Chapter II: Part 2

It is melancholy to observe what a small, mean, precarious, grudging support we give to the best things, if they are of the kind which must be sustained out of our surplus. At Cambridge the other day, while looking about among the ancient barracks in which the students live, I had the curiosity to ask concerning the salaries of the professors in Harvard College,--supposing, of course, that such learned and eminent persons received a compensation proportioned to the dignity of their offices, the importance of their labors, and the celebrity of their names. Alas! it is not so. A good reporter on the New York press gets just about as much money as the President of the College, and the professors receive such salaries as fifteen and eighteen hundred dollars a year. The very gifts of inconsiderate benefactors have impoverished the college, few of whom, it seems, have been able to give money to the institution; most of them have merely bought distinction from it. Thus professorships in plenty have been endowed and named; but the college is hampered, and its resources have become insufficient, by being divided among a multitude of objects. I beg the reader, the next time he gives Harvard University a hundred thousand dollars, or leaves it a million in his will, to make the sum a gift,--a gift to the trustees,--to be expended as they deem best for the general and permanent good of the institution, and not to neutralize the benefit of the donation by conditions dictated by vanity. Yale, I have since learned, is no better off. At all our colleges, it seems, the professors either starve upon twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a year, or eke out a subsistence by taking pupils, or by some other arduous extra labor. But what wonder that learning pines, when we every year waste millions upon millions of the fund out of which alone learning can be supported!

It is so with all high and spiritual things. How the theatre languishes! There are but four cities in the United States where a good and complete theatre could be sustained. In the great and wealthy city of New York there has never been more than one at a time, nor always one. How small, too, the sale of good books, even those of a popular cast! One of the most interesting works ever published in the United States is the "Life of Josiah Quincy," by his son Edmund Quincy. It is not an abstruse production. The narrative is easy and flowing, interspersed with well-told anecdotes of celebrated men,--Washington, Lafayette, John Adams, John Randolph, Hancock, Jefferson, and many others. Above all, the book exhibits and interprets, in the most agreeable manner, a triumphant human life; showing how it came to pass that Josiah Quincy, in this perplexing and perilous world, was able to live happily, healthily, honorably, and usefully for ninety-three years! Splendid triumph of civilization! Ninety-three years of joyous, dignified, and beneficial existence! One would have thought that many thousands of people in the United States would have hurried to their several bookstores to bear away, rejoicing, a volume recounting such a marvel, the explanation of which so nearly concerns us all. The book has now been published three months or more, and has not yet sold more than three thousand copies! Young men cannot waste their hard-earned money upon a three-dollar book. It is the price of a bundle of cigars!

Mr. Henry Ward Beecher has recently told us, in one of his "Ledger" articles, how he earned his first ten dollars, and what he did with it. While he was a student in Amherst he was invited to deliver a Fourth-of-July temperance address in Brattleboro', forty miles distant. His travelling expenses were to be paid; but the brilliant scheme occurred to him to walk the eighty miles, and earn the stage fare by saving it. He did so, and received by mail after his return a ten-dollar bill,--the first ten dollars he had ever possessed, and the first money he had ever earned. He instantly gave a proof that the test of a person's civilization is the use he makes of his surplus money. He spent the whole of it upon an edition of the works of Edmund Burke, and carried the volumes to his room, a happy youth. It was not the best choice, in literature, perhaps; but it was one that marked the civilized being, and indicated the future instructor of his species. Suppose he had invested the sum (and we all know students who would make just that use of an unexpected ten-dollar bill) in a new meerschaum and a bag of Lone-Jack tobacco! At the end of his college course he would have had, probably, a finely colored pipe,--perhaps the prettiest pipe of his year; but he would not have had that little "library of fifty volumes," the solace of his coming years of poverty and fever and ague, always doing their part toward expanding him from a sectarian into a man of the world, and lifting him from the slavery of a mean country parish toward the mastership of a metropolitan congregation. His was the very nature to have been quenched by tobacco. If he had bought a pipe that day, instead of books, he might be at this moment a petty D.D., preaching safe inanity or silly eccentricity in some obscure corner of the world, and going to Europe every five years for his health.

We all perceive that smoking has made bold and rapid encroachments of late years. It is said that the absurdly situated young man who passes in the world by the undescriptive name of the Prince of Wales smokes in drawing-rooms in the presence of ladies. This tale is probably false; scandalous tales respecting conspicuous persons are so generally false, that it is always safest and fairest to reject them as a matter of course, unless they rest upon testimony that ought to convince a jury. Nevertheless, it is true that smoke is creeping toward the drawing-room, and rolls in clouds where once it would not have dared to send a whiff. One reason of this is, that the cigar, and the pipe too, have "got into literature," where they shed abroad a most alluring odor. That passage, for example, in "Jane Eyre," where the timid, anxious Jane, returning after an absence, scents Rochester's cigar before she catches sight of his person, is enough to make any old smoker feel for his cigar-case; and all through the book smoke plays a dignified and attractive part. Mr. Rochester's cigars, we feel, must be of excellent quality (thirty cents each, at least); we see how freely they burn; we smell their delicious fragrance. Charlotte Brontë was, perhaps, one of the few women who have a morbid love of the odor of tobacco, who crave its stimulating aid as men do; and therefore her Rochester has a fragrance of the weed about him at all times, with which many readers have been captivated. "Jane Eyre" is the book of recent years which has been most frequently imitated, and consequently the circulating libraries are populous with smoking heroes. Byron, Thackeray, and many other popular authors have written passages in which the smoke of tobacco insinuates itself most agreeably into the reader's gentle senses.

