fifty feet high. If the equivalent of so many creature-comforts could be employed for the benefit of the poor, it would almost realize the dreams of a Golden Age. But even if we could save it from the hands of the poison- vender by burning it on the public streets, all friends of mankind would hail the conflagration as the gladdest bonfire that ever cheered the hearts of men. For its flames would save more human lives than the perpetual peace of the millennium ; it would prevent more crimes than the civilization of all the savages that infest the prairies of our border states and the slums of our large cities. Nay, it would save us from evils for which mankind has thus far discov- ered no remedy, for intemperance robs us of bless- ings which human skill is unable to restore. CHAPTEE Y. ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. " Reforms advance with or without such allies." Kossuth. UJSTENABLE dogmas are often abandoned in prac- tice before they are repealed in theory. The penal code of several European nations still contains stat- utes on witchcraft. Several States of the American Union have failed to abrogate the Blue-Laws of the eighteenth century, though no combination of bigots and Dogberrys could nowadays persuade an American jury to convict a man for doubting the predictions of St. Augustine, or keeping his Sabbath on the seventh day of the week. Our medical text-books, too, are still full of prescriptions which intelligent physicians have ceased to prescribe for the last thirty years. Drastic drugs of the more virulent kinds have gone out of fashion almost as completely as venesection. Doctors cease to prescribe them, partly because they can not induce their patients to follow or to appreciate the prescription, but partly also because they have begun to recognize the true significance of toxic stimulation. They have recognized the fact that a virulent drug can at best only force Kature to post- ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 79 pone the crisis of a disease, and interrupt the course of a process which, after all, might be the safest as well as most direct path to the goal of recovery. They have learned to mistrust the expediency of a plan which so often suppressed the last symptoms of vitality in aiming to suppress the symptoms of the disease. That mistrust has led inquirers to the adoption of a new plan, empirics to the adoption of compromise methods, especially in the prescription of milder reme- dies, holding a sadly subordinate rank in the thera- peutics of old-school practitioners, but impeaching that classification by a rather suspicious adequacy to the main purpose. Drastic stimulants admit of " sub- stitutes." Homoeopathy, natural hygiene, and the ex- periments of the compromise party, have left no doubt that diseases of all sorts can be cured by remedies which leave us at liberty to ascribe that result to their " milder action," or their neutrality in plainer words, to a non-action, leaving Nature to pursue her course unmolested, which may be exactly the favor most apt to be appreciated, as Lord Clive told his Bengal allies, who threatened to leave him alone unless he would adopt their plan of cam- paign. Even to diminish the risk of the direct result, the use of virulent stimulants ought to be abandoned in all cases where experience speaks in favor of a harm- less substitute ; but in one special case that abolition seems to be recommended by an additional considera- tion, which alone should turn the scales against all the objections ever urged with a shadow of tenable 80 THE POISON PROBLEM. pretexts : An international temperance-league should withdraw their patronage from all physicians who persist in prescribing alcohol for " medical " purposes. For, as we shall presently see, the necessity of such prescriptions has been disproved by the strongest testimony ever accumulated on any medical question. Alcohol as a medicine can be rejected in favor of safer as well as more efficacious tonics; and that it should be thus rejected admits of no doubt, from a moral point of view, considering the facts that : 1. Fifteen per cent of all confirmed topers owe their ruin to the after-effects of a medical prescrip- tion. 2. A single dose of alcoholic drugs is sufficient to reawaken the dormant passion of a reclaimed inebriate, or to kindle the fuel prepared by the transmission of hereditary tendencies. " A young gentleman," says Dr. Isaac Jennings, " after drinking hard a number of years, abandoned the practice, became a Methodist clergyman, and, twenty years after he had tasted any kind of alcoholic drinks, called one evening on a friend in Albany, wet, cold, and very much fatigued by a hard day's ride in a storm, and was urged by his friend to take a little ale, with an importunity that would take no denial. At length he consented, and drank part of a glass. After sitting a little while he took his hat, left the room suddenly, went to a grocery-store in the neighborhood, and called for and drank spirits ; from this store he went to another, and, in the course of the evening, called at a number of these thorough- fares to death and hell, became noisy and furious, and ALOOHOLTO DRUGS. 81 was finally taken to the watch-house. In the morn- ing, when the fumes of alcohol were off, or when his vital forces had rallied so that he could command his mental faculties, all that he could distinctly recollect after drinking the ale was that " his head felt terri- bly." Dr. Mussey, after stating the case of the young man who cut off his hand to get rum, says : " In an- other populous town in the same State there lived an habitual drinker who, in an interval of reflection, made a vow that he would drink no more spirits for forty years, never doubting that forty years would place him in his grave. He actually kept his vow, and, at the expiration of the stipulated period, ven- tured to take a little liquor, as it seemed no more than a friendly salutation given to an old acquaint- ance, and in a short time died a sot." Alcohol can in no case be considered an indispen- sable means either of maintaining or restoring the normal condition of the human organism. Men who have mustered the will-force of deciding the question by a practical experiment have always found that, even after years of indulgence in a variety of seduc- tive poisons, total abstinence from all stimulants what- ever is sure to reward itself by the blessing of im- proved health. "Having determined, for myself, to die a sober man," says the author of " Medical Keform," " I used intoxicating drinks of every kind moderately, as it was called ; and, in consequence of it, I probably had sickness more moderately than I otherwise should have had. Knowing, from long observation, the dreadful evils of intemperance, when our temperance reforma- 82 THE POISON PROBLEM. tion began, I early and joyfully joined the temperance society, and abstained entirely from the use of distilled spirits. It was not long before I was convinced of the propriety of adopting the same course with wine, beer, cider, and all fermented drinks. It was pleasing to feel how, step by step, I improved in health as I made each successive sacrifice. Encouraged by these beginnings, and knowing that there were other things injurious to health which I was practising, I deter- mined to take a new start in the path of reformation, and successively gave up the use of strong, high- seasoned food of every description, my tobacco yes, my tobacco, the idol of my life, which I had used for nearly fifty years, and without which life seemed a burden ; yes, that soothing comforter of my life my vile, filthy, health-destroying weed had to go; and, not very long after, my tea, my coffee. I know that some will say, ' You poor, deluded fanatic ; you have deprived yourself of all the comforts of life, and what have you now worth living for?' I have health such health as men never enjoy who do not lead a uniformly temperate life. For years I have scarcely known what an ache or pain is ; and for years I have not had a cold worth calling a cold. My appetite is always good. I have a great pleasure in eating what- ever is suitable for man to eat, and I have lost all de- sire for anything but the plain, nourishing food on which I live. I feel as if I had gone back many years of my life, and have the ability and disposition to perform much more labor than I had seven years ago. Here is what I have that is worth living for; and I will ask those inquirers, in turn, what do they enjoy ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 83 that is more worth living for ? Do they eat the luxu- ries and fat things of the earth, and drink the fruit of the vine in its fermented and joy-inspiring state ? I use my plain food and plain water with as much pleas- ure and gratification as they, for I have tried both, and speak from experience, and know that their grati- fications are often followed by a bitter pang, and that mine are not. Indeed, so far am I from suffering from my mode of living that it has relieved me en- tirely from the common sufferings of life, to which improper living exposes us. I used to suffer much from headache, sick stomach, want of appetite, irregu- larity of the bowels, restless nights, and a most dis- tressing affection of the heart a disease which has become one of the most malignant and alarming dis- orders of our land. Of all these I have got cured by relinquishing stimulants and improper food." Here is the testimony of a man who at an advanced period of life abandoned the use of seven different tonics, and found his abstinence a panacea unrivalled by all the drugs of the school whose remedies he had tested for half a century. Can health not be restored, as well as sustained, without the use of alcoholic stimu- lants ? Homoeopathy has answered that question by test-experiments embracing every stage of every form of disease, and with results which admit of but one conclusion. Her very opponents, who regard the in- finitesimal doses of Dr. Hahnemann as so much harm- less but ineffective milk-sugar, hereby admit that the numberless disorders which have been successfully treated on that plan can be cured with pellets of milk- sugar better than with more virulent drugs. 84: THE POISON PROBLEM. " Some of the advocates for the moderate use of some kind of internal stimulants," says Dr. Jennings, " contend that all the capabilities of man as a physical and mental being can not be fully developed without such provocatives. This is a very unnatural view of the subject, and I am confident that facts do, or will, clearly show it to be a false one. Nature no more needs goading up to the discharge of her duty to the full extent of her ability, ' sick or well,' than an am- bitious woman does." " Alcohol is neither a food nor a generator of force in the human body," says Dr. N. S. Davis, ex-Presi- dent of the American Medical Association, " and 1 have found no case of disease, and no emergency arising from accident, that I could not treat more successfully without any form of fermented and dis- tilled liquors than with" "The question recurs," says the same writer, " "What are the positive effects of alcohol when taken in the ordinary manner? Like ether and chloroform, its presence diminishes the sen- sibility of the nervous system and brain, thereby ren- dering the individual less conscious of all outward impressions. This diminution of sensibility, or anaes- thesia, is developed in direct ratio to the quantity of alcohol taken, and may be seen in all stages, from simple weight, exhibited by ease, buoyancy, hilarity, etc., to that of complete unconsciousness, and loss of muscular power. It is this ansesthetic effect of alco- hol that has led to all the popular errors and contra- dictory uses which have proved so destructive to hu- man health and happiness. It has long been one of the noted paradoxes of human action that the same ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 85 individual would resort to the same alcoholic drink to warm him in winter and protect him from the heat in summer, to strengthen when weak and weary, and to soothe and cheer when afflicted in body or mind. "With the facts now before us, the explanation of all this is apparent. Alcohol does not relieve the indi- vidual from cold by increasing his temperature, nor from heat by cooling him, nor from weakness and exhaustion by nourishing his tissues, nor yet from