getting up in the morning, after a heavy, restless, drunkard's sleep,
he is miserable beyond expression, and almost helpless. In very bad
cases, he will see double, and his hands will tremble so that he cannot
lift to his lips the glass for which he has a desire amounting to
mania. Two or three stiff glasses of spirituous liquor will restore him
so far that he can control his muscles, and get about without betraying
his condition. After being up an hour, and drinking every ten or
fifteen minutes, he will usually be able to eat a pretty good
breakfast, which, with the aid of coffee, tobacco, and a comparatively
small quantity of liquor, he will be able to digest. After breakfast,
for some hours he will generally be able to transact routine business,
and associate with his fellows without exciting their pity or contempt.
As dinner-time draws near he feels the necessity of creating an
appetite; which he often accomplishes by drinking some of those
infernal compounds which are advertised on the eternal rocks and
mountain-sides as Bitters,--a mixture of bad drugs with worse spirits.
These bitters do lash the torpid powers into a momentary, morbid,
fierce activity, which enables the victim to eat even a superabundant
dinner. The false excitement subsides, but the dinner remains, and it
has to be digested. This calls for an occasional drink for three or
four hours, after which the system is exhausted, and the man feels dull
and languid. He is exhausted, but he is not tranquil; he craves a
continuation of the stimulant with a craving which human nature, so
abused and perverted, never resists. By this time it is evening, when
all the apparatus of temptation is in the fullest activity, and all the
loose population of the town is abroad. He now begins his evening
debauch, and keeps up a steady drinking until he can drink no more,
when he stumbles home to sleep off the stupefying fumes, and awake to
the horror and decrepitude of a drunkard's morning.
The quantity of spirituous liquor required to keep one of these unhappy
men in this degrading slavery varies from a pint a day to two quarts.
Many drunkards consume a quart of whiskey every day for years. The
regular allowance of one gentleman of the highest position, both social
and official, who made his way to the Inebriate Asylum, had been two
quarts of brandy a day for about five years. The most remarkable known
case is that of a hoary-headed man of education and fortune, residing
in the city of New York, who confesses to taking "fifty drinks a day"
of whiskey,--ten drinks to a bottle, and five bottles to a gallon. One
gallon of liquor, he _says_, goes down his old throat every day of the
year. Before he is fit to eat his breakfast in the morning he has to
drink twelve glasses of whiskey, or one bottle and one fifth.
Nevertheless, even this poor man is able, for some hours of the
morning, to transact what people of property and leisure call business,
and, during a part of the evening, to converse in such a way as to
amuse persons who can look on and see a human being in such bondage
without stopping to think what a tragedy it is. This Old Boy never has
to be carried home, I believe. He is one of those most hopeless
drunkards who never get drunk, never wallow in the gutter, never do
anything to scare or startle them into an attempt to reform. He is like
a certain German "puddler" who was pointed out to me in a Pittsburg
iron-works, who consumes exactly seven dollars' worth of lager-bier
every seven days,--twenty glasses a day, at five cents each. He is also
like the men employed in the dismal work of the brewery, who are
allowed as much beer as they can drink, and who generally do drink as
much as they can. Such persons are always fuddled and stupid, but
seldom drunk enough to alarm their neighbors or themselves. Perhaps
they are the only persons in all the world who are in any degree
justified in passing their lives in a state of suspended intelligence;
those of them at least whose duty it is to get inside of enormous beer
barrels, and there, in darkness and solitude, in an atmosphere reeking
and heavy with stale ale, scrape and mop them out before they are
refilled. When you see their dirty, pale faces at the "man-hole" of the
barrel, down in the rumbling bowels of the earth, in one of those vast
caves of beer in Cincinnati, you catch yourself saying, "Drink, poor
devils, drink! Soak what brains you have in beer!" What can a man want
with brains in a beer-barrel? But then, you think again, even these
poor men need their brains when they get home; and _we_ need that they
should have brains on the first Tuesday in November.
