DRUNKENNESS.--THE DRINKS OF MAN.
"Intemperance has been the vice of every people, and is prevalent in all
climes, notwithstanding that intoxicants, properly employed, may serve
humanity's highest aims. Beginning early in the history of a people, the
disease increases with the growth of a nation, until, at last, unless
the knife is used, civilization perishes. A lowly people becomes more
depraved as the use of liquor increases; a cultivated people passes
backward into barbarism with the depravities that come from dissipation.
Here nations meet, and individuals sink to a common level. No drinking
man is strong enough to say, 'I can not become dissipated;' no nation is
rich and cultivated enough to view the debauch of its people without
alarm.
"The disgusting habit of the drunken African finds its counterpart in
the lascivious wine-bibber of aristocratic society. To picture the
indecencies of society, that may be charged to debauchery, when the
Grecian and Roman empires were at the height of greatness, would obscure
the orgies of the barbarous African, and make preferable the brutality
of the drunken American Indian. Intemperance brings men to the lowest
level, and holds its power over all lands and all nations."
"Did the aborigines know how to make intoxicants, and were barbarians
intemperate before contact with civilized nations?"
"Yes."
"But I have understood that drunkenness is a vice inherent only in
civilized people; are not you mistaken?"
"No. Every clime, unless it be the far North where men are scarcely more
than animals, furnishes intoxicants, and all people use them. I will
tell you part of this record of nations.
"The Nubians make a barley beer which they call bouze, and also a wine,
from the palm tree. The savages of Africa draw the clear, sweet juice of
the palm oil tree into a gourd, in the morning, and by night it becomes
a violent intoxicant. The natives of the Malayan Archipelago ferment and
drink the sap of the flower stems of the cocoanut. The Tartar tribes
make an intoxicating drink from mare's milk, called koomis. In South
America the natives drink a vile compound, called cana, distilled from
sugar cane; and in the Sandwich Islands, the shrub kava supplies the
intoxicant kava-kava, drunk by all the inhabitants, from king to slave,
and mother to child. In the heart of Africa, cannibal tribes make legyce
of a cereal, and indulge in wild orgies over their barbaric cup. In
North America the Indians, before Columbus discovered America, made an
intoxicating drink of the sap of the maple tree. The national drink of
the Mexicans is pulque, a beastly intoxicant, prepared from the Agave
Americana. Mead is an alcoholic drink, made of honey, and used in many
countries. In China wine was indulged in from the earliest day, and in
former times, had it not been for the influence of their philosophers,
especially Confucius, who foresaw the end, the Chinese nation would have
perished from drunkenness. Opium, that fearful enslaver of millions of
human beings, is in every sense a narcotic intoxicant, and stands
conspicuous as an agent, capable of being either a friend, a companion,
or a master, as man permits. History fails to indicate the date of its
introduction to humanity. In South America the leaf of the cocoa plant
is a stimulant scarcely less to be dreaded than opium. The juice of a
species of asclepias produces the intoxicant soma, used once by the
Brahmins, not only as a drink, but also in sacrificial and religious
ceremonies. Many different flavored liquors made of palm, cocoanuts,
sugar, pepper, honey, spices, etc., were used by native Hindoos, and as
intoxicants have been employed from the earliest days in India. The
Vedic people were fearfully dissipated, and page after page of that
wonderful sacred book, the Rigs-Veda, is devoted to the habit of
drunkenness. The worst classes of drunkards of India used Indian hemp to
make bhang, or combined the deadly narcotic stramonium with arrack, a
native beer, to produce a poisonous intoxicant. In that early day the
inhabitants of India and China were fearfully depraved drunkards, and
but for the reforms instituted by their wise men, must have perished as
a people. Parahaoma, or 'homa,' is an intoxicant made from a lost plant
that is described as having yellow blossoms, used by the ancient
dissolute Persians from the day of Zoroaster. Cannabis sativa produces
an intoxicant that in Turkey is known as hadschy, in Arabia and India as
hashish, and to the Hottentots as dacha, and serves as a drunkard's food
in other lands. The fruit of the juniper produces gin, and the fermented
juice of the grape, or malt liquors, in all civilized countries are the
favorite intoxicants, their origin being lost in antiquity. Other
substances, such as palm, apples, dates, and pomegranates have also been
universally employed as drink producers.
"Go where you will, man's tendency seems to be towards the bowl that
inebriates, and yet it is not the use but the abuse of intoxicants that
man has to dread. Could he be temperate, exhilarants would befriend."
"But here," I replied, "in this underground land, where food is free,
and existence possible without an effort, this shameful vice has no
existence. Here there is no incentive to intemperance, and even though
man were present with his inherent passion for drink, he could not find
means to gratify his appetite."
"Ah," my guide replied, "that is an error. Why should this part of the
earth prove an exception to the general rule? Nature always supplies the
means, and man's instinct teaches him how to prepare an intoxicant. So
long as man is human his passions will rule. If you should prove unequal
to the task you have undertaken, if you shrink from your journey, and
turn back, the chances are you will fail to reach the surface of the
earth. You will surely stop in the chamber which we now approach, and
which I have now prepared you to enter, and will then become one of a
band of earth drunkards; having all the lower passions of a mortal you
will yet be lost to the virtues of man. In this chamber those who falter
and turn back, stop and remain for all time, sinking until they become
lower in the human scale than any drunkard on earth. Without any
restraining influence, without a care, without necessity of food or
incentive to exertion, in this habitation where heat and cold are
unknown, and no motive for self-preservation exists, they turn their
thoughts toward the ruling passion of mankind and--Listen! Do you not
hear them? Listen!"