Many smokers, too, have been made such by the unexplained rigor with which the practice is sometimes forbidden. Forbidden it must be in all schools; but merely forbidding it and making it a dire offence will not suffice in these times. Some of the most pitiable slaves of smoke I have ever known were brought up in families and schools where smoking was invested with the irresistible charm of being the worst thing a boy could do, except running away. Deep in the heart of the woods, high up in rocky hills, far from the haunts of men and schoolmasters (not to speak of places less salubrious), boys assemble on holiday afternoons to sicken themselves with furtive smoke, returning at the close of the day to relate the dazzling exploit to their companions. In this way the habit sometimes becomes so tyrannical, that, if the victims of it should give a sincere definition of "vacation," it would be this, "The time when boys can get a chance to smoke every day." I can also state, that the only school I ever knew or heard of in which young men who had formed the habit were induced to break themselves of it was the only school I ever knew or heard of in which all students above the age of sixteen were allowed to smoke. Still, it must be forbidden. Professor Charlier, of New York, will not have in his school a boy who smokes even at home in his father's presence, or in the street; and he is right; but it requires all his talents as a disciplinarian and all his influence as a member of society to enforce the rule. Nor would even his vigilance avail if he confined himself to the cold enunciation of the law: Thou shalt not smoke.

To forbid young men to smoke, without making an honest and earnest and skilful attempt to convince their understandings that the practice is pernicious, is sometimes followed by deplorable consequences. At the Naval Academy at Annapolis, not only is smoking forbidden, but the prohibition is effectual. There are four hundred young men confined within walls, and subjected to such discipline that it is impossible for a rule to be broken, the breaking of which betrays itself. The result is, that nearly all the students chew tobacco,--many of them to very great excess, and to their most serious and manifest injury. That great national institution teems with abuses, but, perhaps, all the other deleterious influences of the place united do less harm than this one abomination.

On looking over the articles upon tobacco in the Encyclopædias, we occasionally find writers declaring or conjecturing that, as smoking has become a habit almost universal, there must be, in the nature of things, a reason which accounts for and justifies it. Accounts for it, _yes_; justifies it, _no_.

So long as man lives the life of a pure savage, he has good health without ever bestowing a thought upon the matter. Nature, like a good farmer, saves the best for seed. The mightiest bull becomes the father of the herd; the great warrior, the great hunter, has the most wives and children. The sickly children are destroyed by the hardships of savage life, and those who survive are compelled to put forth such exertions in procuring food and defending their wigwams that they are always "in training." The pure savage has not the skill nor the time to extract from the wilds in which he lives the poisons that could deprave his taste and impair his vigor. Your Indian sleeps, with scanty covering, in a wigwam that freely admits the air. In his own way, he is an exquisite cook. Neither Delmonico nor Parker nor Professor Blot ever cooked a salmon or a partridge as well as a Rocky Mountain Indian cooks them; and when he has cooked his fish or his bird, he eats with it some perfectly simple preparation of Indian corn. He is an absolutely _unstimulated_ animal. The natural working of his internal machinery generates all the vital force he wants. He is as healthy as a buffalo, as a prize-fighter, as the stroke-oar of a university boat.

But in our civilized, sedentary life, he who would have good health must fight for it. Many people have the insolence to become parents who have no right to aspire to that dignity; children are born who have no right to exist; and skill preserves many whom nature is eager to destroy. Civilized man, too, has learned the trick of heading off some of the diseases that used to sweep over whole regions of the earth, and lay low the weakliest tenth of the population. Consequently, while the average duration of human life has been increased, the average tone of human health has been lowered. Fewer die, and fewer are quite well. Very many of us breathe vitiated air, and keep nine tenths of the body quiescent for twenty-two or twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four. Immense numbers cherish gloomy, depressing opinions, and convert the day set apart for rest and recreation into one which aggravates some of the worst tendencies of the week, and counteracts none of them. Half the population of the United States violate the laws of nature every time they take sustenance; and the children go, crammed with indigestion, to sit six hours in hot, ill-ventilated or unventilated school-rooms. Except in a few large towns, the bread and meat are almost universally inferior or bad; and the only viands that are good are those which ought not to be eaten at all. At most family tables, after a course of meat which has the curious property of being both soft and tough, a wild profusion of ingenious puddings, pies, cakes, and other abominable trash, beguiles the young, disgusts the mature, and injures all. From bodies thus imperfectly nourished, we demand excessive exertions of all kinds.