affliction by increasing nerve-power, but simply by diminishing the sensibility of his nerve structures and thereby lessening his consciousness of impressions, whether from cold or heat or weariness or pain. In other words, the presence of alcohol has not in any degree lessened the effects of the evils to which he is exposed, but has diminished his consciousness of their existence, and thereby impaired his judgment con- cerning the degree of their action upon him. It is this property of alcohol to produce that sense of ease, buoyancy, and exhilaration, arising from a moderate diminution of nerve sensibility, that gives it the fasci- nating and delusive power over the human race which it has wielded so ruinously for centuries gone by. But, while the presence of alcohol diminishes the sen- sibility of the nervous structure, it also retards all the molecular changes, thereby diminishing the activity of nutrition, secretion, elimination and the evolution of heat, constituting a true organic sedative." It might be added that even that limited effect decreases with each repetition of the dose ; while in the same proportion the morbid hankering after the operation, of the toxic stimulant continues to increase, 8 86 THE POISON PROBLEM. After taking a dram of " medicated bitters " once a day for three or four weeks, a pint of the same liquor hardly insures the effect which at first could be pro- duced by half a gill, and, moreover, the slight craving has in the meantime become a raging thirst, a poison- prurience curable only by total abstinence through months of desperate struggles with the demon of temptation. A temporary, and, after all, very delu- sive, relief, is bought at the price of years of coining misery and bondage to a tyrannous habit. " One stormy afternoon in 1882," says Mrs. Fran- cis "Willard, " I accompanied a friend to the Harrison Street Police Station. As is generally known, our society has now a matron at every station in the city. We found that many had been imprisoned that day, but the matron directed our attention especially to the most distant cell, where a woman lay curled up on a bench, with an old shawl over her head. She had been brought in drunk some hours before. As we stood there, thinking her to be asleep, and lamenting, in whispered tones, her sad condition, the woman arose, came toward us, grasping with a small, white hand the bars of the cell, and spoke to us in a sweet voice, saying : ' Do you ladies really care for one so hopeless ? ' We assured her of our sympathy, and in a talk that followed learned that she was born in a leading Southern city, had graduated from a first-class normal college, and had been for years a teacher. One spring, about four years previous to our meeting, worn out with her duties, she went to the family physician, who prescribed an alcoholic beverage as a 'tonic.' From that day she had gone down, little by little, un- ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 87 til now she was a confirmed inebriate, often reform- ing, but as often relapsing. Subsequent investigation proved that she was related to a refined and wealthy family in Chicago. They and we have done all in our power for her. She has been kept at the i Mar- tha Washington Home,' and for months has kept her pledge, only to fall away from it at last." Was the prescription that wrought that woman's ruin a " medical necessity " 3 Could the after-effects of mental overwork not be relieved without the aid of a poison tending to induce a life-destroying pas- sion ? Dr. Andrew Clark, of London, court-physician of the royal family, confesses that " Alcohol is not only not a helper of work, but a certain hinderer, and every man who comes to the front of a profession in London is marked by this one characteristic, that the more busy he gets the less in the shape of alcohol he takes, and his excuse is : ' I am sorry, but I can not take it and do my work.' ' : Goethe, who was a moderate wine-drinker for sixty years, became an almost total abstainer toward the end of his life, having found by experience that the habit, even under the control of a strong will-power, was too apt to encroach upon his time, and afforded no real relief from care or fatigue. Dr. W. B. Car- penter, the foremost physiologist of the medical pro- fession, records his conviction that " it is the duty of the medical practitioner to discourage as much as possible the habitual use of alcoholic liquors, in how- ever ( moderate ' a quantity, by all persons in ordinary health, and to seek to remedy those slight departures 88 THE POISON PROBLEM. from health which result from the wear and tear of active life by the means which shall most directly re- move or antagonize their causes, instead of by such as simply palliate their effects. " The banishment of alcohol," says the editor of the Boston " Journal of Chemistry," " would not de- prive us of a single one of the indispensable agents which modern civilization demands. Neither would chemical science be retarded by its loss. In no in- stances of disease in any form is it a medicine which might not be dispensed with and other agents substi- tuted." From this rule, so-called climatic diseases were long supposed to constitute an exception. But the prophylactic value of an alcoholic febrifuge is founded merely on the fact that Nature can not fight two simultaneous battles against the enemies of the hu- man organism, and that her struggle against the influ- ence of a life-endangering drug require the temporary suspension of hostilities against the virus of malaria. In other words, the visible symptoms of that virus are temporarily suppressed while the system is con- vulsed by the paroxysm of the alcohol fever. But the patient can not be kept under the constant influ- ence of such antidotes, and in the intervals of the stimulant-convulsion the other enemy gets his chance and rarely misses it. " Of two hundred and four cases of cholera in Park Hospital, New York," says Dr. Sewell, " only six recovered, and they were temperate persons." The founder of the London Temperance Hospital proves that the mortality of his institution is four and a half per cent lower than in any other hos- ALCOHOLIC DRUGS. 89 pital treating the same variety of cases. Professor Bronson, of Montreal, states that, according to his ex- perience, " the habitual use of ardent spirits, in the smallest quantity, seldom fails to invite cholera and render it incurable." " The use of alcoholic drinks," says Dr. R. E. Ad- ams, " I have found to be a great disposing cause of malignant disorders. So strong is my opinion on this point that, were I one of the authorities and had the power, I would placard every spirit-shop in town with these words : * Cholera sold here ! ' ' In the yellow-fever hospitals of our Gulf-States an enormous plurality of rum-drinkers pay the penalty of their habit by a disposition to the more malignant forms of every epidemic. That climatic diseases are amenable to other than distilled drugs, has been known ever since the Spanish missionaries of the sixteenth century became acquainted with the antiseptic prop- erties of the Peruvian cinchona ; not to mention the undoubted fact that refrigeration alone is sufficient to counteract the blood changes characterizing the symptoms of febrile disorders. The use of alcohol can be safely dispensed with in all diseases thus far brought to the knowledge of medical scientists ; and Dr. Greene, of Boston, reminds us of an additional reason for renouncing its treacherous aid : " It needs no argument to convince us that it is upon the medi- cal profession to a very great extent that the rum- seller depends to maintain the respectability of the traffic. It requires only your own experience and observation to convince you that it is upon the medi- cal profession, upon their prescriptions and recom- 90 THE POISON PROBLEM. mendations for its use upon so many occasions, that the habitual dram-drinker depends for the seeming respectability of his drinking habits. It is upon the members of the medical profession, and the excep- tional laws which it has always demanded, that the whole liquor fraternity depends, more than upon any- thing else, to screen it from the opprobrium and just punishment for the evils which the traffic entails upon society, and it is because the rum-seller and the rum- drinker hide under this cloak of seeming respecta- bility that they are so difficult to reach, either by moral suasion or by law. As a result of thirty years of professional experience and practical observation, I feel assured that alcoholic stimulants are not required as medicines, and believe that many, if not a majority of physicians to-day, of education and experience, are sat- isfied that alcoholic stimulants, as medicines, are worse than useless ; and physicians generally have only to overcome the force of habit and of prevailing fashions, to find a more excellent way, when they will all look back with wonder and surprise to find that they, as individuals and as members of an honored profession, should have been so far compromised." CHAPTEK VI. PROHIBITION. " Rugged or not, there is no other way." Luther. THE champions of temperance have to contend with two chief adversaries ignorance and organized crime. The well-organized liquor league can boast of leaders whose want of principles is not extenuated by want of information, and who deliberately scheme to coin the misery of their fellow-men into dollars and cents. But the machinations of such enemies of man- kind would not have availed them against the power of public opinion, if their cunning had not found a potent ally in the ignorance, not of their victims only, but of their passive opponents. We need the moral and intellectual support of a larger class of our fellow- citizens before we can hope to secure the effectual aid of legal remedies, and in that direction the chief ob- stacles to the progress of our cause have been the prevailing misconceptions on the following points : 1. COMPETENCE OF LEGISLATIVE POWER. There can be no doubt that the legislative authority even of civilized governments has been frequently misapplied. The most competent exponents of political economy 92 THE POISON PROBLEM. agree that the state has no business to meddle in such affairs as the fluctuation of market prices, the rate of : interest, the freedom of international traffic. On more \ than one occasion European governments, having at- - tempted to regulate the price of bread-stuffs, etc., were taught the folly of such interference by com- mercial dead-locks and the impossibility of procuring the necessaries of life at the prescribed price, and were thus compelled to remedy the mischief by re- pealing their enactments. Usury laws tend to in- crease, instead of decreasing, the rate of interest, by obliging the usurer to indemnify himself for the dis- advantage of the additional risk. The attempt to in- crease national revenues by enforcing an artificial balance of trade has ever defeated its own object. It is almost equally certain that compulsory charities do on the whole more harm than good. On the other hand, there are no more undoubtedly legitimate func- tions of government than the suppression, and the, if possible, prevention, of crime, and the enforcement of health laws; and it can be demonstrated by every g rule of logic and equity that the liquor traffic can be : held amenable in both respects. The favorite argu- ment of our opponents is the distinction of crime and vice. For the latter, they tell us, society has no remedy, except in as much as the natural conse- quences (disease, destitution, etc.) are apt to recoil on the person of the perpetrator ; the evil of intemper- ance therefore is beyond the reach of the law. We may fully concede the premises without admitting the cogency of the conclusion. The suspected possession or private use of intoxicating liquors would hardly PROHIBITION. 