TEMPERANCE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Instinct is hereditary experience. The lessons derived from the
repetition of pleasant or painful impressions have been transmitted
from an infinite number of generations, till impending dangers have
come to proclaim themselves by instinctive dread, opportune benefits by
instinctive desire. The shudder that warns us to recede from the brink
of a steep cliff is felt even by persons who have never personally
experienced the peril of falling from the rocks of a precipice.
Mountain breezes are more attractive than swamp odors; the fumes of a
foul dungeon warn off a child who has had as yet no opportunity to
ascertain the danger of breathing contaminated air. A few years ago I
bought a pet fox, with a litter of cubs, who were soon after orphaned
by the escape of their mother. They had to be fed by hand; and, among
other proceeds of a forage, my neighbor’s boy once brought them a
bundle of lizards, and a dead rattlesnake. For the possession of those
lizards there was at once an animated fight, but at sight of the
serpent the little gluttons turned tail and retreated to the farther
end of their kennel. They were not a month old when I bought them, and
could not possibly have seen a rattlesnake before or known the effects
of its bite from personal experience; but instinct at once informed
them that an encounter with a reptile of that sort had brought some of
their forefathers to grief.
The vegetable kingdom, that provides food for nine-tenths of all living
creatures, abounds with an endless variety of edible fruits, seeds, and
herbs, but also with injurious and even deadly products, often closely
resembling the favorite food-plants of animals; which in a state of
Nature are nevertheless sure to avoid mistake, and select their food by
a faculty of recognizing differences that might escape the attention
even of a trained botanist. The chief medium of that faculty is the
sense of smell in the lower, and the sense of taste in the higher
animals. In monkeys, for instance, the olfactory organs are rather
imperfectly developed, and I have often seen them peel an unknown fruit
with their fingers and then cautiously raise it to their lips and rub
it to and fro before venturing to bring their teeth into play. The
preliminary test, however, always sufficed to decide the question in a
couple of seconds. The Abyssinian mountaineers who catch baboons by
fuddling them with plum brandy have to disguise the taste of the liquor
with a large admixture of syrup before they can deceive the warning
instincts of their victims. Where copper mines discharge their drainage
into a water-course, deer and other wild animals have been known to go
in quest of distant springs rather than quench their thirst with the
polluted water.
That protective instincts of that sort are shared even by the lowest
animals is proved by the experiment of the philosopher Ehrenberg, who
put a drop of alcohol into a bottle of pond water, and under the lens
of his microscope saw a swarm of infusoria precipitate themselves to
the bottom of the vessel.
Animals in a state of Nature rarely or never eat to an injurious
excess; the apparent surfeits of wolves, serpents, vultures, etc.,
alternate with long fasts, and are digested as easily as a hunter,
after missing his breakfast and dinner, would be able to digest an
abundant supper. Instinct indicates even the most propitious time for
indulging in repletion. The noon heat of a midsummer day seems to
suspend the promptings of appetite; cows can be seen resting drowsily
at the foot of a shade-tree; deer doze in mountain glens and come out
to browse in moonlight; panthers cannot afford to miss an opportunity
to slay their game at noon, but are very apt to hide the carcass and
come back to devour it in the cool of the evening.
The products of fermentation are so repulsive to the higher animals
that only the distress of actual starvation would tempt a monkey to
touch a rotten apple or quench his thirst with acidulated grape-juice.
Poppy fields need no fence; tobacco leaves are in no danger of being
nibbled by browsing cattle. Nature seems to have had no occasion for
providing instinctive safeguards against such out-of-the-way things as
certain mineral poisons; yet the taste of arsenic, though not violently
repulsive (like that of the more common, and therefore more dangerous,
vegetable poisons), is certainly not attractive, but rather insipid,
and a short experience seems to supplement the defects of instinct in
that respect. Trappers know that poisoned baits after a while lose
their seductiveness, and old rats have been seen driving their young
from a dish of arsenic-poisoned gruel.