It is that _going home_ which makes drunkenness so dire a tragedy. If
the drunkard could only shut himself up with a whiskey-barrel, or a
pipe of Madeira, and quietly guzzle himself to death, it would be a
pity, but it could be borne. He never does this; he goes home to make
that home perdition to some good souls that love him, or depend upon
him, and cannot give him up. There are men at the Asylum near
Binghamton, who have admirable wives, beautiful and accomplished
daughters, venerable parents, whose portraits are there in the
patient's trunks, and who write daily letters to cheer the absent one,
whose absence now, for the firsts time in years, does not terrify them.
_They_ are the victims of drunkenness,--they who never taste strong
drink. For _their_ deliverance, this Asylum stands upon its hill
justified in existing. The men themselves are interesting, valuable,
precious, worth every rational effort that can be made to save them;
but it is those whom they left at home anxious and desolate that have
the first claim upon our consideration.
With regard to these steady, regular drunkards, the point to be noted
is this: very few of them can stop drinking while they continue to
perform their daily labor; they absolutely _depend_ upon the alcohol to
rouse their torpid energies to activity. Their jaded constitutions will
not budge without the spur. Everything within them gapes and hungers
for the accustomed stimulant. This is the case, even in a literal
sense; for it seems, from Dr. Day's dissections, that the general
effect of excessive drinking is to enlarge the globules of which the
brain, the blood, the liver, and other organs are composed, so that
those globules, as it were, stand open-mouthed, empty, athirst,
inflamed, and most eager to be filled. A man whose every organ is thus
diseased cannot usually take the first step toward cure without ceasing
for a while to make any other demands upon himself. This is the great
fact of his condition. If he is a true drunkard, i.e. if he has lost
the power to do his work without excessive alcoholic stimulation, then
there is no cure possible for him without rest. Here we have the simple
explanation of Mrs. Stowe's fine remark just quoted. This is why so
many thousand wives spend their days in torment between hope and
despair,--hope kindled by the husband's efforts to regain possession of
himself, and despair caused by his repeated, his inevitable relapses.
The unfortunate man tries to do two things at once, the easiest of
which is as much as he can accomplish; while the hardest is a task
which, even with the advantage of perfect rest, few can perform without
assistance.
The Occasional Drunkard is a man who is a teetotaler for a week, two
weeks, a month, three months, six months, and who, at the end of his
period, is tempted to drink one glass of alcoholic liquor. That one
glass has upon him two effects; it rouses the slumbering demon of
Desire, and it perverts his moral judgment. All at once his honor and
good name, the happiness and dignity of his family, his success in
business, all that he held dearest a moment before, seem small to him,
and he thinks he has been a fool of late to concern himself so much
about them. Or else he thinks he can drink without being found out, and
without its doing him the harm it did the last time. Whatever may be
the particular delusion that seizes him, the effect is the same; he
drinks, and drinks, and drinks, keeping it up sometimes for ten days,
or even for several weeks, until the long debauch ends in utter
exhaustion or in delirium tremens. He is then compelled to submit to
treatment; he must needs go to the Inebriate Asylum of his own
bed-room. There, whether he raves or droops, he is the most miserable
wretch on earth; for, besides the bodily tortures which he surfers, he
has to endure the most desolating pang that a decent human being ever
knows,--the loss of his self-respect. He abhors himself and is ashamed;
he remembers past relapses and despairs; he cannot look his own
children in the face; he wishes he had never been born, or had died in
the cursed hour, vividly remembered, when this appetite mastered him
first. As his health is restored, his hopes revive; he renews his
resolution and he resumes his ordinary routine, subdued, distrustful of
himself, and on the watch against temptation. Why he again relapses he
can hardly tell, but he always does. Sometimes a snarl in business
perplexes him, and he drinks for elucidation. Sometimes melancholy
oppresses him, and he drinks to drive dull care away. Sometimes good
fortune overtakes him, or an enchanting day in June or October attunes
his heart to joy, and he is taken captive by the strong delusion that
now is the time to drink and be glad. Often it is lovely woman who
offers the wine, and offers it in such a way that he thinks he cannot
refuse without incivility or confession. From conversation with the
inmates of the Inebriate Asylum, I am confident that Mr. Greeley's
assertion with regard to the wine given at the Communion is correct.