93 justify the issue of a search warrant, but the penalties of the law can with full justice be directed against the manufacturer or vender who seeks gain by tempt- ing his fellow-men to indulge in a poison infallibly in- jurious in any quantity, and infallibly tending to the development of a body- and soul-corrupting habit ; they may with equal justice be directed against the consumer, stupefied or brutalized by the effects of that poison. The rumseller has no right to plead the con- sent of his victim. The absence of violence or malice prepense is a plea that would legalize some of the worst offenses against society. The peddler of obscene literature poisons the souls of our children without a shadow of ill-will against his individual cus- tomer. The gambler, the lottery-shark, use no man- ner of force in the pursuit of their prey. By what logic can we justify the interdiction of their industry and condemn that of the liquor traffic ? By the cri- terion of comparative harmlessness ? Have all the indecencies published since the invention of print- ing occasioned the thousandth part of the misery caused by the yearly and inevitable consequences of the poison-vice ? The lottery player may lose or win, but the customer of the liquor vender is doomed to loss as soon as he approaches the dram-shop. The damage sustained by the habitual player may be con- fined to a loss of money, while the habitual drunkard is sure to suffer in health, character, and reputation, as well as in purse. And shall we condone the con- duct of the befuddled drunkard on account of a tem- porary suspense of conscious reason? That very (fomentation constitutes his offense. 94: THE POISON PROBLEM. His actions may or may not result in actual mis- chief, but he has put the decision of that event be- yond his control. The man who gallops headlong through crowded streets is punished for his reckless disregard of other men's safety, though the hoofs of his horse may have failed to inflict any actual injury. A menagerie keeper would be arrested, if not lynched, for turning a city into a pandemonium by letting loose his bears and hyenas, and for the same reason no man should be permitted to turn himself into a wild beast. " Yirtue must come from within," says Professor Newman ; " to this problem religion and morality must direct themselves. But vice may come from without ; to hinder this is the care of the statesman." And here, as elsewhere, prevention is better than cure. By obviating the temptations of the dram- shop, a progressive vice with an incalculable train of mischievous consequences may be nipped in the bud. Penal legislation is a sham if it takes cognizance of moral evils only after they have passed the curable stage. " It is mere mockery," says Cardinal Man- ning, " to ask us to put down drunkenness by moral and religious means, when the legislature facilitates the multiplication of the incitements to intemperance on every side. You might as well call upon me as a captain ot a ship and say : ' Why don't you pump the water out when it is sinking,' when you are scut- tling the ship in every direction. If you will cut off the supply of temptation, I will be bound by the help of God to convert drunkards, but until you have taken off this perpetual supply of intoxicating drink PEOHIBITION. 95 we never can cultivate the fields. Let the legislature do its part and we will answer for the rest." (Ap- pendix, VII.) All civilized nations have recognized not only the right but the duty of legislative authorities to adopt the most stringent measures for the prevention of contagious disease ; yet all epidemics taken together have not caused half as much loss of life and health as the plague of the poison-vice. 2. MAGNITUDE OF THE EVIL. Since health and freedom began to be recognized as the primary con- ditions of human welfare, the conviction is gaining ground that the principles of our legislative system need a general revision. It was a step in the right direction when the lawgivers of the Middle Ages be- gan to realize the truth that the liberty of individual action should be sacrificed only to urgent considera- tion of public welfare, but the modified theories on the comparative importance of these considerations have inaugurated a still more important reform. Penal codes gradually ceased to enforce ceremonies and abstruse dogmas, and to ignore monstrous mu- nicipal and sanitary abuses. The time has passed when legislators raged with extreme penalties against the propagandists of speculative theories and ig- nored the propagation of slum diseases, yet, after all, there is still a lingering belief in the minds of many contemporaries that intemperance, as a physical evil, a " mere dietetic excess," does not justify the in- vasion of personal liberty. They would consent to restrict the freedom of thought and speech rather than the license of the rum-dealer, yet the tendency of a 96 THE POISON PROBLEM. progressive advance in public opinion promises the advent of a time when that license will appear the chief anomaly of the present age. The numberless minute prescriptions and interdicts of our law-books, and their silence on the crime of the liquor traffic, will make it difficult for coming ages to comprehend the intellectual status of a generation that could wage such uncompromising war against microscopic gnats, and consent to gratify the greed of a monstrous vam- pire. 3. SELF-CORRECTING ABUSES. Modern physicians admit that various forms of disease which were for- merly treated with drastic drugs can be safely trusted to the healing agencies of Nature. Many social evils, too, tend to work out their own cure. High markets encourage competition, and have led to a reduction of prices. Luxury leads to enforced economy by reduc- ing the resources of the spendthrift. Dishonest tradesmen lose custom, and a German government that used to fine editors for publishing unverified rumors might have left it to the subscribers to with- draw their patronage from a purveyor of unreliable news. But there are certain causes of disease that demand the interference of art. Poisons, especially, require artificial antidotes. If a child has mistaken arsenic for sugar, its life commonly depends on the timely arrival of a physician. The organism may rid itself of a surfeit, but is unable to eliminate the virus of a skin disease. Alcoholism belongs to the same class of disorders. We need not legislate against cor- sets ; the absurdities of fashion change and vanish like fleeting clouds, and their votaries may welcome PROHIBITION. 97 the change; but drunkards would remain slaves of their vice though the verdict of public opinion should have made dram-drinking extremely unfashionable. The morbid passion transmitted from sire to son, and strengthened by years of indulgence, would defy all moral restraints, and yield only to the practical impos- sibility to obtain the object of its desire. " A number of years ago," says Dr. Isaac Jennings, " I was called to the ship-yard in Derby to see John B., a man about thirty years of age, of naturally stout, robust constitution, who had fallen from a scaffold in a fit, head first upon a spike below. In my visit to dress the wounded head, I spoke to him of the folly and danger of continuing to indulge his habit of drinking, and obtained from him a promise that he would abandon it. Not long after I learned that he was drinking again, and reminded him of his promise. His excuse was, that it would not do for him to aban- don the practice of drinking suddenly. A few weeks after this he called at my office and requested me to bleed him, or do something to prevent a fit, for he felt much as he did a short time before having the last fit. I said to him, c John, sit down here with me and let us consider your case a little.' I drew two pict- ures and held before him one presented a wife and three little children with a circle of friends made happy, and himself respectable and useful in society ; the other, a wretched family, and himself moldering in a drunkard's grave and appealed to him to decide which should prove to be the true picture. The poor fellow burst into tears and wept like a child. When he had recovered himself from sobbing, so that he 98 THE POISON PROBLEM. could speak, he said : Doctor, to tell you the truth, it is not that I am afraid of the consequences of stop- ping suddenly that I do not give up drinking. lean not do it. I have tried and tried again, but it is all in vain. Sometimes I have gone a number of weeks without drinking, and I flattered myself that the temptation was gone, but it returned, and now, if there was a spot on earth where men lived and could not get spirits, and I could get there, I would start in a minute.' I thought I had understood something of the difficulties of hard drinkers before, but this gave me a new impression of the matter, and most solemnly did I charge myself to do what I could to make a spot on earth where men could live and couldn't get spirits" 4. LESSEE EVTLS. Even in a stricter form than any rational friend of temperance would desire its en- forcement, prohibition would not involve any conse- quences that could possibly make the cure a greater evil than the disease. The predicted aching void re- sulting from the expurgation of beer-tunnels could be filled by healthier means of recreation. The grief of the superseded poison-mongers would not outweigh the mountain-load of misery and woe which the abol- ishment of their cursed trade would lift from the shoulders of the nation. When the State of Iowa de- clared for prohibition, the opponents of that amend- ment bemoaned the loss entailed by the departure of " so many industrious and respectable citizens " i. e., from the exodus of the rumsellers ! We might just as well be asked to bewail the doom of the Thugs as the subversion of a prosperous industry. We might PROHIBITION-. 99 as well be requested to sympathize with the respect- able bloodhound-trainers and knout-manufacturers whom the abolition of slavery threw out of employ- ment. The liquor dealer has no right to complain about the rigor of a law that permits him to depart with the spoils of such a trade. We are told that the mere rumor of Maine laws has deterred many for- eigners from making their homes with us ; that the Russian peasants decline to come without their brew- ers and distillers, and that by general prohibition we would risk to reduce our immigration from every country of Northern Europe. We must take that risk, and let Muscovites rot in the bogs of the Yolga if they can not accept our hospitality without turning our bread-corn into poison. Our utilitarian friends would hardly persuade us to legalize cannibalism in order to encourage a larger immigration of Feejee isl- anders. The absence of such guests might not prove an unqualified evil. I shall not insult the intelligence of my readers by repeating the drivel of the wretches who would weigh the reduction of revenues against the happiness of a hell-delivered nation, and I will only mention the reply of a British financier, who estimates that the increase of national pros- perity would offset that reduction in less than five years. 5. EFFICACY OF PEOHIBITIOK. Will prohibition prevent the use of intoxicating liquor ? Not wholly, but it will answer its purpose. It will banish dis- tillers to secret mountain glens and hidden cellars. It will drive the man-traps of the poison-monger from the public streets. It will save our boys from a hun- 100 THE POISON PROBLEM. dred temptations ; it will help thousands of reformed drunkards to keep their pledge ; it will restore peace and plenty to many hundred thousand homes. More than a century ago the philosopher Leibnitz main- tained that the plenary suppression of the liquor traffic would be the most effectual means for reform- ing the moral status of civilized nations, and experi- ence has since fully demonstrated the correctness of that opinion. A memorandum endorsed by a large number of statistical vouchers describes the effect of prohibition in Sweden : " The nation rose and fell, grew prosperous and happy, or miserable and de- graded, as its rulers and law-makers restrained or per- mitted the manufacture and sale of that which all along the track of its history has seemed to be the nation's greatest curse." ..." The vigorously main- tained prohibition against spirits in 175 3-' 5 6, and again in 1772-'75, proved the enormous benefits ef- fected in moral, economical, and other respects, by abstinence from intoxicating spirits." . . . "This it is which has so helped Sweden to emerge from moral and material prostration, and explains the existence of such general indications in that country of comfort and independence among all classes." From the " Edinburgh Keview" for January, 1873, we learn that, in eighty-nine private estates in Eng- land and Scotland, "the drink traffic has been alto- gether suppressed, with the happiest social results. The late Lord Palmerston suppressed the beer-shops in Romsey as the leases fell in. We know an estate which stretches for miles along the romantic shore of Loch Fyne where no whisky is allowed to be sold. PROHIBITION. 