zealous and well-meant effort in the "cause," they agree that people
are drinking more than ever. Dr. R. T. Trall of New York, the most
thoroughgoing teetotaler extant, exclaims: "Where are we to-day?
Defeated on all sides. The enemy victorious and rampant everywhere.
More intoxicating liquors manufactured and drunk than ever before. Why
is this?" Why, indeed! When the teetotalers can answer that question
correctly, they will be in a fair way to gain upon the "enemy" that is
now so "rampant." They are not the first people who have mistaken a
symptom of disease for the disease itself, and striven to cure a cancer
by applying salve and plaster and cooling washes to the sore. They are
not the first travellers through this Wilderness who have tried to
extinguish a smouldering fire, and discovered, at last, that they had
been pouring water into the crater of a volcano.
Dr. Trall thinks we should all become teetotalers very soon, if only
the doctors would stop prescribing wine, beer, and whiskey to their
patients. But the doctors will not. They like a glass of wine
themselves. Dr. Trall tells us that, during the Medical Convention held
at St. Louis a few years ago, the doctors dined together, and upon the
table were "forty kinds of alcoholic liquors." The most enormous feed
ever accomplished under a roof in America, I suppose, was the great
dinner of the doctors, given in New York, fifteen years ago, at the
Metropolitan Hall. I had the pleasure on that occasion of seeing half
an acre of doctors all eating and drinking at once, and I can testify
that very few of them--indeed, none that I could discover--neglected
the bottle. It was an occasion which united all the established
barbarisms of a public dinner,--absence of ladies, indigestible food in
most indigestible quantities, profuse and miscellaneous drinking,
clouds of smoke, late sitting, and wild speaking. Why not? Do not these
men live and thrive upon such practices? Why should they not set an
example of the follies which enrich them? It is only heroes who offend,
deny, and rebuke the people upon whose favor their fortune depends; and
there are never many heroes in the world at one time. No, no, Dr.
Trall! the doctors are good fellows; but their affair is to cure
disease, not to preserve health.
One man, it seems, and only one, has had much success in dissuading
people from drinking, and that was Father Mathew. A considerable
proportion of his converts in Ireland, it is said, remain faithful to
their pledge; and most of the Catholic parishes in the United States
have a Father Mathew Society connected with them, which is both a
teetotal and a mutual-benefit organization. In New York and adjacent
cities the number of persons belonging to such societies is about
twenty-seven thousand. On the anniversary of Father Mathew's birth they
walk in procession, wearing aprons, carrying large banners (when the
wind permits), and heaping up gayly dressed children into pyramids and
mountains drawn by six and eight horses. At their weekly or monthly
meetings they sing songs, recite poetry, perform plays and farces,
enact comic characters, and, in other innocent ways, endeavor to
convince on-lookers that people can be happy and merry, uproariously
merry, without putting a headache between their teeth. These societies
seem to be a great and unmingled good. They do actually help poor men
to withstand their only American enemy. They have, also, the approval
of the most inveterate drinkers, both Catholic and Protestant. Jones
complacently remarks, as he gracefully sips his claret (six dollars per
dozen) that this total abstinence, you know, is an excellent thing for
emigrants; to which Brown and Robinson invariably assent.
Father Mathew used to administer his pledge to people who _knelt_
before him, and when they had taken it he made over them the sign of
the cross. He did not usually deliver addresses; he did not relate
amusing anecdotes; he did not argue the matter; he merely pronounced
the pledge, and gave to it the sanction of religion, and something of
the solemnity of a sacrament. The present Father Mathew Societies are
also closely connected with the church, and the pledge is regarded by
the members as of religious obligation. Hence, these societies are
successful, in a respectable degree; and we may look, with the utmost
confidence, to see them extend and flourish until a great multitude of
Catholics are teetotalers. Catholic priests, I am informed, generally
drink wine, and very many of them smoke; but _they_ are able to induce
men to take the pledge without setting them an example of abstinence,
just as parents sometimes deny their children pernicious viands of
which they freely partake themselves.