That sip might be enough to awaken the desire. The mere odor of the
wine filling the church might be too much for some men.
There appears to be a physical cause for this extreme susceptibility.
Dr. Day has once had the opportunity to examine the brain of a man who,
after having been a drunkard, reformed, and lived for some years a
teetotaler. He found, to his surprise, that the globules of the brain
had not shrunk to their natural size. They did not exhibit the
inflammation of the drunkard's brain, but they were still enlarged, and
seemed ready on the instant to absorb the fumes of alcohol, and resume
their former condition. He thought he saw in this morbid state of the
brain the physical part of the reason why a man who has once been a
drunkard can never again, as long as he lives, safely take one drop of
any alcoholic liquor. He thought he saw why a glass of wine puts the
man back instantly to where he was when he drank all the time. He saw
the citadel free from the enemy, swept and clean, but undefended,
incapable of defence, and its doors opened wide to the enemy's return;
so that there was no safety, except in keeping the foe at a distance,
away beyond the outermost wall.
There are many varieties of these occasional drunkards, and, as a
class, they are perhaps the hardest to cure. Edgar Poe was one of them;
half a glass of wine would set him off upon a wild, reckless debauch,
that would last for days. All such persons as artists, writers, and
actors used to be particularly subject to this malady, before they had
any recognized place in the world, or any acknowledged right to exist
at all. Men whose labors are intense, but irregular, whose gains are
small and uncertain, who would gladly be gentlemen, but are compelled
to content themselves with being loafers, are in special danger; and so
are men whose toil is extremely monotonous. Printers, especially those
who work at night upon newspapers, are, perhaps, of all men the most
liable to fall under the dominion of drink. Some of them have persuaded
themselves that they rest under a kind of necessity to "go on a tear"
now and then, as a relief from such grinding work as theirs. On the
contrary, one "tear" creates the temptation to another; for the man
goes back to his work weak, depressed, and irritable; the monotony of
his labor is aggravated by the incorrectness with which he does it, and
the longing to break loose and renew the oblivion of drink strengthens
rapidly, until it masters him once more.
Of these periodical drunkards it is as true as it is of their regular
brethren, that they cannot conquer the habit without being relieved for
a while of their daily labor. This malady is so frequent among us, that
hardly an individual will cast his eyes over these pages who cannot
call to mind at least one person who has struggled with it for many
years, and struggled in vain. They attempt too much. Their periodical
"sprees," "benders," or "tears" are a connected series, each a cause
and an effect, an heir and a progenitor. After each debauch, the man
returns to his routine in just the state of health, in just the state
of mind, to be irritated, disgusted, and exhausted by that routine;
and, at every moment of weakness, there is always present the
temptation to seek the deadly respite of alcohol. The moment arrives
when the desire becomes too strong for him, and the victim yields to it
by a law as sure, as irresistible, as that which makes the apple seek
the earth's centre when it is disengaged from the tree.
It is amazing to see how helpless men can be against such a habit,
while they are compelled to continue their daily round of duties. Not
ignorant men only, nor bad men, nor weak men, but men of good
understanding, of rare gifts, of the loftiest aspirations, of
characters the most amiable, engaging, and estimable, and of will
sufficient for every purpose but this. They _know_ the ruin that awaits
them, or in which they are already involved, better than we other
sinners know it; they hate their bondage worse than the most
uncharitable of their friends can despise it; they look with
unutterable envy upon those who still have dominion over themselves;
many, very many of them would give all they have for deliverance; and
yet self-deliverance is impossible. There are men among them who have
been trying for thirty years to abstain, and still they drink. Some of
them have succeeded in lengthening the sober interval, and they will
live with strictest correctness for six months or more, and then,
taking that first fatal glass, will immediately lose their
self-control, and drink furiously for days and nights; drink until they
are obliged to use drunken artifice to get the liquid into their
mouths,--their hands refusing their office. Whether they take a large
quantity of liquor every day, or an immense quantity periodically,
makes no great difference, the disease is essentially the same; the
difficulties in the way of cure are the same; the remedial measures
must be the same. A drunkard, in short, is a person so diseased by
alcohol, that he cannot get through his work without keeping his system
saturated with it, or without such weariness and irritation as furnish
irresistible temptation to a debauch. He is, in other words, a fallen
brother, who cannot get upon his feet without help, and who can
generally get upon his feet with help.
Upon this truth Inebriate Asylums are founded; their object being to
afford the help needed. There are now four such institutions in the
United States: one in Boston, opened in 1857, called the Washingtonian
Home; one in Media, near Philadelphia, opened in 1867, called the
Sanitarium; one at Chicago, opened in 1868; and one at Binghamton, New
York, called the New York Inebriate Asylum. The one last named was
founded in 1858, if the laying of the corner-stone with grand
ceremonial can be called founding it; and it has been opened some years
for the reception of patients; but it had no real existence as an
asylum for the cure of inebriates until the year 1867, when the present
superintendent, Dr. Albert Day, assumed control.
The history of the institution previous to that time ought to be
related fully for the warning of a preoccupied and subscribing public,
but space cannot be afforded for it here. The substance of it, as
developed in sundry reports of trials and pamphlets of testimony, is
this: Fifteen or twenty years ago, an English adventurer living in the
city of New York, calling himself a doctor, and professing to treat
unnamable diseases, thought he saw in this notion of an Inebriate
Asylum (then much spoken of) a chance for feathering his nest. He
entered upon the enterprise without delay, and he displayed a good deal
of nervous energy in getting the charter, collecting money, and
erecting the building. The people of Binghamton, misled by his
representations, gave a farm of two hundred and fifty-two acres for the
future inmates to cultivate, which was two hundred acres too much; and
to this tract farms still more superfluous have been added, until the
Asylum estate contains more than five hundred acres. An edifice was
begun on the scale of an imperial palace, which will have cost, by the
time it is finished and furnished, a million dollars. The restless man
pervaded the State raising money, and creating public opinion in favor
of the institution. For several years he was regarded as one of the
great originating philanthropists of the age; and this the more because
he always gave out that he was laboring in the cause from pure love of
the inebriate, and received no compensation.
But the time came when his real object and true character were
revealed. In 1864 he carried his disinterestedness so far as to offer
to _give_ to the institution, as part of its permanent fund, the entire
amount to which he said he was entitled for services rendered and
expenses incurred. This amount was two hundred and thirty-two thousand
dollars, which would certainly have been a handsome gift. When he was
asked for the items of his account, he said he had charged for eighteen
years' services in founding the institution, at thirty-five hundred
dollars a year, and the rest was travelling-expenses, clerk hire, and
salaries paid to agents. The trustees were puzzled to know how a man
who, at the beginning of the enterprise, had no visible property, could
have expended so much out of his private resources, while exercising an
unremunerated employment. Leaving that conundrum unsolved, they were
able at length to conjecture the object of the donation. One of the
articles of the charter provided that any person giving ten dollars to
the institution should be a stockholder, and entitled to a vote at the
election of trustees. Every gift of ten dollars was a vote! If,
therefore, this astounding claim had been allowed, and the _gift_
accepted, the audacious villain would have been constituted owner of
four fifths of the governing stock, and the absolute controller of the
entire property of the institution! It was a bold game, and the
strangest part of the story is, that it came near succeeding. It
required the most arduous exertions of a public-spirited board of
trustees, headed by Dr. Willard Parker, to oust the man who, even after
the discovery of his scheme, played his few last cards so well that he
had to be bought off by a considerable sum cash down. An incident of
the disastrous reign of this individual was the burning of one of the
wings of the building, after he had had it well insured. The insurance
was paid him ($81,000); and there was a trial for arson,--a crime which
is easy to commit, and hard to prove. Binghamton convicted the
prisoner, but the jury was obliged to acquit him.[3]
[3] The man and his confederates must have carried off an
enormous booty. The local trustees say, in their Report for
1867:--
"Less than two years ago the Asylum received about $81,000
from insurance companies for damage done by fire to the north
wing. About $20,000 have since been received from the
counties; making from these two sources about $100,000; and,
although the buildings and grounds remain in the same
unfinished state as when the fire occurred, except a small
amount of work done in one or two wards in the south wing,
the $100,000 have nearly disappeared.... Aside from the
payment of interest and insurance, this money has been
expended by Dr. ----, and in just such ways as he thought
proper to use it.
"It may well be asked why this is so. The answer is, that Dr.
---- assumes and exercises supreme control, and allows no
interference, at least on the part of the resident
trustees....
"His control and management of everything connected with the
institution has been as absolute in fact, if not in form, as
if he were its sole proprietor. He goes to Albany to obtain
legislation giving him extraordinary police powers, without
as much as even informing the trustees of his intentions.
When the iron grates for the windows of the lower ward were
obtained, the resident trustees knew nothing of the matter,
until they were informed that the patients were looking
through barred windows. Everything has been done in the same
way. He is not known to have had any other official relation
to the institution by regular appointment than that of
corresponding secretary, and yet he has exercised a power
over its affairs which has defied all restraint. He lives
there with his family, without a salary, and without
individual resources, and dispenses hospitality or charity to
his kindred with as much freedom and unreserve as if he owned
everything and had unlimited means at his command. In fact,
incredible as it may seem, he claims that he is virtually the
owner of the institution. And his claim might have challenged
contradiction, had his plans succeeded."
Such things may be done in a community where almost every one is
benevolent enough to give money towards an object that promises to
mitigate human woe, but where scarcely any one has leisure to watch the
expenditure of that sacred treasure!
The institution, after it was open, remained for two years under the
blight of this person's control. Everything he did was wrong. Ignorant,
obstinate, passionate, fussy, and false,--plausible and obsequious at
Albany, a violent despot at the Asylum,--he was, of all the people in
the world, the precisely worst man to conduct an experiment so novel
and so abounding in difficulties. If he had a theory, it was that an
inebriate is something between a criminal and a lunatic, who is to be
punished like the one and restrained like the other. His real object
seemed to be, after having received payment for a patient six months in
advance, to starve and madden him into a sudden departure. The very
name chosen by him for the institution proves his hopeless
incompetency. "Inebriate Asylum!" That name to-day is, perhaps, the
greatest single obstacle to its growth. He began by affixing a stigma
to the unfortunate men who had honored themselves by making so gallant
an effort at self-recovery. But let the man and his doings pass into
oblivion. There never yet was a bad man who was not, upon the whole, a
very stupid ass. All the genuine intelligence in the world resides in
virtuous minds. When, therefore, I have said that this individual was
an unprincipled adventurer, I have also said that he was signally
incapable of conducting an institution like this.
While we, in the State of New York, were blundering on in this way,
permitting a million dollars of public and private money to be lavished
in the attempt to found an asylum, a few quiet people in Boston, aided
by a small annual grant from the Legislature, had actually established
one, and kept it going for nine years, during which three thousand
inebriates had been received, and two thousand of them cured! The thing
was accomplished in the simplest way. They hired the best house for the
purpose that chanced to be vacant, fitted it up at the least possible
expense, installed in it as superintendent an honest man whose heart
was in the business, and opened its doors for the reception of
patients. By and by, when they had results to show, they asked the
Legislature for a little help, which was granted, and has been renewed
from year to year ever since. The sum voted has never exceeded five
thousand dollars in any year, and there are three men in Boston at this
moment reclaimed from drunkenness by the Washingtonian Home who pay
taxes enough to support it.