101 The peasants and fishermen are flourishing. They have all their money in the bank, and they obtain higher wages than their neighbors when they go to sea a proof that a small oasis of temperance can maintain its prosperity in the midst of poison-blighted communities. Here and there the wiles of the poison-mongers will undoubtedly succeed in evading the law, but their power for mischief will be diminished as that of the gambling-hell was diminished in Homburg and Baden, where temptation was removed out of the track of the uninitiated till the host of victims dwindled away for want of recruits. Not the promptings of an innate passion, but the charm of artificial allurements, is the gate by which ninety-nine out of a hundred drunk- ards have entered the road to ruin. It would be an understatement to say that the temptation of minors will be reduced a hundred-fold wherever the total amount of sales has been reduced as much as five-fold a result which has been far exceeded, even under the present imperfect system of legal control. " In the course of my duty as an internal revenue officer," says Superintendent Hamlin, of Bangor, " I have be- come thoroughly acquainted with the state and extent of the liquor traffic in Maine, and I have no hesitation in saying that the beer trade is not more than one per cent of what I remember it to have been, and the trade in distilled liquors is not more than ten per cent of what it was formerly." " I think I am justified in saying," reports the attorney-general, "that there is not an open bar for the sale of intoxicating liquor in this county " (Androscoggin, including the manufact- 102 THE POISON PROBLEM. uring district of Lewiston once a very hot-bed of the rum traffic). " In the city of Biddef ord, a manufact- uring place of eleven thousand inhabitants, for a month at a time not a single arrest for drunkenness has been made or become necessary." And from Au- gusta (the capital of the State) : " If we were to say that the quantity of liquor sold here is not one tenth as large as formerly, we think it would be within the truth ; and the favorable effects of the change upon all the interests of the State are plainly seen every- where." "It is perhaps not necessary," says the Boston "Globe," of July 29, 1875, "to dwell on the evils of intemperance, and yet people seldom think how great a proportion of these might be prevented by driving the iniquity into its hiding-places, and preventing it from coming forth to lure its victims from among the unwary and comparatively guileless. Few young men who are worth saving, or are likely to be saved, to decency and virtue, would seek it out if it were kept from sight. But, when it comes forth in gay and alluring colors, it draws a procession of our youth into a path that has an awful termination. Nor does the evil which springs from an open toleration of the way in which this vice carries on its traffic of destruc- tion fall only on men. A sad proportion of its vic- tims is made up from shop-girls and abandoned women, who are not so infatuated at the start that they would plunge into a life of infamy if its temptations were strictly under the ban, and kept widely separated from the world of decency. But it intruded itself upon them. Its temptations and opportunities are PROHIBITION. 103 before their eyes, and the way is made easy for their feet to go down to death." " To what good is it," says Lord Brougham, "that the legislature should pass laws to punish crime, or that their lordships should occupy themselves in try- ing to improve the morals of the people by giving them education ? What could be the use of sowing a little seed here and plucking up a weed there, if these beer-shops are to be continued to sow the seeds of immorality broadcast over the land, germinating the most frightful produce that ever has been al- lowed to grow up in a civilized country, and, I am ashamed to add, under the fostering care of Par- liament." The prohibition of the poison-traffic has become the urgent duty of every legislator, the foremost aim of every moral reformer. The verdict of the most eminent statesmen, physicians, clergymen, patriots, and philanthropists, is unanimous on that point. "We lack energy, not competence, nor the sanction of a higher authority, to gain the votes of the masses. " We can prove the success of prohibition by the experience of our neighboring state," writes Dr. Her- bert Buchanan, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire; "all the vicious elements of society are arranged against us, but I have no fear of the event if we do not cease to agitate the subject" Agitation, a ceaseless appeal to the common sense and conscience of our fellow-men, can, indeed, not fail to be crowned with ultimate success. The struggle with vice, with ignorance and mean selfishness, may continue, but it will be our own fault if our adver- 104: THE POISON PROBLEM. saries can support their opposition by a single valid argument, and the battle will be more than half won if a majority of our fellow-citizens have to admit that we contend no longer for a favor, but for an evident right. CHAPTER VII. SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES. " Deep-rooted evils can not be abolished by striking at the branches." Boerhaave. THE history of the temperance movement has demonstrated the sad futility of palliative remedies. We have seen that the malady of the poison-vice is not a self-limited, but a necessarily progressive evil. The half-way measures of "restrictive" legislation have resulted only in furnishing additional proof that prevention is better, because less impossible, than con- trol.* The regulation of the poison-traffic, the re- * " All past legislation has proved ineffectual to restrain the habit of excess. Acts of Parliament, intended to lessen, have notoriously augmented the evil, and we must seek a remedy in some new direction, if we are not prepared to abandon the contest or contentedly to watch with folded arms the gradual deterioration of the people. Restriction, in the forms which it has hitherto assumed, of shorter hours, more stringent regulation of licensed houses, and magisterial control of licenses, has been a conspicuous failure. For a short time after the passing of Lord Aberdare's act, hopes were entertained of great results from the provisions for early closing, and many chief constables testi- fied to the improved order of the streets under their charge ; but it soon appeared that the limitation, while it lessened the labor of the police, and advanced their duties an hour or so in the night, was not sufficient to reduce materially the quantity of liquor consumed, or the consequent amount of drunkenness." "Fortnightly Review." 106 THE POISON PROBLEM. dress of the unavoidably resulting mischief, the cure and conversion of drunkards, in order to be effectual, would impose intolerable and never-ending burdens on the resources even of the wealthiest communities, while the advocates of prohibition would forestall the evils both of the remedy and the disease. But we should not overlook the truth that, in our own country at least, the poison-plant of intemperance springs from a composite root. In southern Spain, under the dominion of the Saracens, the poison-vice was almost unknown during a series of centuries.* The moral code and the religion of the inhabitants discountenanced intemperance. The virtue of die- tetic purity ranked with chastity and cleanliness. An abundance of harmless amusements diverted from vicious pastimes. Under such circumstances the ab- sence of direct temptations constituted a sufficient safeguard against the vice of the poison-habit; but, in a country like ours, the efficacy of prohibi- tion depends on the following supplementary reme- dies: 1. INSTRUCTION. In the struggle against the pow- ers of darkness light often proves a more effective * " The Western Saracens abstained not only from wine, but from all fermented and distilled drinks whatsoever, were as innocent of cof- fee as of tea and tobacco, knew opium only as a soporific medicine, and were inclined to abstemiousness in the use of animal food. Yet six millions of these truest sons of temperance held their own for seven centuries against great odds of heavy-armed Giaours, excelled all Christendom in astronomy, medicine, agriculture, chemistry, and lin- guistics, as well as in the abstract sciences, and could boast of a whole galaxy of philosophers and inspired poets." " International Review," December, 1880. SUBJECTIVE KEMEDIES. 107 weapon than might or right. Even the limited light of human reason might help us to avoid mistakes that have undoubtedly retarded the triumph of our cause. We must enlighten, as well as admonish, our children, if we would save them from the snares of the tempter ; among the victims of intemperance, even among those who can speak from experience, and can not deny that their poison has proved the curse of their lives, only a small portion is at all able to comprehend the necessary connection of cause and result. They ascribe their ruin to the spite of fortune, to the ma- chinations of an uncharitable world, to abnormally untoward circumstances, rather than to the normal effects of the insidious poison. Intoxication they admit to be an evil, but defend the moderate use of a liquor as infallibly injurious in the smallest as in the largest dose ; they underrate the progressive tend- ency of their vice, and overrate their power of resist- ance; they cling to the tradition that alcohol, dis- creetly enjoyed, may prove a blessing instead of a curse. We must banish that fatal delusion. We must reveal the true significance of the poison-habit before we can hope to suppress it as a life-blighting vice. Our text-books should be found in every col- lege and every village school from Florida to Oregon. Every normal school should graduate teachers of temperance. The law of the State of New York, providing for the introduction of primers on the ef- fects of alcoholic beverages, was attacked by one of our leading scientific periodicals, with more learning than insight, on the ground that the physiological action of alcohol is as yet obscure even to our ablest 108 THE POISON PKOBLEM. pathologists, and therefore not a fit subject for a com- mon school text-book. The same objection might be urged against every other branch of physiology and the natural history of the organic creation. " Every vital process is a miracle," says Lorenz Oken, " that is, in all essential respects an unexplained phenome- non." A last question will always remain unanswered wherever the marvelous process of life is concerned, but our ignorance, as well as our knowledge, of that phenomenon has its limits, and, in regard to the ef- fects of alcoholic beverages, it is precisely the most knowable and most fully demonstrated part of the truth which it behooves every child to know, but of which at present nine tenths of the adults, even in the most civilized countries, remain as ignorant as the natives of Kamtschatka, who worship a divinity in the form of a poisonous toadstool. A boy may be brought to comprehend the folly of gambling even before he has mastered the abstruse methods of com- bination and permutation employed in the calculus of probable loss and gain. We need not study Ben- tham to demonstrate that honesty is an essential basis of commerce and social intercourse. By the standard of usefulness, too, temperance primers might well take precedence of many other text -books. Our schoolboys hear all sorts of things about the perils encountered by the explorers of African deserts and Arctic seas, but next to nothing about the pitfalls in their own path no room for the discussion of such subjects in a curriculum that devotes years to the study of dead languages. Is the difference between the archaic and pliocene form of a Greek verb so SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES. 109 much more important than the difference between food and poison ? "With such a text as the monster curse of intem- perance and its impressive practical lessons, a slight commentary would suffice to turn thousands of young observers into zealous champions of our cause, just as in Germany a few years of gymnastic training