But _we_ cannot proceed in that way. Our religion has not power to
control a physical craving by its mere fiat, nor do we all yet perceive
what a deadly and shameful sin it is to vitiate our own bodies. The
Catholic Church is antiquity. The Catholic Church is childhood. _We_
are living in modern times; _we_ have grown a little past childhood;
and when we are asked to relinquish a pleasure, we demand to be
convinced that it is best we should. By and by we shall all comprehend
that, when a person means to reform his life, the very first thing for
him to do--the thing preliminary and most indispensable--will be to
cease violating physical laws. The time, I hope, is at hand, when an
audience in a theatre, who catch a manager cheating them out of their
fair allowance of fresh air, will not sit and gasp, and inhale
destruction till eleven P.M., and then rush wildly to the street for
relief. They will stop the play; they will tear up the benches, if
necessary; they will throw things on the stage; they will knock a hole
in the wall; they will _have_ the means of breathing, or perish in the
struggle. But at present people do not know what they are doing when
they inhale poison. They do not know that more than one half of all the
diseases that plague us most--scarlet fever, small-pox, measles, and
all the worst fevers--come of breathing bad air. Not a child last
winter would have had the scarlet fever, if all the children in the
world had slept with a window open, and had had pure air to breathe all
day. This is Miss Nightingale's opinion, and there is no better
authority. People are ignorant of these things, and they are therefore
indifferent to them. They will remain indifferent till they are
enlightened.
Our teetotal friends have not neglected the scientific questions
involved in their subject; nor have they settled them. Instead of
insulting the public intelligence by asserting that the wines mentioned
in the Bible were some kind of unintoxicating slop, and exasperating
the public temper by premature prohibitory laws, they had better
expend their strength upon the science of the matter, and prove to
mankind, if they can, that these agreeable drinks which they
denounce are really hurtful. We all know that excess is hurtful.
We also know that adulterated liquors may be. But is the thing in
itself pernicious?--pure wine taken in moderation? good beer? genuine
Old Bourbon?
For one, I wish it could be demonstrated that these things are hurtful.
Sweeping, universal truths are as convenient as they are rare. The
evils resulting from excess in drinking are so enormous and so
terrible, that it would be a relief to know that alcoholic liquors are
in themselves evil, and to be always avoided. What are the romantic
woes of a Desdemona, or the brief picturesque sorrows of a Lear,
compared with the thirty years' horror and desolation caused by a
drunken parent? We laugh when we read Lamb's funny description of his
waking up in the morning, and learning in what condition he had come
home the night before by seeing all his clothes carefully folded. But
his sister Mary did not laugh at it. He was all she had; it was tragedy
to her,--this self-destruction of her sole stay and consolation. Goethe
did not find it a laughing matter to have a drunken wife in his house
for fifteen years, nor a jest to have his son brought in drunk from the
tavern, and to see him dead in his coffin, the early victim of
champagne. Who would not _like_ to have a clear conviction, that what
we have to do with regard to all such fluids is to let them alone? I am
sure I should. It is a great advantage to have your enemy in plain
sight, and to be sure he _is_ an enemy.
What is wine? Chemists tell us they do not know. Three fifths of a
glass of wine is water. One fifth is alcohol. Of the remaining fifth,
about one half is sugar. One tenth of the whole quantity remains to be
accounted for. A small part of that tenth is the acid which makes
vinegar sour. Water, alcohol, sugar, acid,--these make very nearly the
whole body of the wine; but if we mix these things in the proportions
in which they are found in Madeira, the liquid is a disgusting mess,
nothing like Madeira. The great chemists confess they do not know what
that last small fraction of the glass of wine is, upon which its
flavor, its odor, its fascination, depend. They do not know what it is
that makes the difference between port and sherry, but are obliged to
content themselves with giving it a hard name.