Hence, the universal craving for artificial aids to digestion. Hence, the universal use of stimulants,--whiskey, Worcestershire sauce, beer, wine, coffee, tea, tobacco. This is the only reason I can discover in the nature of things here for the widespread, increasing propensity to smoke. As all the virtues are akin, and give loyal aid to one another, so are all the vices in alliance, and play into one another's hands. Many a smoker will discover, when at last he breaks the bond of his servitude, that his pipe, trifling a matter as it may seem to him now, was really the power that kept down his whole nature, and vulgarized his whole existence. In many instances the single act of self-control involved in giving up the habit would necessitate and include a complete regeneration, first physical, then moral.

Whether the Coming Man will drink wine or be a teetotaller has not yet, perhaps, been positively ascertained; but it is certain he will not smoke. Nothing can be surer than that. The Coming Man will be as healthy as Tecumseh, as clean as Shirley, and as well groomed as Dexter. He will not fly the female of his species, nor wall himself in from her approach, nor give her cause to prefer his absence. We are not left to infer or conjecture this; we can ascertain it from what we know of the messengers who have announced the coming of the Coming Man. The most distinguished of these was Goethe,--perhaps the nearest approach to the complete human being that has yet appeared. The mere fact that this admirable person lived always unpolluted by this seductive poison is a fact of some significance; but the important fact is, that he _could not_ have smoked and remained Goethe. When we get close to the man, and live intimately with him, we perceive the impossibility of his ever having been a smoker. We can as easily fancy Desdemona smoking a cigarette as the highly groomed, alert, refined, imperial Goethe with a cigar in his mouth. In America, the best gentleman and most variously learned and accomplished man we have had--the man, too, who had in him most of what will constitute the glory of the future--was Thomas Jefferson, Democrat, of Virginia. He was versed in six languages; he danced, rode, and hunted as well as General Washington; he played the violin well, wrote admirably, farmed skilfully, and was a most generous, affectionate, humane, and great-souled human being. It was the destiny of this ornament and consolation of his species to raise tobacco, and live by tobacco all his life. But he knew too much to use it himself; or, to speak more correctly, his fine feminine senses, his fine masculine instincts, revolted from the use of it, without any assistance from his understanding.

There is no trace of the pipe in the writings of Washington or Franklin; probably they never smoked; so that we may rank the three great men of America--Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson--among the exempts. Washington Irving, who was the first literary man of the United States to achieve a universal reputation, and who is still regarded as standing at the head of our literature, was no smoker. Two noted Americans, Dr. Nott and John Quincy Adams, after having been slaves of the weed for many years, escaped from bondage and smoked no more. These distinguished names may serve as a set-off to the list of illustrious smokers previously given.

Among the nations of the earth most universally addicted to smoking are the Turks, the Persians, the Chinese, the Spanish,--all slaves of tradition, submissive to tyrants, unenterprising, averse to improvement, despisers of women. Next to these, perhaps, we must place the Germans, a noble race, renowned for two thousand years for the masculine vigor of the men and the motherly dignity of the women. Smoking is a blight upon this valuable breed of men; it steals away from their minds much of the alertness and decision that naturally belong to such minds as they have, and it impairs their bodily health. Go, on some festive day, to "Jones's Woods," where you may sometimes see five thousand Germans--men, women, and children--amusing themselves in their simple and rational way. Not one face in ten has the clear, bright look of health. Nearly all the faces have a certain tallowy aspect,--yellowish in color, with a dull shine upon them. You perceive plainly that it is not well with these good people; they are not conforming to nature's requirements; they are not the Germans of Tacitus,--ruddy, tough, happy, and indomitable. To lay the whole blame of this decline upon smoking, which is only one of many bad habits of theirs, would be absurd. What I insist upon is this: Smoking, besides doing its part toward lowering the tone of the bodily health, deadens our sense of other physical evils, and makes us submit to them more patiently. If our excellent German fellow-citizens were to throw away their pipes, they would speedily toss their cast-iron sausages after them, and become more fastidious in the choice of air for their own and their children's breathing, and reduce their daily allowance of lager-bier. Their first step toward physical regeneration will be, must be, the suppression of the pipe.