have turned nearly every young man into an advocate of physical education. The work begun in the school- room should be continued on the lecture platform, but we should not dissemble the truth that in a crowded hall ninety per cent of the visitors have gen- erally come to hear an orator rather than a teacher, and enjoy an eloquence that stirs up their barrenest emotions as much as if it had fertilized the soil of their intelligence, just as the unrepentant gamesters of a Swiss watering-place used to applaud the sensa- tional passages of a drama written expressly to set forth the evils of the gambling hell. Enthusiasm and impressiveness are valuable qualifications of a public speaker, but he should possess the talent of making those agencies the vehicles of instruction. The great mediaeval reformers, as well as certain political agitators of a later age, owe their success to their nat- ural or acquired skill in the act of stirring their hear- ers into an intellectual ferment that proved the leaven of a whole community for that skill is a talent that can be developed on a basis of pure common sense, and should be more assiduously cultivated for the purposes of our reform. A modern philanthropist could hardly confer a greater benefit on his fellow- citizens than by founding a professorship of temper- 10 110 THE POISON PKOBLEM. ance, or endowing a college with the special condition of a proviso for a weekly lecture on such topics as "The Stimulant Delusion," "Alcoholism," "The History of the Temperance Movement." Pamphlets, too, may subserve an important didac- tic purpose, and in the methods of their distribution we might learn a useful lesson from our adversaries, the manufacturers of alcoholic nostrums, who intro- duce their advertisements into every household by publishing them combined with almanacs, comic illus- trations, note-books, etc., i. e., not only free, but winged with extra inducements to the recipient, and often by the special subvention of druggists and vil- lage postmasters till quack annuals have almost superseded the old family calendars with their miscel- lanies of pious adages and useful recipes. Could we not retrieve the lost vantage-ground by the publica- tion of temperance year-books, compiled by a com- mittee of our best tract societies, and distributed by agents of the "W. C. T. U. with inspiring conviction to emulate the zeal stimulated by a bribe of gratuitous brandy bottles ? Popular books must, above all, be interesting, and with a large plurality of readers that word is still a synonym of entertaining. A German bookseller esti- mates that the romances of Louisa Muhlbach have done more to familiarize her countrymen with the history of their fatherland than all historical text- books, annals, and chronicles taken together, and we should not despise the aid of the novelist, if he should possess the gift of making fiction the handmaid of truth, and the rarer talent of awakening the reflections SUBJECTIVE EEMEDIES. HI as well as the emotions of Iris readers, for all such appeals should prepare the way for the products of the temperance press proper, by which we should never cease to invoke the conscience and the reason of our fellow-men. (Appendix, YIII.) 2. PROSCRIPTION. That union is strength is a truth which .asserts itself even at the expense of public wel- fare, and in favor of those who combine to thwart the purposes of the law or prevent the progress of needed reforms. To the cabals of such adversaries, against whom the influence of moral suasion would be power- less, we should oppose weapons that would strike at the foundation of their strength, namely, the most effectual means to diminish the number of their allies. Many of those who are callous to the stings of con- science would hesitate to defy the stigma of public opinion ; others who are proof against all other argu- ments would yield if we could make it their com- mercial interest to withdraw their aid from the ene- mies of mankind. That the prescription of alcohol for remedial pur- poses will ultimately be abandoned, like bleeding, blue-pill dosing, and other medical anachronisms, is as certain as that the Carpathian peasants will cease to exorcise devils by burning cow-dung, and we can somewhat promote the advent of that time by patron- izing reform physicians in preference to "brandy- doctors," as Benjamin Hush used to call them, and by classing alcoholic "bitters" with the prohibited beverages. It is mere mockery to prohibit the sale of small beer and permit quacks to sell their brandy as a " digestive tonic," and obviate the inconveniences 112 THE POISON PROBLEM. of the Sunday law by consigning their liquor to a drug-store. Does the new name or the admixture of a handful of herbs change the effects of the poison ? We might as well prohibit gambling and permit musi- cal lottery drawings under the name of sacred con- certs. Till we can do better we should permit drug- gists to sell alcoholic bitters only on the certified prescription of a responsible physician, all such pre- scriptions to be duly registered, and periodically re- ported to the Temperance Commissioner of a Board of Health. Nostrum-mongers will probably continue to fleece the ignorant to the end of time, but they must cease to decoy their victims by pandering to the alcohol-vice. 3. HEALTHIER PASTIMES. There is no doubt that a lack of better pastimes often tends to promote in- temperance. In thousands of our country towns, equidistant from rural sports and the amusements of the metropolis, ennui rather than ignorance * or nat- ural depravity leads our young men to the dram-shop, and, in recognizing that fact, we should not delude ourselves with the hope that reading-rooms alone could remedy the eviLf The craving after excitement, in * " Education is the cure of ignorance," says Judge Pitman, " but ignorance is not the cause of intemperance. Men who drink generally know better than others that the practice is foolish and hurtful. . . . It is not the most earnest and intelligent workers in the sphere of public education that make their overestimate of it as a specific for intemperance. While they are fully sensible of that measure of indi- rect aid which intellectual culture brings to all moral reforms, they feel how weak is this agency alone to measure its strength against the powerful appetite for drink." f " In a primitive state of society field-sports afford abundant pas- SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES. H3 some form or other, is an instinct of human nature j which may be perverted, but can never be wholly suppressed, and, in view of the alternative, we would find it cheaper both morally and materially to gratify that craving in the comparatively harmless way of the Languedoc peasants (who devote the even- ing hours to singing contests, trials of skill, round dances, etc.), or after the still better plan of the an- cient Greeks. Antiquity had its Olympic games, JS"emean and Capitoline arenas, circenses, and local festivals. The Middle Ages had their tournaments, May days, archery contests, church festivals, and guild feasts. The Latin nations still find leisure for pas- times of that sort, though in modified, and not always improved, forms ; but in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, with their six times twelve hours of monotonous factory- work, and Sunday laws against all kinds of recreations, the dreariness of existence has reached a degree which for millions of working- men has made oblivion a blest refuge, and there is no doubt that many dram-drinkers use alcohol as an times, our wealthy burghers find indoor amusements, and scholars have ideal hunting-grounds of their own ; but the large class of our fellow- citizens, to whom reading is a task rather than a pleasure, are reduced to the hard choice between their circenses and their panes. Even the slaves of ancient Rome had their saturnalia, when their masters in- dulged them in the enjoyment of their accumulated arrears of happi- ness ; but our laborers toil like machines, whose best recreation is a temporary respite from work. Human hearts, however, will not re- nounce their birthright to happiness ; and, if joy has departed this life, they pursue its shadow in the land of dreams, and try to spice the dry bread of daily drudgery with the sweets of delirium." " International Review," December, 1880. THE POISON PROBLEM. anodyne the most available palliative against the misery of life- weariness. We would try in vain to convert such men by reproofs or ostracism. Before we can persuade them to renounce their excursions to the land of delirium, the realities of life must be made less unendurable. They know the dangers of intemperance, but consider it a lesser evil.* They know no other remedy. Hence their bitter hatred of those who would deprive them of that only solace. Shall we resign such madmen to their fate ? I am afraid that their type is represented by a larger class than current conceptions might incline us to admit. Let those who would verify those conceptions visit a popular beer-garden not as emissaries of our propa- ganda, but as neutral observers. Let them use a suita- ble opportunity to turn the current of conversation upon a test topic " Personal Liberty," " The Sunday Question," " Progress of the Prohibition Party." Let the observer retain his mask of neutrality, and ascer- tain the views the private views of a few specimen topers. Do they deny the physiological tendencies of their practice? The correlation of alcohol and crime? They avoid such topics. !N"o, nine out of ten will prefer an unanswerable or unanswered argu- ment ; the iniquity of interfering with the amuse- ments of the poor, with the only available recreations * " But, beside their excitative influence, strong stimulants induce a lethargic reaction; and it is for the sake of this after effect that many unfortunates resort to intoxication. They drink in order to get drunk ; they are not tempted by the poison-fiend in the guise of a good, familiar spirit, but deliberately invoke the enemy which steals away their brains." "International Review," December, 1880. SUBJECTIVE KEMEDIES. 115 of the less privileged classes. Take that away and what can a man do who has no better pastimes, and can not always stay at home ? What shall he do with sixteen hours of leisure ? The question then recurs : How shall we deal with such men ? How reclaim them sufficiently even for the nobler purposes of the present life, not to speak of higher aims ? How save them from the road that leads down to death ? A change of heart may now and then work wonders, even the wonder of a permanent reform ; but we have no right to rely on constant miracles, and for thousands in sorest need of help there is only one practical solution of the problem : Let us provide an opportunity of better pastimes not as a concession to our enemies, l)ut as the most effectual method to counteract the attraction of their snares, and deprive them of the only plausible argument against the tendencies of our reform. We need not profane the Sabbath by bull-fights. We need not tempt the poor to spend their wages on rail- way excursions or the gambling tables of a popular summer resort. But we should recognize the neces- { sity of giving them once a week a chance for outdoor i amusements, and unless we should prefer the Swedish I compromise plan of devoting the evening of the Sab- bath to earthly purposes, we should adopt the sug- gestion of the Chevalier Bunsen, and amend the eight hour law by a provision for a free Saturday after- noon. Half a day a week, together with the evenings of the long summer days, would suffice where the means of recreation are near at hand. Even the smallest factory villages could afford a little pleasure 116 THE POISON PROBLEM. ground of their own, a public garden with a free gymnasium, a foot-race track, ball ground, a tennis- hall or nine-pin alley, for the winter season, a free bath, and a few zoological attractions. In larger towns we might add free music, a restaurant man- aged on the plan of Susanna Dodds, M. D.,* and perhaps a museum of miscellaneous curiosities. Such pleasure resorts should be known as Temperance Gar- dens. They would redeem as many drunkards as all our prisons and inebriate asylums taken together ; they would do more : they would prevent drunken- ness. And, above all, they would accustom the work- ing classes to associate the name of Temperance