Similar things are admitted concerning the various kinds of spirituous
and malt liquors. Chemistry seems to agree with the temperance society,
that wine, beer, brandy, gin, whiskey, and rum are alcohol and water,
mixed in different proportions, and with some slight differences of
flavoring and coloring matter. In all these drinks, teetotalers
maintain, _alcohol is power_, the other ingredients being mere dilution
and flavoring. Wine, they assure us, is alcohol and water flavored with
grapes; beer is alcohol and water flavored with malt and hops; Bourbon
whiskey is alcohol and water flavored with corn. These things they
assert, and the great chemists do not enable us drinkers of those
seductive liquids to deny it. On the contrary, chemical analysis, so
far as it has gone, supports the teetotal view of the matter.
What does a glass of wine do to us when we have swallowed it?
We should naturally look to physicians for an answer to such a
question; but the great lights of the profession--men of the rank of
Astley Cooper, Brodie, Abernethy, Holmes--all assure the public, that
no man of them knows, and no man has ever known, how medicinal
substances work in the system, and why they produce the effects they
do. Even of a substance so common as Peruvian bark, no one knows why
and how it acts as a tonic; nor is there any certainty of its being a
benefit to mankind. There is no science of medicine. The "Red Lane" of
the children leads to a region which is still mysterious and unknown;
for when the eye can explore its recesses, a change has occurred in it,
which is also mysterious and unknown: it is dead. Quacks tell us, in
every newspaper, that they can cure and prevent disease by pouring or
dropping something down our throats, and we have heard this so often,
that, when a man is sick, the first thing that occurs to him is to
"take physic." But physicians who are honest, intelligent, and in an
independent position, appear to be coming over to the opinion that this
is generally a delusion. We see eminent physicians prescribing for the
most malignant fevers little but open windows, plenty of blankets,
Nightingale nursing, and beef tea. Many young physicians, too, have
gladly availed themselves of the ingenuity of Hahnemann, and satisfy at
once their consciences and their patients by prescribing doses of
medicine that are next to no medicine at all. The higher we go among
the doctors, the more sweeping and emphatic is the assurance we receive
that the profession does not understand the operation of medicines in
the living body, and does not really approve their employment.
If something more is known of the operation of alcohol than of any
other chemical fluid,--if there is any approach to certainty respecting
it,--we owe it chiefly to the teetotalers, because it is they who have
provoked contradiction, excited inquiry, and suggested experiment. They
have not done much themselves in the way of investigation, but they
started the topic, and have kept it alive. They have also published a
few pages which throw light upon the points in dispute. After going
over the ground pretty thoroughly, I can tell the reader in a few words
the substance of what has been ascertained, and plausibly inferred,
concerning the effects of wine, beer, and spirits upon the human
constitution.
They cannot be _nourishment_, in the ordinary acceptation of that word,
because the quantity of nutritive matter in them is so small. Liebig,
no enemy of beer, says this: "We can prove, with mathematical
certainty, that as much flour or meal as can lie on the point of a
table-knife is more nutritious than nine quarts of the best Bavarian
beer; that a man who is able daily to consume that amount of beer
obtains from it, in a whole year, in the most favorable case, exactly
the amount of nutritive constituents which is contained in a five-pound
loaf of bread, or in three pounds of flesh." So of wine; when we have
taken from a glass of wine the ingredients known to be innutritious,
there is scarcely anything left but a grain or two of sugar. Pure
alcohol, though a product of highly nutritive substances, is a mere
poison,--an absolute poison,--the mortal foe of life in every one of
its forms, animal and vegetable. If, therefore, these beverages do us
good, it is not by supplying the body with nourishment.