One hopeful sign for the future is, that this great subject of the physical aids and the physical obstacles to virtue is attracting attention and rising into importance. Our philanthropists have stopped giving tracts to hungry people; at least they give bread first. It is now a recognized truth, that it takes a certain number of cubic yards for a person to be virtuous in; and that, consequently, in that square mile of New York in which two hundred and ninety thousand people live, there must be--absolutely _must_ be--an immense number of unvirtuous persons. No human virtue or civilization can long exist where four families live in a room, some of whom take boarders. The way to regenerate this New York mile is simply to widen Manhattan Island by building three bridges over the East River, and to shorten the island by making three lines of underground or overground railroad to the upper end of it. We may say, too, there are circles--not many, it is true, but some--in which a man's religion would not be considered a very valuable acquisition, if, when he had "got" it, he kept on chewing tobacco. Such a flagrant and abominable violation of the Creator's laws, by a person distinctly professing a special veneration for them, would be ludicrous, if it were not so pernicious.

The time is at hand when these simple and fundamental matters will have their proper place in all our schemes for the improvement of one another. The impulse in this direction given by the publication of the most valuable work of this century--Buckle's "History of Civilization in England"--will not expend itself in vain. If that author had but lived, he would not have disdained, in recounting the obstacles to civilization, to consider the effects upon the best modern brains of a poison that lulls their noblest faculties to torpor, and enables them languidly to endure what they ought constantly to fight.

It is not difficult to stop smoking, except for one class of smokers,--those whom it has radically injured, and whose lives it is shortening. For all such the discontinuance of the practice will be almost as difficult as it is desirable. No rule can be given which will apply to all or to many such cases; but each man must fight it out on the line he finds best, and must not be surprised if it takes him a great deal longer than "all summer." If one of this class of smokers should gain deliverance from his bondage after a two years' struggle, he would be doing well. A man who had been smoking twenty cigars a day for several years, and should suddenly stop, would be almost certain either to relapse or fall into some worse habit,--chewing, whiskey, or opium. Perhaps his best way would be to put himself upon half allowance for a year, and devote the second year to completing his cure,--always taking care to live in other respects more wisely and temperately, and thus lessen the craving for a stimulant. The more smoke is hurting a man, the harder it is for him to stop smoking; and almost all whom the practice is destroying rest under the delusion that they could stop without the least effort, if they liked.

The vast majority of smokers--seven out of every ten, at least--can, without the least danger or much inconvenience, cease smoking at once, totally and forever.

As I have now given a trial to both sides of the question, I beg respectfully to assure the brotherhood of smokers that it does _not_ pay to smoke. It really does not. I can work better and longer than before. I have less headache. I have a better opinion of myself. I enjoy exercise more, and step out much more vigorously. My room is cleaner. The bad air of our theatres and other public places disgusts and infuriates me more, but exhausts me less. I think I am rather better tempered, as well as more cheerful and satisfied. I endure the inevitable ills of life with more fortitude, and look forward more hopefully to the coming years. It did not pay to smoke, but, most decidedly, it pays to stop smoking.

DRINKING.

WILL THE COMING MAN DRINK WINE?

The teetotalers confess their failure. After forty-five years of zealous and well-meant effort in the "cause," they agree that people are drinking more than ever. Dr. R. T. Trall of New York, the most thoroughgoing teetotaler extant, exclaims: "Where are we to-day? Defeated on all sides. The enemy victorious and rampant everywhere. More intoxicating liquors manufactured and drunk than ever before. Why is this?" Why, indeed! When the teetotalers can answer that question correctly, they will be in a fair way to gain upon the "enemy" that is now so "rampant." They are not the first people who have mistaken a symptom of disease for the disease itself, and striven to cure a cancer by applying salve and plaster and cooling washes to the sore. They are not the first travellers through this Wilderness who have tried to extinguish a smouldering fire, and discovered, at last, that they had been pouring water into the crater of a volcano.

Dr. Trall thinks we should all become teetotalers very soon, if only the doctors would stop prescribing wine, beer, and whiskey to their patients. But the doctors will not. They like a glass of wine themselves. Dr. Trall tells us that, during the Medical Convention held at St. Louis a few years ago, the doctors dined together, and upon the table were "forty kinds of alcoholic liquors." The most enormous feed ever accomplished under a roof in America, I suppose, was the great dinner of the doctors, given in New York, fifteen years ago, at the Metropolitan Hall. I had the pleasure on that occasion of seeing half an acre of doctors all eating and drinking at once, and I can testify that very few of them--indeed, none that I could discover--neglected the bottle. It was an occasion which united all the established barbarisms of a public dinner,--absence of ladies, indigestible food in most indigestible quantities, profuse and miscellaneous drinking, clouds of smoke, late sitting, and wild speaking. Why not? Do not these men live and thrive upon such practices? Why should they not set an example of the follies which enrich them? It is only heroes who offend, deny, and rebuke the people upon whose favor their fortune depends; and there are never many heroes in the world at one time. No, no, Dr. Trall! the doctors are good fellows; but their affair is to cure disease, not to preserve health.