with the conceptions of liberality, manliness, cheerfulness, and recreation, instead of well, their present mis- conceptions. We might arrange monthly excursions, and the happiest yearly festival would be a Deliver- ance Feast ; an anniversary of the day when the city or village decided to free itself from the curse of the poison-traffic. Like some of the Turner halls of the German gymnasts, temperance gardens could be made more than self-supporting by charging a small admis- sion fee to the spectator-seats of the gymnasium, and selling special refreshments at a moderate advance on the cost price. The surplus might be invested in prizes to stimulate competition in such gymnastics as wrestling, running, and hammer throwing (" putting the club," as the Scotch highlanders call it), with re- served days, or arenas, for juvenile competitors. In winter we might vary the programme by archery, * Author of " Health in the Household." SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES. singing contests, and trials of skill in various domes- tic fashions, with an occasional " spelling bee " at least for those who could be trusted to consider it a pastime rather than a task, for the purpose of recre- ation should not be sacrificed even to considerations of utility. In regard to athletics, that apprehension would be superfluous ; the enthusiasm of gymnastic emulation has exerted its power at all times and among all nations, and needs but little encouragement to re- vive in its old might. It would make the Temper- ance Garden what the Tillage Green was to the ar- chers of Old England, what the palaestra was to the youth of ancient Greece. It would supersede vicious pastimes ; it would regenerate the manhood of the tempted classes, and thus react on their personal and social habits ; they would satisfy their craving for excitement in the arena, they would learn is prefer mechanical to chemical stimulants.* Physical and moral vigor would go hand in hand. (Appendix, IX.) The union of temperance and athletic education has, indeed, been the ideal of many social reformers, from Pythagoras to Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the secret of their failure was a mistake that has defeated more than one philanthropic project. They failed to begin their reform at the basis of the social structure. He who fears the hardships of such a beginning lacks, after all, true faith in the destiny of his mission. Per- severance and uncompromising loyalty to tenets of * I can not help thinking that most of our fashionable diseases might be cured mechanically instead of chemically, by climbing a bitter- wood tree, or chopping it down, if you like, rather than swallowing a decoction of its disgusting leaves." Boerhaave. 118 THE POISON PEOBLEM. our covenant is to us a duty, as well as the best policy, for as a moral offense treason itself would not be more unpardonable than doubt in the ultimate triumph of a cause like ours. There is a secret which almost seems to have been better known to the philosophers and patriots of antiquity than to this unheroic age of our own, namely, that in the arena of moral contests a clearly undeserved defeat is a step toward victory. In that warfare the scales of fate are not biased by a pre- ponderance of gold or iron. Tyrants have reached the term of their power if they have made deliverance more desirable than life ; the persuasive power of Truth is increased by oppression ; and if the interests of a cause have become an obvious obstacle in the road of progress and happiness the promoters of that cause have to contend with a law that governs the tendencies of the moral as well as the physical uni- verse, and inexorably dooms the unfit to perish.* The unmasked enemies of mankind have no chance to prosper. (Appendix, X.) And, even where their disguises still avail them amidst the ignorance of their victims, we should re- member the consolation of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his address to the Polish patriots: "They have swallowed you, but you can prevent them from as- * " The ultimate issue of the struggle is certain. If any one doubts the general preponderance of good over evil in human nature, he has only to study the history of moral crusades. The enthusiastic energy and self-devotion with which a great moral cause inspires its soldiers always have prevailed, and always will prevail, over any amount of self -interest or material power arrayed on the other side." Goldwin Smith. SUBJECTIVE EEMEDIES. 119 similating you." Our enemies may prevent the re- covery of their spoil, they may continue to devour the produce of our fields and of our labor, but we do not propose to let them enjoy their feast in peace ; whatever their gastric capacity, it will be our own fault if we do not cause them an indigestion that will diminish their appetite. " All the vile elements of society are against us," writes one of our lecturers, " but I have no fear of the event if we do not cease to agitate the subject," and we would, indeed, not deserve success if we should relax our efforts before we have secured the co-operation of every friend of justice and true freedom. It is true, we invite our friends to a battle-field, but there are times when war is safer than peace, and leads to the truer peace of conscience. The highest development of altruism inspires a devotion to the welfare of mankind that rewards itself by a deliver- ance from the petty troubles and vexations of daily life ; nay, all personal sorrows may thus be sunk out of sight, and those who seek release from grief for the inconstancy of fate, for the frustration of a cher- ished project, for the loss of a dear friend, may find a peace which fortune can neither give nor take away by devoting themselves to a cause of enduring prom- ise, to the highest abiding interest of their fellow-men. At the dawn of history that highest aim would have been : security against the inroads of barbarism. In the night of the Middle Ages : salvation from the phantoms of superstition. To-day it should be : de- liverance from the curse of the poison- vice. That deliverance will more than compensate all 120 THE POISON PEOBLEM. sacrifices. Parties, like individuals, are sometimes des- tined to conquer without a struggle ; but the day of triumph is brighter if the powers of darkness have been forced to yield step for step, and we need not regret our labors, our troubles, nor even the disap- pointment of some minor hopes, for in spite of the long night we have not lost our way, and the waning of the stars often heralds the morning. APPENDIX. I. (Page 24-.) Even in the wine countries of Southern Europe. "I saw men, women, and chil- dren sitting in rows," Professor Delavan writes from Rome, " swilling away at wine, making up in quan- tity what was wanting in strength; and such was the character of the inmates of those dens that my guide urged my immediate departure, as I valued my life." "In regard to temperance," says Mr. Hillard ("Six Months in Italy"), "I am inclined to think that the inhabitants of Southern Italy, and the wine- making countries generally, enjoy a reputation some- what beyond their deserts. ... If the proportion of cases of stabbing brought to the Roman hospitals, which occur in or near wine-shops, I have no question that it would furnish a strong fact wherewith to point the exhortations of a temperance lecturer." II. (Page 34.) " Nature will have her revenge, and, when the most ordinary and harmless recreations are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences which no moralist would be willing to con- done. The charge brought against the Novatians in 11 122 THE POISON PROBLEM. the early days of the Church can, with equal plausi- bility, be brought against the Puritans in our own day. One vice, at all events, which Christians of every school, as well as non-Christian moralists, are agreed in condemning, is reputed to be a special op- probrium of Scotland ; and the strictest observance of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regula- tions referred to has been found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not cheer." (" Saturday Keview," July 19, 1879, p. 75.) III. (Page 49.) Even under the crucial circum- stances mentioned in Dr. Hargreaves's Temperance Anecdotes (" Alcohol and Man," pages 97 and 135) : " Among the crews of the late English Arctic Expe- dition there was a number of noble fellows who dared to meet the icy rigors of the North Pole in the well- tried armor of total abstinence. The total abstainers were six: William Malley, Adam Ayles, "William Gore, Joiner, and Self, of the ship Alert, and Henry- Petty of the ship Discovery. Ayles, Malley, Gore, and Petty were Good Templars, and all, except Gore, were true to their colors to the end. Joiner had been a total abstainer for eighteen years, and Self for twen- ty-one years, but neither were Good Templars. Both took drink during the toilsome sledge-journeys. The only men in the Alert that did sledge-work worthy of remark were Malley, Ayles, Joiner, and Self, the rest of the crew, including Gore, having all suffered disease and exhaustion. When the sledging - work closed, at the end of July, it was found that the few abstainers of the Alert had surpassed all the remain- APPENDIX. 123 der of the crew in the number of days' sledging per- formed. Malley had been out ninety-nine days, and Ayles one hundred and ten days. It is a fact worthy of note that neither of these men was attacked with scurvy, but enjoyed good health, being only weakened by their arduous duties in sledging, which is said to be the hardest work ever imposed upon man. Each man had a design painted on canvas upon his back, to attract the attention of those following, in order to prevent snow- blindness. The Good Templars had the Grand Lodge Seal of the I. O. of G. T. painted on theirs. It was agreed that he who went farthest should leave his behind. Adam Ayles accomplished that feat, and buried the Good Templar's seal in a cavern nearer the North Pole than any human being has yet gone." Bruce, the heroic explorer of Eastern Africa, tested the efficacy of total abstinence with equal success un- der the opposite extremes of climatic vicissitudes in the glowing sands of the Soudan and the icy summit- regions of the Abyssinian highlands. " I laid it down as a positive rule of health," says he, " that spirits and all fermented liquors should be regarded as poisons, and, for fear of temptation, not to carry them along with you, except as a menstruum for outward applica- tion. Spring or running water, if you can find it, is to be your only drink." Waterton, the zoological explorer of the South American virgin-woods, was a consistent abstainer, not from alcoholic tipples only, but from the tonic brandies which onr nostrum-mongers would make us consider the safest antidote of malarious climates. 124 THE POISON PROBLEM. " I eat moderately," says he, " and never drink wine, spirits, or any fermented liquors in any climate. This abstemiousness has ever proved a faithful friend." Dr. Livingstone (in 1862) writes from Zululand : " I lived on the principle of total abstinence from all alcoholic liquors for more than twenty years. The most severe labors or privations may be undergone without alcoholic stimulants." On the occasion of a monthly review (at Calcutta) Sir Charles Kapier addressed his soldiers as follows : "Let me give you a bit of advice. Don't drink. Give ruin a wide berth. I know that young fellows don't think much about advice from old ones. They put their tongue in their cheek and think they know a good deal better than the old cove who is giving them the benefit of his experience. But rely on it, if you drink you are done for. You will either be in- valided or die." " In Western !N"ubia," says Professor Blackhouse, " I have traveled over sand so hot that the very dogs who trod it howled with pain, and where the water was so bad that we had to conceal its taste with coffee. Yet there is no single act of my life to which I look back with greater satisfaction than to the adoption of total abstinence." " From my own knowledge," says the author of "Tropical Diseases," "as well as from the observation of others, I aver that those who drink nothing but water, or make it their principal drink, are but little affected by the climate, can undergo the greatest fatigue with- out inconvenience, and are not subject to troublesome or dangerous diseases." APPENDIX. 