that it is possible to abolish warfare?" Unfortunately, we can cherish
no such pleasing hope. I do emphatically believe that in time men will
come to see the wild folly of engaging in sanguinary struggles; but the
growth of their wisdom will be slow. Action and reaction are equal; the
fighting instinct has been impressed on our nature by hereditary
transmission for countless generations, and we cannot hope suddenly to
make man a peaceful animal any more than we can hope to breed setters
from South African wild dogs. But the conditions of life are gradually
changing, and the very madness which has made Europe into a huge barrack
may work its own cure. The burden will probably grow so intolerable that
the most embruted of citizens will ask themselves why they bear it, and
a rapid revolution may undo the growth of centuries. The scientific men
point to the huge warfare that goes on from the summit of the Himalayas
to the depths of the ocean slime, and they ask how men can be exempt
from the universal struggle for existence. But it is by no means certain
that the pressure of population in the case of man will always force on
struggles--at any rate, struggles that can be decided only by death and
agony. Little by little we are learning something of the laws that
govern our hitherto mysterious existence, and we have good hopes that by
and by our race may learn to be mutually helpful, so that our span of
life may be passed with as much happiness as possible. Men will strive
against each other, but the striving will not be carried on to an
accompaniment of slaughter and torture. There are keen forms of
competition which, so far from being painful, give positive pleasure to
those who engage in them; there are triumphs which satisfy the victor
without mortifying the vanquished; and, in spite of the indiscreet
writers who have called forth this Essay, I hold that such harmless
forms of competition will take the place of the brutal strife that adds
senselessly to the sum of human woe. Our race has outgrown so many forms
of brutality, so many deliberate changes have taken place in the course
of even two thousand years, that the final change which shall abolish
war is almost certain to come. We find that about one thousand nine
hundred years ago a polished gentleman like Julius Caesar gravely
congratulates himself on the fact that his troops destroyed in cold
blood forty thousand people--men, women, and children. No man in the
civilized world dare do such a deed now, even if he had the mind for the
carnage. The feeling with which we read Caesar's frigid recital measures
the arc of improvement through which we have passed. May the improvement
go on! We can continue to progress only through knowledge; if our
people--our women especially--are wantonly warlike, then our action will
be wantonly warlike; knowledge alone can save us from the guilt of
blood, and that knowledge I have tried to set forth briefly. By wondrous
ways does our Master work out His ends. Let us pray that He may hasten
the time when nation shall not rise up against nation, neither shall
they draw the sword any more.
_December, 1886._
_DRINK_.
I have no intention of imitating those intemperate advocates of
temperance who frighten people by their thunderous and extravagant
denunciations; I leave high moral considerations on one side for the
present, and our discussion will be purely practical, and, if possible,
helpful. The duty of helpful men and women is not to rave about horrors
and failures and misfortunes, but to aim coolly at remedial measures;
and I am firmly convinced that such remedial measures can be employed
only by private effort. State interference is always to be deprecated;
individual action alone has power to better the condition of our
sorely-tempted race. With sorrow too keen for words, I hear of blighted
homes, intellects abased, children starved, careers wrecked, wives made
wretched, crime fostered; and I fully sympathize with the men and women
who are stung into wild speech by the sight of a curse that seems
all-powerful in Britain. But I prefer to cultivate a sedate and
scientific attitude of mind; I do not want to repeat catalogues of
evils; I want to point out ways whereby the intemperate may be cured.
Above all, I wish to abate the panic which paralyzes the minds of some
afflicted people, and which causes them to regard a drunkard or even a
tippler as a hopeless victim. "Hopeless" is a word used by ignorant
persons, by cowards, and by fools. When I hear some mourner say, "Alas!
we can do nothing with him--he is a slave!" I feel impelled to reply,
"What do you know about it? Have you given yourself the trouble to do
more than preach? Listen, and follow the simple directions which I lay
down for you."
First, I deal with the unhappy beings who are called periodical
drinkers. These are generally men who possess great ability and a
capacity for severe stretches of labour. They may be artists, writers,
men of business, mechanicians--anything; but in nearly every case some
special faculty of brain is developed to an extraordinary degree, and
the man is able to put forth the most strenuous exertions at a pinch.
Let us name some typical examples. Turner was a man of phenomenal
industry, but at intervals his temperament craved for some excitement
more violent and distracting than any that he could get from the steady
strain of daily work. He used to go away to Wapping, and spend weeks in
the filthiest debauch with the lowest characters in London. None of his
companions guessed who he was; they only knew that he had more money
than they had, and that he behaved in a more bestial manner than any of
those who frequented the "Fox under the Hill" and other pleasing
hostelries. Turner pursued his reckless career, till his money was gone,
and then he returned to his gruesome den and proceeded to turn out
artistic prodigies until the fit came upon him once more. Benvenuto
Cellini was subject to similar paroxysms, during which he behaved like a
maniac. Our own novelist Bulwer Lytton disappeared at times, and plunged
into the wildest excesses among wretches whom he would have loathed
when he was in his normal state of mind. He used to dress himself as a
navvy, or as a sailor, and no one would have recognized the weird
intellectual face when the great writer was clad in rags, and when the
brutal mask of intoxication had fallen over his face. It was during his
recovery from one of these terrible visitations that he drove the woman
whom he most loved from his house, and brought on that breach which
resulted in irreparable misery. Poor George Morland, the painter, had
wild spells of debauch, during which he spent his time in boxing-saloons
among ruffianly prize-fighters and jockeys. His vice grew upon him, his
mad fits became more and more frequent, and at last his exquisite work
could be produced only when his nerve was temporarily steadied by
copious doses of brandy. Keats, who "worshipped Beauty," was afflicted
by seizures like those of Turner and Morland. On one occasion he
remained in a state of drunkenness for six weeks; and it is a wonder
that his marvellous mind retained its freshness at all after the poison
had passed from amid the delicate tissues of the brain. He conquered
himself at last; but I fear that his health was impaired by his few mad
outbursts. Charles Lamb, who is dear to us all, reduced himself to a
pitiable state by giving way to outbreaks of alcoholic craving. When
Carlyle saw him, the unhappy essayist was semi-imbecile from the effects
of drink; and the savage Scotsman wrote some cruel words which will
unfortunately cleave to Lamb's cherished memory for long. Lamb fought
against his failing; he suffered agonies of remorse; he bitterly blamed
himself for "buying days of misery by nights of madness;" but the sweet
soul was enchained, and no struggles availed to work a blessed
transformation. Read his "Confessions of a Drunkard." It is the most
awful chapter in English literature, for it is written out of the agony
of a pure and well-meaning mind, and its tortured phrases seem to cry
out from the page that holds their misery. We are placed face to face
with a dread aspect of life, and the remorseless artist paints his own
pitiable case as though he longed to save his fellow-creatures even at
the expense of his own self-abasement. All these afflicted creatures
sought the wrong remedy for the exhaustion and the nameless craving that
beset them when they were spent with toil. The periodic drinker takes
his dive into the sensual mud-bath just at the times when eager exertion
has brought on lassitude of body and mind. He begins by timidly drinking
a little of the deleterious stuff, and he finds that his mental images
grow bright and pleasant. A moment comes to him when he would not change
places with the princes of the earth, and he endeavours to make that
moment last long. He fails, and only succeeds in dropping into
drunkenness. On the morning after his first day he feels depressed; but
his biliary processes are undisturbed, and he is able to begin again
without any sense of nausea. His quantity is increased until he
gradually reaches the point when glasses of spirits are poured down with
feverish rapidity. His appetite is sometimes voracious, sometimes
capricious, sometimes absent altogether. His stomach becomes ulcerated,
and he can obtain release from the grinding uneasiness only by feeding
the inflamed organ with more and more alcohol. The liver ceases to act
healthily, the blood becomes charged with bile, and one morning the
wretch awakes feeling that life is not worth having. He has slept like a
log; but all night through his outraged brain has avenged itself by
calling up crowds of hideous dreams. The blood-vessels of the eye are
charged with bilious particles, and these intruding specks give rise to
fearful, exaggerated images of things that never yet were seen on sea or
land. Grim faces leer at the dreamer and make mock of him; frightful
animals pass in procession before him; and hosts of incoherent words are
jabbered in his ear by unholy voices. He wakes, limp, exhausted,
trembling, nauseated, and he feels as if he must choose between suicide
and--more drink. If he drinks at this stage, he is lost; and then is the
time to fix upon him and draw him by main force from the slough.
Now some practitioners say, "Let him drop it gradually;" and they
proceed to stir every molecule of alcohol in the system into vile
activity by adding small doses of wine or spirit to the deadly
accumulation. The man's brain is impoverished, and the mistaken doctors
proceed to impoverish it more, so that a patient who should be cured in
forty-eight hours is kept in dragging misery for a month or more. The
proper mode of treatment is widely different. You want to nourish the
brain speedily, and at any cost, ere the ghastly depression drives the
agonized wretch to the arms of Circe once more. First, then, give him
milk. If you try milk alone, the stomach will not retain it long, so you
must mix the nourishing fluid with soda-water. Half an hour afterwards
administer a spoonful of meat-essence. Beware of giving the patient any
hot fluid, for that will damage him almost as much as alcohol. Continue
with alternate half-hourly instalments of milk and meat-essence; supply
no solid food whatever; and do not be tempted by the growing good
spirits of your charge to let him go out of doors amid temptation. At
night, after some eight hours of this rapid feeding, you must take a
risky step. Make sure that the drinker is calm, and then prepare him for
sleep. That preparation is accomplished thus. Get a draught of hydrate
of chloral made up, and be sure that you describe your man's
physique--this is most important--to the apothecary who serves you. A
very light dose will suffice, and, when it is swallowed, the drugged man
should be left in quietude. He will sleep heavily, perhaps for as much
as twelve hours, and no noise must be allowed to come near him. If he is
waked suddenly, the consequences may be bad, so that those who go to
look at him must use precautions to ensure silence. In the morning he
will awake with his brain invigorated, his muscles unagitated, and his
craving utterly gone. It is like magic; for a man who was prostrate on
Sunday morning is brisk and eager for work on Monday at noon. Whenever
the cured man feels his craving arise after a spell of labour, he should
at once recuperate his brain by rapidly-repeated doses of the
easily-assimilated meat-essence, and this, with a little strong black
coffee taken at short intervals, will tide him over the evil time. He
saves money, he keeps his working power, and he gives no shock to his
health. Since a beneficent doctor first described this cure to the
British Medical Association, hundreds have been restored and ultimately
reclaimed.
And now as to the persons who are called "soakers." Scattered over the
country are thousands of men and women who do not go to bestial
excesses, but who steadily undermine their constitutions by persistent
tippling. Such a man as a commercial traveller imbibes twenty or thirty
nips in the course of the day; he eats well in the evening, though he is
usually repelled by the sight of food in the morning, and he preserves
an outward appearance of ruddy health. Then there are the female
soakers, whom doctors find to be the most troublesome of all their
patients. There is not a medical man in large practice who has not a
shocking percentage of lady inebriates on his list, and the cases are
hard to manage. An ill-starred woman, whose well-to-do husband is
engaged in business all day, finds that a dull life-weariness overtakes
her. If she has many children, her enforced activity preserves her from
danger; but, if she is childless, the subtle temptation is apt to
overcome her. She seeks unnatural exaltation, and the very secrecy which
is necessary lends a strange zest to the pursuit of a numbing vice. Then
we have such busy men as auctioneers, ship-brokers, water-clerks,
ship-captains, buyers for great firms--all of whom are more or less a
prey to the custom of "standing liquors."
The soaker goes on without meeting any startling check for a good while;
but, by slow degrees, the main organs of the body suffer, and a chronic
state of alcoholic irritation is set up. A man becomes suspected by his
employers and slighted by his abstemious friends; he loses health,
character, prospects; and yet he is invariably ready to declare that no
one ever saw him the worse for drink. The tippling goes on till the
resultant irritation reaches an acute stage, and the faintest disturbing
cause brings on _delirium tremens_. There is only one way with people
thus afflicted. They must be made to loathe alcohol, and their nerves
must at the same time be artificially stimulated. The cure is not
precisely easy, but it is certain. If my directions are followed out,
then a man who is in the last stage of alcoholic debility will not only
regain a certain measure of health, but he will turn with horror from
the stuff that fascinated him. In the case of the soaker a little wine
may be given at meal-times during the first stages of the cure; but he
(or she) will soon reject even wine. Strong black coffee, or tea, should
be given as often as possible--the oftener the better--and iced
soda-water should be administered after a heavy meal. Take this
prescription and let it be made up--Rx Acid. Acet. eight ounces. Sponge
down the patient's spine with this fluid until the parts moistened
tingle smartly; and let this be done night and morning. Also get the
following from your chemist--Rx Ext. Cinch. Rub. Liq. four ounces--and
give one teaspoonful in water after each meal. In a week the drinker
will cease to desire alcohol, and in a month he will refuse it with
disgust. His nerves will resume their healthy action, and, if he has not
reached the stage of cirrhosis of the liver, he will become well and
clear-headed. Recollect that this remedy is almost infallible, and then
even the most greedy of literary students will hardly reproach me for
placing a kind of medical chapter in the quarter usually devoted to
disquisitions of another kind. From every side rises the bitter cry of
those who see their loved ones falling victims to the seductive scourge;
from all quarters the voices of earnest men are raised in passionate
pleading; and in every great city there are noble workers who strive to
rescue their fellow-creatures from drink as from a gulf of doom. My
words are not addressed to the happy beings who can rejoice in the
cheerfulness bestowed by wine; I have before me only the fortunes of
those to whom wine is a mocker. Far be it from me to find fault with the
good and sound-hearted men and women who are never scathed by their
innocent potations; my attempt is directed toward saving the wreckages
of civilization who perish in the grasp of the destroyer.
_March, 1886._
_CONCERNING PEOPLE WHO KNOW THEY ARE GOING WRONG_.
Some five years ago a mere accident gave to the world one of the most
gruesome and remarkable pieces of literature that has ever perhaps been
seen. A convict named Fury confessed to having committed a murder of an
atrocious character. He was brought from prison, put on his trial at
Durham, and condemned to death. Every chance was given him to escape his
doom; but he persisted in providing the authorities with the most
minutely accurate chain of evidence against himself; and, in the end,
there was nothing for it but to cast him for death. Even when the police
blundered, he carefully set them right--and he could not have proved his
own guilt more clearly had he been the ablest prosecuting counsel in
Britain. He held in his hand a voluminous statement which, as it seems,
he wished to read before sentence of death was passed. The Court could
not permit the nation's time to be thus expended; so the convict handed
his manuscript to a reporter--and we thus have possibly the most
absolutely curious of all extant thieves' literature. Somewhere in the
recesses of Fury's wild heart there must have been good concealed; for
he confessed his worst crime in the interests of justice, and he went to
the scaffold with a serious and serene courage which almost made of him
a dignified person. But, on his own confession, he must have been all
his life long an unmitigated rascal--a predatory beast of the most
dangerous kind. From his youth upward he had lived as a professional
thief, and his pilferings were various and extensive. The glimpses of
sordid villainy which he frankly gives are so poignantly effective that
they put into the shade the most dreadful phases in the life of Villon.
He was a mean sneaking wretch who supported a miserable existence on the
fruits of other people's industry, and he closed his list of crimes by
brutally stabbing an unhappy woman who had never harmed him. The fellow
had genuine literary skill and a good deal of culture; his confession is
very different from any of those contained in the _Newgate
Calendar_--infinitely different from the crude horror of the statement
which George Borrow quotes as a masterpiece of simple and direct
writing. Here is Borrow's specimen, by-the-way--"So I went with them to
a music-booth, where they made me almost drunk with gin and began to
talk their flash language, which I did not understand"--and so on. But
this dry simplicity is not in Fury's line. He has studied philosophy; he
has reasoned keenly; and, as one goes on through his terrible narrative,
one finds that he has mental capacity of a high order. He was as mean a
rascal as Noah Claypole: and yet he had a fine clear-seeing intellect.
Now what does this gallows-bird tell us? Why, his whole argument is
intended to prove that he was an ill-used victim of society! Such a
perversion has probably never been quite equalled; but it remains there
to show us how firmly my theory stands--that the real scoundrel never
knows himself to be a scoundrel. Had Fury settled down in a back street
and employed his genius in writing stories, he could have earned a
livelihood, for people would have eagerly read his experiences; but he
preferred thieving--and then he turned round and blamed other people for
hounding him on to theft.
There are wrong-doers and wrong-doers; there are men who do ill in the
world because they are entirely harmful by nature, and they seek to hurt
their fellows--there are others who err only from weakness of will. I
make no excuse for the weaklings; a man or woman who is weak may do more
harm than the vilest criminal, and, when I hear any one talk about that
nice man who is nobody's enemy but his own, I am instantly forced to
remember a score or thereabouts of beings whom I know to have been the
deadliest foes of those whom they should have cherished. Let us help
those who err; but let us have no maudlin pity.
Moralists in general have made a somewhat serious error in supposing
that one has only to show a man the true aspect of any given evil in
order to make sure of his avoiding it. Of late so many sad things have
been witnessed in public and private life that one is tempted to doubt
whether abstract morality is of any use whatever in the world. One may
tell a man that a certain course is dangerous or fatal; one may show by
every device of logic and illustration that he should avoid the said
course, and he will fully admit the truth of one's contentions; yet he
is not deterred from his folly, and he goes on toward ruin with a sort
of blind abandonment. "Blind," I say. That is but a formal phrase; for
it happens that the very men and women who wreck their lives by doing
foolish things are those who are keenest in detecting folly and wisest
in giving advice to others. "Educate the people, and you will find that
a steady diminution of vice, debauchery, and criminality must set in." I
am not talking about criminality at present; but I am bound to say that
no amount of enlightenment seems to diminish the tendency toward forms
of folly which approach criminality. It is almost confounding to see how
lucid of mind and how sane in theoretical judgment are the men who
sometimes steep themselves in folly and even in vice. A wicked man
boasted much of his own wickedness to some fellow-travellers during a
brief sea-voyage. He said, "I like doing wrong for the sake of doing it.
When you know you are outraging the senses of decent people there is a
kind of excitement about it." This contemptible cynic told with glee
stories of his own vileness which made good men look at him with scorn;
but he fancied himself the cleverest of men. With the grave nearly ready
for him, he could chuckle over things which he had done--things which
proved him base, although none of them brought him within measurable
distance of the dock. But such instances are quite rare. The man whose
vision is lucid, but who nevertheless goes wrong, is usually a prey to
constant misery or to downright remorse. Look at Burns's epitaph,
composed by himself for himself. It is a dreadful thing. It is more than
verse; it is a sermon, a prophecy, a word of doom; and it tells with
matchless terseness the story of many men who are at this hour passing
to grim ruin either of body or soul or both. Burns had such magnificent
common sense that in his last two lines he sums up almost everything
that is worth saying on the subject; and yet that fatal lack of will
which I have so often lamented made all his theoretical good sense as
naught He could give one every essential of morality and conduct--in
theory--and he was one of the most convincing and wise preachers who
ever lived; but that mournful epitaph summarises the results of all his
mighty gifts; and I think that it should be learned by all young men, on
the chance that some few might possibly be warned and convinced. Advice
is of scanty use to men of keen reason who are capable of composing
precepts for themselves; but to the duller sort I certainly think that
the flash of a sudden revelation given in concise words is beneficial.
Here is poor Burns's saying--
Is there a man whose judgment clear
Can others teach the course to steer,
Yet runs himself life's mad career
Wild as the wave?
Here pause, and through the starting tear
Survey this grave.
The poor inhabitant below
Was quick to learn and wise to know,
And keenly felt the kindly glow
And softer flame;
But thoughtless follies laid him low
And stained his name.
Reader, attend! Whether thy soul
Soars fancy's flights beyond the pole;
Or, darkling, grubs this earthly hole
In low pursuit,
Know--prudent cautious self-control
Is wisdom's root.