Certainly no animal would feel any natural inclination to seek arsenic
or alcohol for its own sake, and there is no reason to suppose that
man, in that respect, differs from every known species of his
fellow-creatures. Our clerical temperance lecturers rant about “the
lusts of the unregenerate heart,” the “weakness of the flesh,” the
“danger of yielding to the promptings of appetite,” as if Nature
herself would tempt us to our ruin, and the path of safety could be
learned only from preternatural revelation. But the truth is that to
the palate of a child, even the child of a habitual drunkard, the taste
of alcohol is as repulsive as that of turpentine or bitterwood. Tobacco
fumes and the stench of burning opium still nauseate the children of
the habitual smoker as they would have nauseated the children of the
patriarchs. The first cigar demonstrates the virulence of nicotine by
vertigo and sick headaches; the first glass of beer is rejected by the
revolt of the stomach; the fauces contract and writhe against the first
dram of brandy. Nature records her protest in the most unmistakable
language of instinct, and only the repeated and continued disregard of
that protest at last begets the abnormal craving of that poison-thirst
which clerical blasphemers ascribe to the promptings of our natural
appetites. They might as well make us believe in a natural passion for
dungeon air, because the prisoners of the Holy Inquisition at last lost
their love of liberty and came to prefer the stench of their
subterranean black-holes to the breezes of the free mountains.
The craving for hot spices, for strong meats, and such abominations as
fetid cheese and fermented cabbage have all to be artificially
acquired; and in regard to the selection of our proper food the
instincts of our young children could teach us more than a whole
library of ascetic twaddle. Not for the sake of “mortifying the flesh,”
but on the plain recommendation of the natural senses that prefer
palatable to disgusting food, the progeny of Adam could be guided in
the path of reform and learn to avoid forbidden fruit by the symptoms
of its forbidding taste.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
There is a tradition that the ancient Thessalians made it a rule that
the guests of their banquets must get drunk on pain of expulsion. To
let anyone remain sober, they argued, would not be just to the
befuddled majority, of whose condition he might be tempted to take all
sorts of advantage. If the evils of drunkenness were undeserved
afflictions, it would certainly be true that sobriety would give an
individual an almost unfair advantage over the rest of his fellow-men.
He would be an archer trying his skill against hoodwinked rivals, a
runner challenging the speed of shackled competitors. There is not a
mechanical or industrial avocation in which sobriety does not give a
man the advantage which health and freedom confer over crippling
disease. For the baneful effects of intemperance are by no means
limited to the moments of actual intoxication, but react on the
half-lucid intervals, and even on the after years of the reformed
toper. Temperance, in the widest sense, of abstinence from unfit food
and drink, would be the best gift which the fairies could bestow on a
favorite child, for the blessing of frugal habits includes almost all
other blessings whatever. Spontaneous gayety, the sunshine of the
unclouded soul, is dimmed by the influence of the first poison-habit,
and the regretful retrospects to the “lost paradise of childhood” are
founded chiefly on the contrast of poison-engendered distempers with
the moral and physical health of earlier years. Temperance prolongs
that sunshine to the evening of life. By temperance alone the demon of
life-weariness can be kept at bay in times of fiercest tribulation:
Undimmed eyes can more easily recognize the gleam of sunshine behind
the cloudy. The prisoners of the outlawed Circassian insurgents
admitted that, in spite of hunger, hardships, and constant danger,
their captors contrived to enjoy life better than their enemies in the
brandy-reeking abundance of their headquarters. The myth of the
Lotos-eaters described a nation of vegetarians who passed life so
pleasantly that visitors refused to leave them, and renounced their
native lands. The religion of Mohammed makes abstinence from
intoxicating drinks a chief duty of a true believer, and that law alone
has prevented the physical degeneration of his followers. With all
their mental sloth and the enervating influence of their harem life,
the Turks are still the finest representatives of physical manhood. At
the horse fairs of Bucharest I saw specimens of their broad-shouldered,
proud-eyed rustics, whose appearance contrasted strangely with that of
the sluggish boors and furtive traffickers of the neighboring natives.
After twelve hundred years of exhaustive wars, alternating with periods
of luxury and tempting wealth, the descendants of the Arabian
conquerors are still a hardy, long-lived race, physically far superior
to the rum-drinking foreigners of their coast towns. For more than six
hundred years the temperate Moriscos held their own in war and peace
against all nations of Christendom. Their Semitic descent gave them no
natural advantage over their Caucasian rivals; but they entered the
arena of life with clear eyes and unpalsied hearts, and in an age of
universal superstition made their country a garden of science and
industry. Their cities offered a refuge to the scholars and
philosophers of three continents, and in hundreds of pitched battles
their indomitable valor prevailed against the wine-inspired heroism of
their adversaries.