125 Dr. Arthur Jackson, a veteran surgeon of the Brit- ish army, records his personal experience in the tropi- cal coast-lands of India and Southern Africa : " I have wandered a good deal about all parts of the world ; my health has been tried in all ways, and by the aid of temperance and hard work I have worn out two armies in two wars, and probably could wear out another, before my period of old age arrives in ear- nest. I eat no animal food, drink no wine or malt liquors, or spirits of any kind." Professor H. Marshall, Deputy Inspector of Army Hospitals, said before a Parliamentary committee : " In all climates the temperate are least affected by fatigues. Personal experience has taught me that the use of ardent spirits is not necessary to enable a Eu- ropean to undergo the fatigues of marching in a torrid climate. So far from being calculated to assist the human body in undergoing fatigues, I have always found that the strongest liquors were the most ener- vating, and this in whatever quantity they were con- sumed." Dr. "Ward writes from Sumatra : " I have had the opportunity of observing for twenty years the com- parative effects of the use of spirituous liquors and less stimulating drinks by different classes of the na- tives, and I find that while the former expose them- selves with impunity to every degree of heat, cold, and wet, the latter can endure neither wet nor cold for even a short period, without danger to their health." " I am indebted to a gracious Providence for pres- ervation in every unhealthy climate," says Sir W. F. Williams, the defender of Kara ; " but I am satisfied 126 THE POISON PROBLEM. that a resolution, early formed and steadily persevered in, never to take spirituous liquors, has been the means of my escaping diseases by which multitudes have fallen around me. Had not the Turkish army of Kars been literally a ' cold-water army,' I am persuaded that they would never have performed the achieve- ments which crowned them with glory." IV. (Page 51.) " Before total abstinence had been tried to any great extent in England," says Dr. Hargreaves, " it was ascertained that the hardest work- ing men were those who forged ship anchors. They were besides exposed to great extremes of heat and cold, and their employers allowed them an unlimited amount of strong beer. Dr. Beddoes proposed to the men that six of them should only drink water for one week, while six others should continue their usual allowance of beer. The men seemed astonished at such a proposition. l Why, you want to kill us ! ' they exclaimed. ' Do you for a moment suppose it possi- ble that we can endure such fatigue, that we can weld a ship's anchor and only drink water ? You must surely intend to ruin us.' ' No,' said the doctor, < I have no such intention. I am a physician, and shall carefully watch the progress, so that no injury shall happen to you. I will put down fifty pounds. Try water for one week ; if you succeed, the fifty pounds are yours ; if not, I shall put them back in my pocket.' They at last agreed to the proposition. The two sets of men were pretty much alike during the first day of the trial; the second day the water drinkers com- plained less of fatigue than the othe>s ; the third day the difference was more apparent, and on Saturday APPENDIX. 127 night the water-drinkers confessed that they never felt so well in all their lives as they had felt that par- ticular week." While Tom Sawyers, the English pugilist, was under training, a gentleman once said to him : " "Well, Tom, of course, in training you must take a good deal of nourishment, such as beefsteak, Barclay's stout, or ale ? " " I'll tell you what it is, sir," said Tom, " I am no teetotaler, and in my time have drunk a good deal more than was good for me ; but when I've any business on hand there's nothing like water and dumb-bells." Weston, the pedestrian, who has walked over five hundred miles in six days, when asked if he did not take any stimulants, an- swered if he had taken any alcoholic drinks he would have lost his wager. The only use he made of alco- hol was to rub his feet with when they became ten- der.' " Alcohol," says Liebig, " by its effect on the nerv- ous system, merely enables the laborer to make up deficient power at the expense of his body ; to con- sume to-day that quantity of strength which ought naturally to have been employed to-morrow. He draws, so to speak, a bill on his bank of health, which must be always renewed, because, for want of means, he can not take it up. He consumes his capital in- stead of his interest, and the inevitable result is the final bankruptcy of a total collapse." "A moderate dose of beer or wine," says Dr. "William Brunton, " would, in most cases, at once di- minish 'the maximum weight which a healthy person could lift. Mental acuteness, accuracy of perception, and delicacy of senses, are all so far opposed by alco- 128 THE POISON PROBLEM. hoi that the maximum efforts of each are incompati- ble with the indigestion of any moderate quantity of fermented liquors." Y. (Page 55.) " It is unanimously admitted," says the Paris "Constitutional," "that the habit of drunkenness has increased in France year by year since the beginning of the century. In all directions its increase is remarked, and complaints are made of the disastrous effects which it produces on public health, as well as on public morality. The habitues of the taverns and the wine-cellars lose all inclination for work ; they desert their workshops during several days of the week, and the gains of the other days are devoted entirely to the indulgence of their passion for drink. Family-life is neglected ; all idea of saving is entirely abandoned. Those drunkards who are mar- ried and fathers of families take no trouble to satisfy the most urgent wants of their wives and children. The money that should supply the household passes into the hands of the tavern-keeper. Often, besides, the misconduct of the husband leads to the miscon- duct of the wife. Despairing of finding any comfort in her home, she seeks for some kind of compensation out of doors. As for the drunkard himself, it is for- tunate if he becomes merely idle and neglectful of his domestic obligations. His moral corruption often goes further. The tavern is a school of vice. ... It is also well known that the habit of drinking ruins the health, that it renders many diseases more danger- ous, and is the direct origin of many others. The French race is deteriorating daily. The drunkenness caused by wine would be less dangerous, but unhap- APPENDIX. 129 pilymen who begin with wine soon crave for stronger stimulants. The passage from one to the other is rapid. Alcohol is taken. In forty years the con- sumption of alcohol has tripled in France. From 350,000 hectolitres in 1820 it increased to 620,000 in 1850, and to 976,000 in 1868. These are the amounts on which duty was paid, and to these must be added all that escaped the customs officers." " Our impression is," says the editor of the San Francisco " Pacific " (April 15, 1872), " that the lowest, slowest, most illiterate, most unimpressible, most un- improvable, if not most vicious population of this State" (California) "outside of the great cities, is found in the oldest wine districts, and that the use of the product of vineyards has been the most active cause of this condition of the population ; that the in- creased production and consumption of wine on this coast, in the more recent years, has diminished the use of neither distilled liquors nor lager beer, but rather increased the demand for both. We never hear of people who forsake liquors and beer for the sake of wine ; but we hear of many who never used an in- toxicant till they learned to love wine, and then have abandoned wine for something more stimulating. In a word, we do not believe that wines reform any- body, and we do believe that they beguile many into drinking habits, and finally into drunkenness, who would never have drunk a drop, but for wine." " I advise no settler in this State to make wine," says Charles Nordhoff. " He runs too many risks with children and laborers, even if he himself escapes. ... I remember a wine-cellar . . . and on a pleasant, 130 THE POISON PROBLEM. sunny afternoon, around these casks, a group of tipsy men hopeless, irredeemable beasts with nothing much to do but to encourage each other to another glass, and to wonder at the Eastern man, who would not drink. There were two or three Indians stagger- ing about the door ; there were swearing and filthy talk inside ; there was a pretentious tasting of this or that other cask by a parcel of sots, who in their hearts would have preferred 'forty-rod whisky.' And a little way off there was a house with women and children, who had only to look out of the door to see this miserable sight, of husband, father, friends, visit- ors, and the hiredmen, spending the afternoon in getting drunk." " The Convention " (of Congregational ministers) " struck a strong blow for the temperance cause,'' writes Rev. Dr. Stone, "by declaring in unequivocal terms against the manufacture and use of wine. This was a point upon which I will confess I had not pre- viously a clear conviction. I had entertained a sort of hope that the manufacture of pure wines and their introduction into general use would crowd out the gross, strong liquors and diminish intemperance. 1 am now fully convinced that this hope was ground- less and delusive. It appears that in the wine-grow- ing districts intemperance is on the increase^ extending even to the youth of both sexes. There is no way but to take ground against the production of grapes for all such purposes. This touches a very large and growing pecuniary interest, and will provoke strenu- ous opposition, but we must save this State, if it can be done, from such investment of capital and labor, and APPENDIX. 131 from the unavoidable increase of drunkenness, profli- gacy, and crime." " The idea entertained in the establishment of free beer-shops," said the London " Times " in 1871, " was that the increased sale of beer would gradually wean men from the temptations of the regular tavern, would promote the consumption of a wholesome national beverage in place of ardent spirits, would break down the monopoly of the old license-houses, and impart, in short, a better character to the whole trade. . . . The result of this experiment did not con- firm the expectation of its promoters. The sale of beer was increased, but the sale of spirituous liquors was not diminished." " The new beer bill," wrote Sidney Smith, in 1831, " has begun its operation. Everybody is drunk. Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state." The report of a Parliamentary committee declares that, "among the direct causes of our national in- temperance, one of the foremost and most prolific is the operation of the legislative act which called free beer-shops into existence." In a summary of more than two thousand paragraphs, the committee states : " 87. Beer-shops the curse of the country." " 88. Intemperance, especially among young men, has much increased since beer-shops were introduced some years ago." " 100. Intemperance, where decreased previous, has increased since enactment of the beer-shop law." " 112. One of the most demoralizing acts of late years." 132 THE POISON PROBLEM. " I have no doubt," says the District Attorney of "Worcester County, Massachusetts, " that the beer-traf- fic is adverse to the enforcement of the liquor law. I do not well understand how the friends of that law can hope to enforce it where the exemption of beer af- fords a cover." And a witness from Essex County : " I am inclined to believe that beer not only creates an appetite for something stronger, but that its immediate influence and effect upon some is more dangerous to the com- munity than that of the stronger liquors, which are liable to make men drunk and helpless, while beer in- toxicates just enough to excite men to acts of vio- lence and crime." VI. (Page 74.) Twenty years ago Dr. Young, Chief of the Bureau of Statistics, estimated the annual consumption in the United States to be at least 220,000,000 gallons, and the cost about $600,000,000. " These figures," he says, " ought to be a sufficient argument. Six hundred million dollars ! The minds of few persons can comprehend this vast sum which is worse than wasted every year. It would pay for 100,000,000 barrels of flour, averaging two and a half barrels to every man, woman, and child in the coun- try. This flour, if placed in wagons, ten barrels in each, would require 10,000 teams, which, allowing eight yards to each, would extend 45,455 miles nearly twice round the earth, or half way to the moon. If the sum were in one dollar notes, it would take one hundred persons one year to count them. If spread on the surface of the ground, so that no spaces should be left between the notes, they would APPENDIX. 