One man, it seems, and only one, has had much success in dissuading people from drinking, and that was Father Mathew. A considerable proportion of his converts in Ireland, it is said, remain faithful to their pledge; and most of the Catholic parishes in the United States have a Father Mathew Society connected with them, which is both a teetotal and a mutual-benefit organization. In New York and adjacent cities the number of persons belonging to such societies is about twenty-seven thousand. On the anniversary of Father Mathew's birth they walk in procession, wearing aprons, carrying large banners (when the wind permits), and heaping up gayly dressed children into pyramids and mountains drawn by six and eight horses. At their weekly or monthly meetings they sing songs, recite poetry, perform plays and farces, enact comic characters, and, in other innocent ways, endeavor to convince on-lookers that people can be happy and merry, uproariously merry, without putting a headache between their teeth. These societies seem to be a great and unmingled good. They do actually help poor men to withstand their only American enemy. They have, also, the approval of the most inveterate drinkers, both Catholic and Protestant. Jones complacently remarks, as he gracefully sips his claret (six dollars per dozen) that this total abstinence, you know, is an excellent thing for emigrants; to which Brown and Robinson invariably assent.

Father Mathew used to administer his pledge to people who _knelt_ before him, and when they had taken it he made over them the sign of the cross. He did not usually deliver addresses; he did not relate amusing anecdotes; he did not argue the matter; he merely pronounced the pledge, and gave to it the sanction of religion, and something of the solemnity of a sacrament. The present Father Mathew Societies are also closely connected with the church, and the pledge is regarded by the members as of religious obligation. Hence, these societies are successful, in a respectable degree; and we may look, with the utmost confidence, to see them extend and flourish until a great multitude of Catholics are teetotalers. Catholic priests, I am informed, generally drink wine, and very many of them smoke; but _they_ are able to induce men to take the pledge without setting them an example of abstinence, just as parents sometimes deny their children pernicious viands of which they freely partake themselves.

But _we_ cannot proceed in that way. Our religion has not power to control a physical craving by its mere fiat, nor do we all yet perceive what a deadly and shameful sin it is to vitiate our own bodies. The Catholic Church is antiquity. The Catholic Church is childhood. _We_ are living in modern times; _we_ have grown a little past childhood; and when we are asked to relinquish a pleasure, we demand to be convinced that it is best we should. By and by we shall all comprehend that, when a person means to reform his life, the very first thing for him to do--the thing preliminary and most indispensable--will be to cease violating physical laws. The time, I hope, is at hand, when an audience in a theatre, who catch a manager cheating them out of their fair allowance of fresh air, will not sit and gasp, and inhale destruction till eleven P.M., and then rush wildly to the street for relief. They will stop the play; they will tear up the benches, if necessary; they will throw things on the stage; they will knock a hole in the wall; they will _have_ the means of breathing, or perish in the struggle. But at present people do not know what they are doing when they inhale poison. They do not know that more than one half of all the diseases that plague us most--scarlet fever, small-pox, measles, and all the worst fevers--come of breathing bad air. Not a child last winter would have had the scarlet fever, if all the children in the world had slept with a window open, and had had pure air to breathe all day. This is Miss Nightingale's opinion, and there is no better authority. People are ignorant of these things, and they are therefore indifferent to them. They will remain indifferent till they are enlightened.

Our teetotal friends have not neglected the scientific questions involved in their subject; nor have they settled them. Instead of insulting the public intelligence by asserting that the wines mentioned in the Bible were some kind of unintoxicating slop, and exasperating the public temper by premature prohibitory laws, they had better expend their strength upon the science of the matter, and prove to mankind, if they can, that these agreeable drinks which they denounce are really hurtful. We all know that excess is hurtful. We also know that adulterated liquors may be. But is the thing in itself pernicious?--pure wine taken in moderation? good beer? genuine Old Bourbon?

For one, I wish it could be demonstrated that these things are hurtful. Sweeping, universal truths are as convenient as they are rare. The evils resulting from excess in drinking are so enormous and so terrible, that it would be a relief to know that alcoholic liquors are in themselves evil, and to be always avoided. What are the romantic woes of a Desdemona, or the brief picturesque sorrows of a Lear, compared with the thirty years' horror and desolation caused by a drunken parent? We laugh when we read Lamb's funny description of his waking up in the morning, and learning in what condition he had come home the night before by seeing all his clothes carefully folded. But his sister Mary did not laugh at it. He was all she had; it was tragedy to her,--this self-destruction of her sole stay and consolation. Goethe did not find it a laughing matter to have a drunken wife in his house for fifteen years, nor a jest to have his son brought in drunk from the tavern, and to see him dead in his coffin, the early victim of champagne. Who would not _like_ to have a clear conviction, that what we have to do with regard to all such fluids is to let them alone? I am sure I should. It is a great advantage to have your enemy in plain sight, and to be sure he _is_ an enemy.