Frugality has cured diseases which defied all other remedies. For
thousands of reformed gluttons it has made life worth living, after the
shadows of misery already threatened to darken into the gloom of
approaching night. Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman of the sixteenth
century, had impaired his health by gastronomic excesses till his
physicians despaired of his life, when, as a last resort, he resolved
to try a complete change of diet. His father, his uncles, and two of
his brothers had all died before the attainment of their fiftieth year;
but Luigi determined to try conclusions with the demon of unnaturalism,
and at once reduced his daily allowance of meat to one-tenth of the
usual quantity, and his wine to a stint barely sufficient to flavor a
cup of Venetian cistern-water. After a month of his new regimen he
regained his appetite. After ten weeks he found himself able to take
long walks without fatigue, and could sleep without being awakened by
nightmare horrors. At the end of a year all the symptoms of chronic
indigestion had left him, and he resolved to make the plan of his cure
the rule of his life. That life was prolonged to a century—forty years
of racking disease followed by sixty years of unbroken health, undimmed
clearness of mind, unclouded content. Habitual abstinence from
unnatural food and drink saves the trials of constant self-control and
the alternative pangs of repentance. “Blessed are the pure, for they
can follow their inclinations with impunity.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The poison-habit, as we might call the craving for the stimulus of
unnatural diet, is the oldest vice, and in some of its forms has been
practiced by almost every nation known to history or tradition.
Thousands of years before Lot got drunk on home-made wine, the
ancestors of the Brahmans fuddled with soma-juice; Zoroaster enacts
laws against habitual intoxication; the art of turning grape-juice from
a blessing into a curse seems to have been known to the nations of
Iran, to the Parsees, and to the first agricultural colonists of the
lower Nile. Nunus, the Arabian Noah, is said to have planted vineyards
on the banks of the Orontes; the worship of Bacchus was introduced into
Asia Minor several centuries before the birth of Homer. The origin of
the opium habit antedates the earliest records of Chinese history; for
immemorial ages the Tartars have been addicted to the use of Koumis
(fermented mare’s milk), the Germanic nations to beer, the natives of
Siam to tea and sago-wine. Intoxication and the excessive use of animal
food were prevalent vices, especially in the larger cities, of pagan
Greece and Rome.
Yet the ancients sinned with their eyes half open. Their recognition of
dietetic abuses was expressed in the word frugality, which literally
meant subsistence on tree fruits—or, at least, vegetable products—in
distinction from the habitual use of flesh-food. The advantages of
temperate habits were never directly denied; the law of Pythagoras
enjoins total abstinence from wine and flesh, and the name of a
“Pythagorean” became almost a synonym of “philosopher.” In all but the
most depraved centuries of Imperial Rome, wine was forbidden to
children and women. The festival of the Bona Dea commemorated the fate
of a Roman matron who had yielded to the temptation of intoxicating
drink, and was slain by the hand of her stern husband. Lycurgus
recommends the plan of letting the pupils of the military
training-schools witness the bestial conduct of a drunken Helot, in
order to inspire them with an abhorrence of intoxication. The bias of
public opinion always respected the emulation of patriarchal frugality
and frowned upon the excesses of licentious patricians.
But the triumph of an anti-physical religion removed those safeguards.
Mistrust in the competence of our natural instincts formed the keystone
of the Galilean dogma. The importance of physical welfare was
systematically depreciated. The health-laws of the Mosaic code were
abrogated. The messiah of Antinaturalism sanctioned the use of
alcoholic drinks by his personal example—nay, by the association of
that practice with the rites of a religious sacrament. The habit of
purchasing mental exaltation—even of a fever-dream—at the expense of
the body, agreed perfectly with the tendencies of a Nature-despising
fanaticism, and during the long night of the Middle Ages monks and
priests vied in an unprecedented excess of alcoholic riots. Nearly
every one of the thick-sown convents from Greece to Portugal had a
vineyard and a wine cellar of its own. The monastery of Weltenburg on
the upper Danube operated the largest brewery of the German empire. For
centuries spiritual tyranny and spirituous license went hand in hand,
and as the church increased in wealth, gluttony was added to the
unnatural habits of the priesthood, and only the abject poverty of the
lower classes prevented intemperance from becoming a universal vice. As
it was, the followers of the Nature-despising messiah lost no
opportunity to drown their better instincts in alcohol. They could
plead the precedence of their moral exemplars, and vied in sowing the
seeds of bodily diseases which their system of ethics welcomed as
conducive to the welfare of a world-renouncing soul.
Among the slaves of the Scotch kirk-tyrants the long-continued
suppression of all healthier pastimes contributed its share to the
increase of intemperance. On the day when the laboring classes found
their only chance of leisure, outdoor sports were strictly prohibited.
Dancing was considered a heinous, and on the Sabbath almost an
unpardonable, sin. The tennis-halls were closed from Saturday night to
Monday morning. Bathing was sinful. Mountain excursions, strolls along
the beach, or in the open fields, were not permitted on the day of the
Lord. Dietetic excesses, however, escaped control, and thus became the
general outlet for the cruelly suppressed craving for a diversion from
the deadly monotony of drudgery and church-penance. For “Nature will
have her revenge, and when the most ordinary and harmless recreations
are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences
which no moralist would be willing to condone, ... and the strictest
observance of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations
was found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but
unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not
cheer” (Saturday Review, July 19, 1879). “Everyone,” says Lecky, “who
considers the world as it really exists, must have convinced himself
that in great towns public amusements of an exciting order are
absolutely necessary, and that to suppress them is simply to plunge an
immense portion of the population into the lowest depths of vice.”
Clerical despotism is still a potent ally of intemperance. In hundreds
of British and North American cities the dearth of better pastimes
drives our workingmen to the pot-house. They drink to get drunk, as the
only available means of escaping tedium and the consciousness of their
misery. Nature craves recreation, and the suppression of that instinct
has avenged itself by its perversion.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Dietetic abuses have contributed more to the progress of human
degeneration than all other causes taken together. Our infants are
sickened with drastic drugs. The growth of young children is stunted
with narcotic beverages; the suppression of healthier pastimes drives
our young men to the rum-shop; intemperance has become the Lethe in
which the victims of social abuses seek to drown their misery. The
curse of the poison-habit haunts us from the cradle to the grave, and
for millions of our fellow-men has made the burdens of life to outweigh
its blessings. There is a doubt if the “years” of Genesis should be
understood in the present meaning of the word; but historians and
biologists agree that the average longevity of our race has been
enormously reduced within the last twenty centuries, and intemperance
is the chief cause of that decrease. Our average stature has been
reduced even below that of the ancient natives of an enervating
climate, like that of the lower Nile, as proved by D’Arnaud’s
measurements of the Egyptian mummy-skeletons. On our own continent,
outdoor life in the struggle with the perils of the wilderness has
somewhat redeemed our loss of physical manhood; but what are the men of
modern Europe compared with their iron-fisted ancestors, the athletic
Greeks, the world-conquering Romans, the Scandinavian giants, the
heroic Visigoths? Like a building collapsing under the progress of a
devouring fire, the structure of the human body has shrunk under the
influence of the poison-habit; and there is no doubt that the moral
vigor of our race has undergone a corresponding impairment—appreciable
in spite of the recent revival of intellectual activity and the
constant increase of general information.
The tide is turning; the victims of anti-physical dogmas are awakening
to the significance of their delusion; the power of public opinion has
forced the dupes of the alcohol-brewing Galilean to join the crusade of
the temperance movement; diet-reform has become a chief problem of
civilization; but the upas-tree of the poison-habit is too deeply
rooted to be eradicated in a single generation, and the task of
redemption will be the work of centuries. As yet the probing of the
wound has only revealed the appalling extent of the canker-sore. The
statistics of the liquor traffic have established the fact that the
value of the resources wasted on the gratification of the poison-vice
far exceeds the aggregate amount of the yearly expenditure for
educational, charitable, and sanitary purposes—nay, that the abolition
of that traffic would save a sum sufficient for all reforms needed to
turn earth into a physical and social paradise. And yet that waste
expresses only the indirect and smaller part of the damage caused by
the curse of the poison-habit. The loss in health and happiness cannot
be estimated in coin; but if the sum thus expended in the purchase of
disease were devoted to the promotion of arson and robbery, the utmost
possible extent of the consequent mischief would probably fall short of
the present result. The stimulant habit in all its forms clouds the
sunshine of life like an all-pervading poison-vapor. Alcohol undermines
the stamina of manhood; narcotic drinks foster a complication of
nervous diseases; opium and tobacco impair the vigor of the cerebral
functions. The excessive use of animal food, too, avenges itself in all
sorts of moral and physical disorders. It inflames passions which no
prayer can quench. “Alas! what avails all theology against a diet of
bull-beef?” Father Smeth wrote from the Sioux missions; and the almost
exclusive use of flesh food has, indeed, afflicted our Indians with the
truculence of carnivorous beasts. The same cause has produced the same
effects in western Europe. The carnivorous saints of medieval Spain
delighted in matanzas and heretic-hunts, as their carnivorous ancestors
in the butcher sports of the circus, and their British contemporaries
in bear-baits and Tyburn spectacles.
E.—REFORM.
The consequences of intemperance have at all times provoked protests
against the more ruinous forms of the poison-habit, but the advance
from special to general principles is often amazingly slow; and even
now the cause of temperance is hampered by the shortsightedness of
reformers who hope to eradicate the Upas-tree by clipping and hacking
its more prominent branches. They would limit prohibition to the more
deadly stimulants, not dreaming that the fatal habit is sure to
reproduce its fruit from the smallest germs; that the poison-vice, in
fact, is infallibly progressive, ever tending to goad the morbid
craving of the toper to stronger and stronger poisons or to a constant
increase in the quantity of the wonted stimulant: from cider to brandy,
from laudanum to morphine, from tonic bitters to rum, from a glass of
wine to a dozen bottles, from beer and tobacco to the vilest tipples of
the dram-shop. “Principiis obsta” (Resist the beginnings) was a Latin
maxim of deep significance. The cumulative tendency of the stimulant
vice may be resisted, but only by constant vigilance, constant
self-denial, constant struggles with the revivals of a morbid
appetency, all of which might be saved by the total renunciation of all
abnormal stimulants whatever, for only in that sense is it true that
“abstinence is easier than temperance.”
We must accustom our boys to avoid the poison-vice as a loathsome
disease, rather than as a forbidden luxury which could ever be indulged
without paying the penalty of Nature in a distressing reaction, far
outweighing the pleasures of the morbid and momentary exaltation. We
must teach them that the artifice by which the toper hopes to cheat
Nature out of an access of abnormal enjoyment is under all
circumstances a losing game, which at last fails to produce, even for
the moment of the fever-stimulus, a glimpse of happiness at all
comparable to the unclouded sunshine of temperance.
But before we can hope to redeem the victims of the poison-vender, we
must learn to make virtue more attractive than vice. We must counteract
the attractions of the rum-shop by inviting reforming topers, not to
the whining conventicles of a Sabbath-school, but to temperance
gardens, resounding with music (dance music, if “sacred concerts”
should pall) and the jubilee of romping children, and shortening summer
days with free museums, picture galleries, swings, ball grounds, and
foot-race tracks. The gods of the future will contrive to outbid the
devil.
It would be unfair, though, to depreciate the services of the Christian
ministers who in a choice between dogma and reform have bravely sided
with Nature, and, defying the wrath both of spiritual and spirituous
poison-mongers, of rum-sellers and heretic-hunters, are trying their
utmost to undo the mischief of their antinatural creed, by frankly
admitting that a man can be defiled by “things that enter his mouth,”
and that the sacrament of eucharistic alcohol should be abandoned to
the rites of devil-worshipers.
But the religion which pretends to inculcate a peace-making spirit of
meekness has been strangely remiss in opposing the excessive use of a
diet which is clearly incompatible with the promotion of that virtue.
In Christians, as in Turks, Tartars, and North American Redskins, a
chiefly carnivorous diet engenders the instincts of carnivorous beasts,
and a Peace Congress celebrating its banquets with sixteen courses of
flesh food might as well treat a vigilance committee to sixteen courses
of opium. “Frugality” should again be promoted in the ancient sense of
the word; in a community of reformants temperance and vegetarianism
should go hand in hand. Or rather, the word “temperance” should be used
in the extended sense that would make it a synonym of Abstinence from
all kinds of unnatural food and drink; and Dr. Schrodt’s rule should
become the canon of every dietetic reform league. “Avoid,” he says,
“all drinks and stimulants repulsive to the palate of an unseduced
child, but also all comestibles that need artificial preparation to
make them palatable.” The first part of that rule would exclude opium,
tobacco, alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee, absinthe, fetid cheese, and
caustic spices. The second would abolish many kinds of animal food, but
sanction milk, butter, eggs, honey, and other “semi-animal” substances,
condemned by the extreme school of vegetarians. “From the egg to the
apple,” is an old Latin phrase which proves that the frugality of the
ancient Romans never went to such extremes. Milk, eggs, and vegetable
fats, in their combination with farinaceous dishes, might amply replace
the flesh food of the northern nations, and, considering the infinite
variety of fruits and vegetables known to modern horticulture, there
seems no reason why a vegetarian diet should necessarily be a
monotonous one. The Religion of Nature will require the renunciation of
several deep-rooted prejudices, but its path of salvation will in no
sense be a path of thorns.