133 cover 20,466 acres, forming a parallelogram of six by more than five miles, the walk around it being more than twenty-two miles." It was then hoped that the poison-deluge had reached its highest flood-mark (the great increase of the last decade being ascribed to the demoralizing influences of the war, etc.), but, since 1866, the yearly aggregate of all liquors consumed has increased at a rate even exceeding that of our rapid growth in population. VII. (Page 95.) " It is a profound observation," says Judge Sprague, " that the morality of no people can be maintained above the morality of their laws. Their institutions are an index of their sentiments. Reason, observation, and history all teach this. While gambling-houses were licensed in Paris and New Or- leans, that vice could not there be made disgraceful ; and where prostitution, even, has been licensed, as in some parts of Europe, it has there been viewed in a very different light from the abhorrence with which we regard it. Where polygamy is lawful, a plurality of wives is reputable. If we recur to the history of Rome, we learn that public brothels were there toler- ated with the inscription 'Hie habitat felicitas'* glaring upon their front, as may even now be seen in the ruins of Pompeii ; and, at the same time, public exhibitions of mortal combats by gladiators, and of human victims thrown to wild beasts, were common amusements of the people. And what was the effect upon morals and manners? A combination of the extremes of luxurious license and ferocious barbarism. The laws of a country may reconcile public sentiment to crimes, even the most abhorrent to our nature, to 12 134 THE POISON PROBLEM. murder itself nay, to the murder of one's own off- spring. Where infanticide is allowed, people look on and see parents destroy their own children, not only without remonstrance, but without emotion. . . . Extraordinary efforts, or the impulses of a particular occasion, may, for a time, carry up public sentiment to an elevation above that of legal institutions, but the laws must either be changed to come up to public opinion, or public opinion will be brought down to a level with the laws.' 1 " It is plain to me as the sum in a clear summer sky," says Dr. Humphrey, of Amherst College, " that the license laws of our country constitute one of the main pillars on which the stupendous fabric of intem- perance now rests." And Senator Frelinghuysen adds : " If men will engage in this destructive traffic, if they will stoop to degrade their reason and reap the wages of iniquity, let them no longer have the law-book as a pillow, nor quiet their conscience with the opiate of a court- license." " The point to be decided by the Legislature of these United States," says Dr. Justin Edwards in his " Sixth Report of the American Temperance Society," " to be decided for all coming posterity, is, Shall the sale of ardent spirits as a drink be treated in legislar tion as a virtue or as a vice ? Shall it be licensed, sanctioned by law, and perpetuated to roll its all-per- vading curs33 onward interminably, or shall it be treated as it is, in truth, a sin ? " " An evil always becomes worse by being sustained by the laws of the land," says the Rev. Albert Barnes. APPENDIX. 135 " This fact does much to discourage others in oppos- ing the evil, and endeavoring to turn public indigna- tion against it. It is an unwelcome thing for a good man ever to set himself against the laws of the land, and denounce that as wrong which they affirm to be right." The Hon. "Woodbury Davis, of the Supreme Court of Maine, admits that " one of the most valuable re- sults of prohibitive laws is their effect on public senti- ment in making it disreputable to drink, and in re- straining men from a practice in which they could not indulge, except by doing it secretly, which they do not like to do ; and therefore, aside from its direct influence, perhaps its most valuable work was in mak- ing the use of liquor disgraceful, .and thereby restrain- ing the young from the habit." " License-laws," says Judge Pitman, " carry to the popular mind the implication that, although the traffic in intoxicants is an exceptional one, requiring some special safeguards, yet that there is a legitimate public demand for such liquors as an ordinary beverage, which the State is bound to allow adequate means to supply. On the other hand, prohibitory laws as plainly declare that the sale of intoxicating liquors as a beverage supplies no legitimate want, and is fraught with such dire results to the State as to justify and require its suppression. What is so dangerous to the State can hardly be deemed safe to the citizen, and the natural sequence of prohibition is total abstinence. Suppose, instead of license or strict prohibition, the State adopts some * half -way measure.' If, for in- stance, under a system of 6 local option,' what is crim- 136 THE POISON PROBLEM. inal in the country becomes innocent in the city, does it not tend to the confusion of moral distinctions? 1 it not inevitably lead the thoughtless to pr cally feel, if not to theoretically believe, that, in drink- . as in other things, a different standard of conduct is permissible in the one place from that in the other ? Or, suppose the law undertakes to discriminate be- tween the different kinds of alcoholic beverages, allow- for instance, the sale of malt liquors and prohibit- ing that of distilled spirits, is there not plainly, beyond the enticement offered to the use of the beers by their free public exposure and sale, a most impressive and, at the same time, as we believe, a most dangerous advertisement of them by the State itself as harmless beverages ? The force of these considerations, as to the weight which law has in the popular mind, in matters of opinion and conduct, will be more and more apparent to the reader upon reflection. It may be that the influence of law in the formation of opin- ion, and the regulation of human conduct in matters beyond its domain of positive rule, is excessive. It is true that a right and wise-minded man will find a more unerring external and internal standard for the regulation of his moral belief and his conduct than that of statute-law ; but it is a profound remark of George Eliot that, 'to judge w:^ly. I suppose we must know how things appear to the unwise ; that kind of appearance making the larger part of the world's history.' Soon after the enactment of the present license-law in Massachusetts, I was holding a term of court, when a deputy-sheriff said to me one morning, ' I have just seen a sad sight a fellow per- APPENDIX. 137 snading a reluctant comrade to enter a grog-shop. " Come along," said he, " this is now as respectable a place as any; the Commonwealth of Massachusetts says so." ' But this immediate application of the stat- ute-law to override moral tastes and convictions is the coarser and less dangerous kind of the educational influence which bad laws exert. The greater danger is in the slower and more insidious influence which such laws exert in familiarizing us with public vice ; in accustoming us to its public tolerance ; in repress- ing the natural force of moral indignation ; and in inducing a faithless acquiescence in the inevitableness of moral evil. And, on the other hand, it is in ac- cordance with both philosophy and experience that the effect of prohibitory laws should be surely, if slowly, to discourage the formation of drinking-habits. It is a mistake to suppose that men often rush into evil courses in a spirit of moral defiance. "When the State writes ' criminal' over the doorway of the most elegant drinking-saloon, as well as over the lowest grog-shop; when it places at the bar of justice the tempter by the side of his victim ; and when it stamps every package of liquor as a dangerous beverage, mer- iting destruction as a public nuisance, it has done much to warn the young and unwary, and to turn their feet aside from the downward path." VIII. (Page 111.) " The Women's Christian Tem- perance Union has from the beginning believed that, in its battle with the drink curse, it must adopt the 4 Do Everything Policy.' Into every nook and cor- ner of the awful darkness light must penetrate. . . . The drink-curse shields itself behind false theories of 138 THE POISON PROBLEM. science, hence we must follow it into the schools, medical colleges included." Frances E. Willard. IX. (Page 117.) " Nobody wants to abolish our weekly day of rest. The only question is, how to make it worth as much as possible to those who need it most. . . . The example of Agassiz's Museum should not remain unimitated. Special penalties on Sunday recreations are in force throughout New Eng- land. This legislation does not trouble people who get all the diversion they wish, however expensive. But those who are so fortunate ought to put them- selves in the place of those who have been for six days in such a monotonous round of toil that they crave something new and bright to look at and think about. To deny it is to brutalize them, and predis- pose them to vice." F. M. Holland, "The Poor Man's Sunday." X. (Page 118.) " The ultimate success of the struggle is certain. If any one doubts the general preponderance of good over evil in human nature, he has only to study the history of moral crusades. 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As many eminent physicians have declared that cholera will certainly come to America in 18S5, a memorandum of the New York tftate Beard ot Health relating to the prevention of the disease has been introduced, together with directions for home treatment, includins recipes for medicines. The book, though aiming especially to interest women, U addressed to all readers who desire a popular and practical presentation of this important subject: quotations from the writings of able physicians and sanitarians have been freely used, and evidently care has been taken to make a useful and reliable book. 1 ' The Popular Science Monthly. u Mrs. H. M. Plunkett has written a book that will prove a blessing in thousands of households, if only its important lessons are heeded. She clearly shows why women should understand the details as well as the theory of sanitation, and furnishes all Information to enable them to possess such an understanding." Boston Home Jour- nal. 'The work is well written, and the diagrams showing the perfect and imperfect work are simple and easily understood : it is well worth perusal by every father, and more particularly by every mother of a family, showing, as it does,' where most of the seeds of disease germinaie." Rochester Pjoy ; the Smells we Dislike ; the Colors we Admire ; What we Breathe and Breathe for; What, How, and Why we Digest ; the Body we Cherish ; the Circulation of Matter. In the number and variety of striking illustrations, in the simplicity of its etyle. and in the closeness and cogency of its arguments, Professor Johnston's " Chemistry of Common Life " has as yet found no equal among the many books of a similar character which its success originated, and it steadily maintains its preeminence in the popular scientific literature of the day. In preparing this edition for the press, the editor had the opportunity of consulting Professor Johnston's private and corrected copy of " The Chemistry of Common Life," Who had, before his death, cleaned very many fresfc details, so that he was able not only to incorporate with his revision seme really valuable matter, but to kirn the kind of addition which the author contemplated. New York : D. APPLETOX & CO., 1, 3, & 6 Bond Street 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. RENEWALS ONLY TEL NO. 642-3405 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or ft on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 27 HA LD21- LD 21A-40m-2,'69 (J6057slO)476 A-32 General Library University of California Berkeley LD 968 * -'of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY