CAUSES OF DRUNKENNESS.
The causes of drunkenness are so obvious, that few authors have thought
it necessary to point them out: we shall merely say a few words upon the
subject. There are some persons who will never be drunkards, and others
who will be so in spite of all that can be done to prevent them. Some are
drunkards by choice, and others by necessity. The former have an innate
and constitutional fondness for liquor, and drink _con amore_. Such men
are usually of a sanguineous temperament, of coarse unintellectual minds,
and of low and animal propensities. They have, in general, a certain
rigidity of fibre, and a flow of animal spirits which other people are
without. They delight in the roar and riot of drinking clubs; and with
them, in particular, all the miseries of life may be referred to the
bottle.
The drunkard by necessity was never meant by nature to be dissipated.
He is perhaps a person of amiable dispositions, whom misfortune has
overtaken, and who, instead of bearing up manfully against it, endeavours
to drown his sorrows in liquor. It is an excess of sensibility, a partial
mental weakness, an absolute misery of the heart, which drives him on.
Drunkenness, with him, is a consequence of misfortune; it is a solitary
dissipation preying upon him in silence. Such a man frequently dies
broken-hearted, even before his excesses have had time to destroy him by
their own unassisted agency.
Some become drunkards from excess of indulgence in youth. There are
parents who have a common custom of treating their children to wine,
punch, and other intoxicating liquors. This, in reality, is regularly
bringing them up in an apprenticeship to drunkenness. Others are taught
the vice by frequenting drinking clubs and masonic lodges. These are the
genuine academies of tippling. Two-thirds of the drunkards we meet with,
have been there initiated in that love of intemperance and boisterous
irregularity which distinguish their future lives. Men who are good
singers are very apt to become drunkards, and, in truth, most of them are
so, more or less, especially if they have naturally much joviality or
warmth of temperament. A fine voice to such men is a fatal accomplishment.
Ebriety prevails to an alarming degree among the lower orders of society.
It exists more in towns than in the country, and more among mechanics
than husbandmen. Most of the misery to be observed among the working
classes springs from this source. No persons are more addicted to the
habit, and all its attendant vices, than the pampered servants of the
great. Innkeepers, musicians, actors, and men who lead a rambling and
eccentric life, are exposed to a similar hazard. Husbands sometimes teach
their wives to be drunkards by indulging them in toddy, and such fluids,
every time they themselves sit down to their libations.
Women frequently acquire the vice by drinking porter and ale while
nursing. These stimulants are usually recommended to them, from
well-meant but mistaken motives, by their female attendants. Many fine
young women are ruined by this pernicious practice. Their persons become
gross, their milk unhealthy, and a foundation is too often laid for
future indulgence in liquor.
The frequent use of cordials, such as noyau, shrub, kirsch-wasser,
curaçoa, and anissette, sometimes leads to the practice. The active
principle of these liqueurs is neither more nor less than ardent
spirits.[6]
Among other causes, may be mentioned the excessive use of spirituous
tinctures for the cure of hypochondria and indigestion. Persons who use
strong tea, especially green, run the same risk. The latter species is
singularly hurtful to the constitution, producing hysteria, heartburn,
and general debility of the chylopoetic viscera. Some of these bad
effects are relieved for a time by the use of spirits; and what was at
first employed as a medicine, soon becomes an essential requisite.
Certain occupations have a tendency to induce drunkenness. Innkeepers,
recruiting-sergeants, pugilists, &c., are all exposed in a great degree
to temptation in this respect; and intemperance is a vice which may be
very often justly charged against them. Commercial travellers, also,
taken as a body, are open to the accusation of indulging too freely in
the bottle, although I am not aware that they carry it to such excess
as to entitle many of them to be ranked as drunkards. “Well fed, riding
from town to town, and walking to the houses of the several tradesmen,
they have an employment not only more agreeable, but more conducive to
health than almost any other dependant on traffic. But they destroy their
constitutions by intemperance; not generally by drunkenness, but by
taking more liquor than nature requires. Dining at the traveller’s table,
each drinks his pint or bottle of wine; he then takes negus or spirit
with several of his customers; and at night he must have a glass or two
of brandy and water. Few commercial travellers bear the employ for thirty
years—the majority not twenty.”[7]
Some writers allege that unmarried women, especially if somewhat advanced
in life, are more given to liquor than those who are married. This point
I am unable from my own observation to decide. Women who indulge in this
way, are _solitary_ dram-drinkers, and so would men be, had not the
arbitrary opinions of the world invested the practice in them with much
less moral turpitude than in the opposite sex. Of the two sexes, there
can be no doubt that men are much the more addicted to all sorts of
intemperance.
Drunkenness appears to be in some measure hereditary. We frequently see
it descending from parents to their children. This may undoubtedly often
arise from bad example and imitation, but there can be little question
that, in many instances at least, it exists as a family predisposition.
Men of genius are often unfortunately addicted to drinking. Nature,
as she has gifted them with greater powers than their fellows, seems
also to have mingled with their cup of life more bitterness. There is a
melancholy which is apt to come like a cloud over the imaginations of
such characters. Their minds possess a susceptibility and a delicacy of
structure which unfit them for the gross atmosphere of human nature;
wherefore, high talent has ever been distinguished for sadness and gloom.
Genius lives in a world of its own: it is the essence of a superior
nature—the loftier imaginings of the mind, clothed with a more spiritual
and refined verdure. Few men endowed with such faculties enjoy the
ordinary happiness of humanity. The stream of their lives runs harsh and
broken. Melancholy thoughts sweep perpetually across their souls; and
if these be heightened by misfortune, they are plunged into the deepest
misery.
To relieve these feelings, many plans have been adopted. Dr. Johnson
fled for years to wine under his habitual gloom. He found that the pangs
were removed while its immediate influence lasted, but he also found
that they returned with double force when that influence passed away. He
saw the dangerous precipice on which he stood, and, by an unusual effort
of volition, gave it over. In its stead he substituted tea; and to this
milder stimulus had recourse in his melancholy. Voltaire and Fontenelle,
for the same purpose, used coffee. The excitements of Newton and Hobbes
were the fumes of tobacco, while Demosthenes and Haller were sufficiently
stimulated by drinking freely of cold water. Such are the differences of
constitution.
“As good be melancholy still, as drunken beasts and beggars.” So says
old Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, and there are few who will not
subscribe to his creed. The same author quaintly, but justly, remarks,
“If a drunken man gets a child, it will never, likely, have a good
brain.” Dr. Darwin, a great authority on all subjects connected with
life, says, that he never knew a glutton affected with the gout, who
was not at the same time addicted to liquor. He also observes, “it is
remarkable that all the diseases from drinking spirituous or fermented
liquors are liable to become hereditary, even to the third generation,
gradually increasing, if the cause be continued, till the family becomes
extinct.”[8]
We need not endeavour to trace further the remote causes of drunkenness.
A drunkard is rarely able to recall the particular circumstances which
made him so. The vice creeps upon him insensibly, and he is involved in
its fetters before he is aware. It is enough that we know the proximate
cause, and also the certain consequences. One thing is certain, that a
man who addicts himself to intemperance, can never be said to be sound
in mind or body. The former is a state of partial insanity, while the
effects of the liquor remain; and the latter is always more or less
diseased in its actions.