What is wine? Chemists tell us they do not know. Three fifths of a glass of wine is water. One fifth is alcohol. Of the remaining fifth, about one half is sugar. One tenth of the whole quantity remains to be accounted for. A small part of that tenth is the acid which makes vinegar sour. Water, alcohol, sugar, acid,--these make very nearly the whole body of the wine; but if we mix these things in the proportions in which they are found in Madeira, the liquid is a disgusting mess, nothing like Madeira. The great chemists confess they do not know what that last small fraction of the glass of wine is, upon which its flavor, its odor, its fascination, depend. They do not know what it is that makes the difference between port and sherry, but are obliged to content themselves with giving it a hard name.

Similar things are admitted concerning the various kinds of spirituous and malt liquors. Chemistry seems to agree with the temperance society, that wine, beer, brandy, gin, whiskey, and rum are alcohol and water, mixed in different proportions, and with some slight differences of flavoring and coloring matter. In all these drinks, teetotalers maintain, _alcohol is power_, the other ingredients being mere dilution and flavoring. Wine, they assure us, is alcohol and water flavored with grapes; beer is alcohol and water flavored with malt and hops; Bourbon whiskey is alcohol and water flavored with corn. These things they assert, and the great chemists do not enable us drinkers of those seductive liquids to deny it. On the contrary, chemical analysis, so far as it has gone, supports the teetotal view of the matter.

What does a glass of wine do to us when we have swallowed it?

We should naturally look to physicians for an answer to such a question; but the great lights of the profession--men of the rank of Astley Cooper, Brodie, Abernethy, Holmes--all assure the public, that no man of them knows, and no man has ever known, how medicinal substances work in the system, and why they produce the effects they do. Even of a substance so common as Peruvian bark, no one knows why and how it acts as a tonic; nor is there any certainty of its being a benefit to mankind. There is no science of medicine. The "Red Lane" of the children leads to a region which is still mysterious and unknown; for when the eye can explore its recesses, a change has occurred in it, which is also mysterious and unknown: it is dead. Quacks tell us, in every newspaper, that they can cure and prevent disease by pouring or dropping something down our throats, and we have heard this so often, that, when a man is sick, the first thing that occurs to him is to "take physic." But physicians who are honest, intelligent, and in an independent position, appear to be coming over to the opinion that this is generally a delusion. We see eminent physicians prescribing for the most malignant fevers little but open windows, plenty of blankets, Nightingale nursing, and beef tea. Many young physicians, too, have gladly availed themselves of the ingenuity of Hahnemann, and satisfy at once their consciences and their patients by prescribing doses of medicine that are next to no medicine at all. The higher we go among the doctors, the more sweeping and emphatic is the assurance we receive that the profession does not understand the operation of medicines in the living body, and does not really approve their employment.

If something more is known of the operation of alcohol than of any other chemical fluid,--if there is any approach to certainty respecting it,--we owe it chiefly to the teetotalers, because it is they who have provoked contradiction, excited inquiry, and suggested experiment. They have not done much themselves in the way of investigation, but they started the topic, and have kept it alive. They have also published a few pages which throw light upon the points in dispute. After going over the ground pretty thoroughly, I can tell the reader in a few words the substance of what has been ascertained, and plausibly inferred, concerning the effects of wine, beer, and spirits upon the human constitution.

They cannot be _nourishment_, in the ordinary acceptation of that word, because the quantity of nutritive matter in them is so small. Liebig, no enemy of beer, says this: "We can prove, with mathematical certainty, that as much flour or meal as can lie on the point of a table-knife is more nutritious than nine quarts of the best Bavarian beer; that a man who is able daily to consume that amount of beer obtains from it, in a whole year, in the most favorable case, exactly the amount of nutritive constituents which is contained in a five-pound loaf of bread, or in three pounds of flesh." So of wine; when we have taken from a glass of wine the ingredients known to be innutritious, there is scarcely anything left but a grain or two of sugar. Pure alcohol, though a product of highly nutritive substances, is a mere poison,--an absolute poison,--the mortal foe of life in every one of its forms, animal and vegetable. If, therefore, these beverages do us good, it is not by supplying the body with nourishment.

Nor can they aid digestion by assisting to decompose food. When we have taken too much shad for breakfast, we find that a wineglass of whiskey instantly mitigates the horrors of indigestion, and enables us again to contemplate the future without dismay. But if we catch a curious fish or reptile, and want to keep him from decomposing, and bring him home as a contribution to the Museum of Professor Agassiz, we put him in a bottle of whiskey. Several experiments have been made with a view to ascertain whether mixing alcohol with the gastric juice increases or lessens its power to decompose food, and the results of all of them point to the conclusion that the alcohol retards the process of decomposition. A little alcohol retards it a little, and much alcohol retards it much. It has been proved by repeated experiment, that any portion of alcohol, however small, diminishes the power of the gastric juice to decompose. The digestive fluid has been mixed with wine, beer, whiskey, brandy, and alcohol diluted with water, and kept at the temperature of the living body, and the motions of the body imitated during the experiment; but, in every instance, the pure gastric juice was found to be the true and sole digester, and the alcohol a retarder of digestion. This fact, however, required little proof. We are all familiar with alcohol as a _preserver_, and scarcely need to be reminded, that, if alcohol assists digestion at all, it cannot be by assisting decomposition.

Nor is it a heat-producing fluid. On the contrary, it appears, in all cases, to diminish the efficiency of the heat-producing process. Most of us who live here in the North, and who are occasionally subjected to extreme cold for hours at a time, know this by personal experience; and all the Arctic voyagers attest it. Brandy is destruction when men have to face a temperature of sixty below zero; they want lamp-oil then, and the rich blubber of the whale and walrus. Dr. Rae, who made two or three pedestrian tours of the polar regions, and whose powers of endurance were put to as severe a test as man's ever were, is clear and emphatic upon this point. Brandy, he says, stimulates but for a few minutes, and greatly lessens a man's power to endure cold and fatigue. Occasionally we have in New York a cool breeze from the North which reduces the temperature below zero,--to the sore discomfort of omnibus-drivers and car-drivers, who have to face it on their way up town. On a certain Monday night, two or three winters ago, twenty-three drivers on one line were disabled by the cold, many of whom had to be lifted from the cars and carried in. It is a fact familiar to persons in this business, that men who drink freely are more likely to be benumbed and overcome by the cold than those who abstain. It seems strange to us, when we first hear it, that a meagre teetotaller should be safer on such a night than a bluff, red-faced imbiber of beer and whiskey, who takes something at each end of the line to keep himself warm. It nevertheless appears to be true. A traveller relates, that, when Russian troops are about to start upon a march in a very cold region, no grog is allowed to be served to them; and when the men are drawn up, ready to move, the corporals smell the breath of every man, and send back to quarters all who have been drinking. The reason is, that men who start under the influence of liquor are the first to succumb to the cold, and the likeliest to be frost-bitten. It is the uniform experience of the hunters and trappers in the northern provinces of North America, and of the Rocky Mountains, that alcohol diminishes their power to resist cold. A whole magazine could be filled with testimony on this point.

Still less is alcohol a strength-giver. Every man that ever trained for a supreme exertion of strength knows that Tom Sayers spoke the truth when he said: "I'm no teetotaller: but when I've any business to do, there's nothing like water and the dumb-bells." Richard Cobden, whose powers were subjected to a far severer trial than a pugilist ever dreamed of, whose labors by night and day, during the corn-law struggle, were excessive and continuous beyond those of any other member of the House of Commons, bears similar testimony: "The more work I have to do, the more I have resorted to the pump and the teapot." On this branch of the subject, _all_ the testimony is against alcoholic drinks. Whenever the point has been tested,--and it has often been tested,--the truth has been confirmed, that he who would do his _very_ best and most, whether in rowing, lifting, running, watching, mowing, climbing, fighting, speaking, or writing, must not admit into his system one drop of alcohol. Trainers used to allow their men a pint of beer per day, and severe trainers half a pint; but now the knowing ones have cut off even that moderate allowance, and brought their men down to cold water, and not too much of that, the soundest digesters requiring little liquid of any kind. Mr. Bigelow, by his happy publication lately of the correct version of Franklin's Autobiography, has called to mind the famous beer passage in that immortal work: "I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers[1] of beer. On occasion I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands." I have a long list of references on this point; but, in these cricketing, boat-racing, prize-fighting days, the fact has become too familiar to require proof. The other morning, Horace Greeley, teetotaler, came to his office after an absence of several days, and found letters and arrears of work that would have been appalling to any man but him. He shut himself in at ten A.M., and wrote steadily, without leaving his room, till eleven, P.M.,--thirteen hours. When he had finished, he had some little difficulty in getting down stairs, owing to the stiffness of his joints, caused by the long inaction; but he was as fresh and smiling the next morning as though he had done nothing extraordinary. Are any of us drinkers of beer and wine capable of such a feat? Then, during the war, when he was writing his history, he performed every day, for two years, two days' work,--one from nine to four, on his book; the other from seven to eleven, upon the Tribune; and, in addition, he did more than would tire an ordinary man in the way of correspondence and public speaking. I may also remind the reader, that the clergyman who, of all others in the United States, expends most vitality, both with tongue and pen, and who does his work with least fatigue and most gayety of heart, is another of Franklin's "water Americans."

[1] We owe to Mr. Bigelow the restoration of this strong
Franklinian word. The common editions have it "drinkers."

If, then, wine does not nourish us, does not assist the decomposition of food, does not warm, does not strengthen, what does it do?