Nor can they aid digestion by assisting to decompose food. When we have
taken too much shad for breakfast, we find that a wineglass of whiskey
instantly mitigates the horrors of indigestion, and enables us again to
contemplate the future without dismay. But if we catch a curious fish
or reptile, and want to keep him from decomposing, and bring him home
as a contribution to the Museum of Professor Agassiz, we put him in a
bottle of whiskey. Several experiments have been made with a view to
ascertain whether mixing alcohol with the gastric juice increases or
lessens its power to decompose food, and the results of all of them
point to the conclusion that the alcohol retards the process of
decomposition. A little alcohol retards it a little, and much alcohol
retards it much. It has been proved by repeated experiment, that any
portion of alcohol, however small, diminishes the power of the gastric
juice to decompose. The digestive fluid has been mixed with wine, beer,
whiskey, brandy, and alcohol diluted with water, and kept at the
temperature of the living body, and the motions of the body imitated
during the experiment; but, in every instance, the pure gastric juice
was found to be the true and sole digester, and the alcohol a retarder
of digestion. This fact, however, required little proof. We are all
familiar with alcohol as a _preserver_, and scarcely need to be
reminded, that, if alcohol assists digestion at all, it cannot be by
assisting decomposition.
Nor is it a heat-producing fluid. On the contrary, it appears, in all
cases, to diminish the efficiency of the heat-producing process. Most
of us who live here in the North, and who are occasionally subjected to
extreme cold for hours at a time, know this by personal experience; and
all the Arctic voyagers attest it. Brandy is destruction when men have
to face a temperature of sixty below zero; they want lamp-oil then, and
the rich blubber of the whale and walrus. Dr. Rae, who made two or
three pedestrian tours of the polar regions, and whose powers of
endurance were put to as severe a test as man's ever were, is clear and
emphatic upon this point. Brandy, he says, stimulates but for a few
minutes, and greatly lessens a man's power to endure cold and fatigue.
Occasionally we have in New York a cool breeze from the North which
reduces the temperature below zero,--to the sore discomfort of
omnibus-drivers and car-drivers, who have to face it on their way up
town. On a certain Monday night, two or three winters ago, twenty-three
drivers on one line were disabled by the cold, many of whom had to be
lifted from the cars and carried in. It is a fact familiar to persons
in this business, that men who drink freely are more likely to be
benumbed and overcome by the cold than those who abstain. It seems
strange to us, when we first hear it, that a meagre teetotaller should
be safer on such a night than a bluff, red-faced imbiber of beer and
whiskey, who takes something at each end of the line to keep himself
warm. It nevertheless appears to be true. A traveller relates, that,
when Russian troops are about to start upon a march in a very cold
region, no grog is allowed to be served to them; and when the men are
drawn up, ready to move, the corporals smell the breath of every man,
and send back to quarters all who have been drinking. The reason is,
that men who start under the influence of liquor are the first to
succumb to the cold, and the likeliest to be frost-bitten. It is the
uniform experience of the hunters and trappers in the northern
provinces of North America, and of the Rocky Mountains, that alcohol
diminishes their power to resist cold. A whole magazine could be filled
with testimony on this point.
Still less is alcohol a strength-giver. Every man that ever trained for
a supreme exertion of strength knows that Tom Sayers spoke the truth
when he said: "I'm no teetotaller: but when I've any business to do,
there's nothing like water and the dumb-bells." Richard Cobden, whose
powers were subjected to a far severer trial than a pugilist ever
dreamed of, whose labors by night and day, during the corn-law
struggle, were excessive and continuous beyond those of any other
member of the House of Commons, bears similar testimony: "The more work
I have to do, the more I have resorted to the pump and the teapot." On
this branch of the subject, _all_ the testimony is against alcoholic
drinks. Whenever the point has been tested,--and it has often been
tested,--the truth has been confirmed, that he who would do his _very_
best and most, whether in rowing, lifting, running, watching, mowing,
climbing, fighting, speaking, or writing, must not admit into his
system one drop of alcohol. Trainers used to allow their men a pint of
beer per day, and severe trainers half a pint; but now the knowing ones
have cut off even that moderate allowance, and brought their men down
to cold water, and not too much of that, the soundest digesters
requiring little liquid of any kind. Mr. Bigelow, by his happy
publication lately of the correct version of Franklin's Autobiography,
has called to mind the famous beer passage in that immortal work: "I
drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great
guzzlers[1] of beer. On occasion I carried up and down stairs a large
form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands."
I have a long list of references on this point; but, in these
cricketing, boat-racing, prize-fighting days, the fact has become too
familiar to require proof. The other morning, Horace Greeley,
teetotaler, came to his office after an absence of several days, and
found letters and arrears of work that would have been appalling to any
man but him. He shut himself in at ten A.M., and wrote steadily,
without leaving his room, till eleven, P.M.,--thirteen hours. When he
had finished, he had some little difficulty in getting down stairs,
owing to the stiffness of his joints, caused by the long inaction; but
he was as fresh and smiling the next morning as though he had done
nothing extraordinary. Are any of us drinkers of beer and wine capable
of such a feat? Then, during the war, when he was writing his history,
he performed every day, for two years, two days' work,--one from nine
to four, on his book; the other from seven to eleven, upon the Tribune;
and, in addition, he did more than would tire an ordinary man in the
way of correspondence and public speaking. I may also remind the
reader, that the clergyman who, of all others in the United States,
expends most vitality, both with tongue and pen, and who does his work
with least fatigue and most gayety of heart, is another of Franklin's
"water Americans."
[1] We owe to Mr. Bigelow the restoration of this strong
Franklinian word. The common editions have it "drinkers."
If, then, wine does not nourish us, does not assist the decomposition
of food, does not warm, does not strengthen, what does it do?
We all know that, when we drink alcoholic liquor, it affects the brain
immediately. Most of us are aware, too, that it affects the brain
injuriously, lessening at once its power to discern and discriminate.
If I, at this ten, A.M., full of interest in this subject, and eager to
get my view of it upon paper, were to drink a glass of the best port,
Madeira, or sherry, or even a glass of lager-bier, I should lose the
power to continue in three minutes; or, if I persisted in going on, I
should be pretty sure to utter paradox and spurts of extravagance,
which would not bear the cold review of to-morrow morning. Any one can
try this experiment. Take two glasses of wine, and then immediately
apply yourself to the hardest task your mind ever has to perform, and
you will find you cannot do it. Let any student, just before he sits
down to his mathematics, drink a pint of the purest beer, and he will
be painfully conscious of loss of power. Or, let any salesman, before
beginning with a difficult but important customer, perform the idiotic
action of "taking a drink," and he will soon discover that his
ascendency over his customer is impaired. In some way this alcohol, of
which we are so fond, gets to the brain and injures it. We are
conscious of this, and we can observe it. It is among the wine-drinking
classes of our fellow-beings, that absurd, incomplete, and reactionary
ideas prevail. The receptive, the curious, the candid, the trustworthy
brains,--those that do not take things for granted, and yet are ever
open to conviction,--such heads are to be found on the shoulders of men
who drink little or none of these seductive fluids. How we all wondered
that England should _think_ so erroneously, and adhere to its errors so
obstinately, during our late war! Mr. Gladstone has in part explained
the mystery. The adults of England, he said, in his famous wine speech,
drink, on an average, three hundred quarts of beer each per annum! Now,
it is physically impossible for a human brain, muddled every day with a
quart of beer, to correctly hold correct opinions, or appropriate pure
knowledge. Compare the conversation of a group of Vermont farmers,
gathered on the stoop of a country store on a rainy afternoon, with
that which you may hear in the farmers' room of a market-town inn in
England! The advantage is not wholly with the Vermonters; by no means,
for there is much in human nature besides the brain and the things of
the brain. But in this one particular--in the topics of conversation,
in the interest manifested in large and important subjects--the
water-drinking Vermonters are to the beer-drinking Englishmen what
Franklin was to the London printers. It is beyond the capacity of a
well-beered brain even to read the pamphlet on Liberty and Necessity
which Franklin wrote in those times.