We all know that, when we drink alcoholic liquor, it affects the brain immediately. Most of us are aware, too, that it affects the brain injuriously, lessening at once its power to discern and discriminate. If I, at this ten, A.M., full of interest in this subject, and eager to get my view of it upon paper, were to drink a glass of the best port, Madeira, or sherry, or even a glass of lager-bier, I should lose the power to continue in three minutes; or, if I persisted in going on, I should be pretty sure to utter paradox and spurts of extravagance, which would not bear the cold review of to-morrow morning. Any one can try this experiment. Take two glasses of wine, and then immediately apply yourself to the hardest task your mind ever has to perform, and you will find you cannot do it. Let any student, just before he sits down to his mathematics, drink a pint of the purest beer, and he will be painfully conscious of loss of power. Or, let any salesman, before beginning with a difficult but important customer, perform the idiotic action of "taking a drink," and he will soon discover that his ascendency over his customer is impaired. In some way this alcohol, of which we are so fond, gets to the brain and injures it. We are conscious of this, and we can observe it. It is among the wine-drinking classes of our fellow-beings, that absurd, incomplete, and reactionary ideas prevail. The receptive, the curious, the candid, the trustworthy brains,--those that do not take things for granted, and yet are ever open to conviction,--such heads are to be found on the shoulders of men who drink little or none of these seductive fluids. How we all wondered that England should _think_ so erroneously, and adhere to its errors so obstinately, during our late war! Mr. Gladstone has in part explained the mystery. The adults of England, he said, in his famous wine speech, drink, on an average, three hundred quarts of beer each per annum! Now, it is physically impossible for a human brain, muddled every day with a quart of beer, to correctly hold correct opinions, or appropriate pure knowledge. Compare the conversation of a group of Vermont farmers, gathered on the stoop of a country store on a rainy afternoon, with that which you may hear in the farmers' room of a market-town inn in England! The advantage is not wholly with the Vermonters; by no means, for there is much in human nature besides the brain and the things of the brain. But in this one particular--in the topics of conversation, in the interest manifested in large and important subjects--the water-drinking Vermonters are to the beer-drinking Englishmen what Franklin was to the London printers. It is beyond the capacity of a well-beered brain even to read the pamphlet on Liberty and Necessity which Franklin wrote in those times.

The few experiments which have been made, with a view to trace the course of alcohol in the living system, all confirm what all drinkers feel, that it is to the brain alcohol hurries when it has passed the lips. Some innocent dogs have suffered and died in this investigation. Dr. Percy, a British physician, records, that he injected two ounces and a half of alcohol into the stomach of a dog, which caused its almost instant death. The dog dropped very much as he would if he had been struck upon the head with a club. The experimenter, without a moment's unnecessary delay, removed the animal's brain, subjected it to distillation, and extracted from it a surprising quantity of alcohol,--a larger proportion than he could distil from the blood or liver. The alcohol seemed to have rushed to the brain: it was a blow upon the head which killed the dog. Dr. Percy introduced into the stomachs of other dogs smaller quantities of alcohol, not sufficient to cause death; but upon killing the dogs, and subjecting the brain, the blood, the bile, the liver, and other portions of the body, to distillation, he invariably found more alcohol in the brain than in the same weight of other organs. He injected alcohol into the blood of dogs, which caused death; but the deadly effect was produced, not upon the substance of the blood, but upon the brain. His experiments go far toward explaining why the drinking of alcoholic liquors does not sensibly retard digestion. It seems that, when we take wine at dinner, the alcohol does not remain in the stomach, but is immediately absorbed into the blood, and swiftly conveyed to the brain and other organs. If one of those "four-bottle men" of the last generation had fallen down dead, after boozing till past midnight, and he had been treated as Dr. Percy treated the dogs, his brain, his liver, and all the other centres of power, would have yielded alcohol in abundance; his blood would have smelt of it; his flesh would have contained it; but there would have been very little in the stomach. Those men were able to drink four, six, and seven bottles of wine at a sitting, because the sitting lasted four, six, and seven hours, which gave time for the alcohol to be distributed over the system. But instances have occurred of laboring men who have kept themselves steadily drunk for forty-eight hours, and then died. The bodies of two such were dissected some years ago in England, and the food which they had eaten at the beginning of the debauch was undigested. It had been preserved in alcohol as we preserve snakes.

Once, and only once, in the lifetime of man, an intelligent human eye has been able to look into the living stomach, and watch the process of digestion. In 1822, at the United States military post of Michilimackinac, Alexis St. Martin, a Canadian of French extraction, received accidentally a heavy charge of duck-shot in his side, while he was standing one yard from the muzzle of the gun. The wound was frightful. One of the lungs protruded, and from an enormous aperture in the stomach the food recently eaten was oozing. Dr. William Beaumont, U.S.A., the surgeon of the post, was notified, and dressed the wound. In exactly one year from that day the young man was well enough to get out of doors, and walk about the fort; and he continued to improve in health and strength, until he was as strong and hardy as most of his race. He married, became the father of a large family, and performed for many years the laborious duties appertaining to an officer's servant at a frontier post. But the aperture into the stomach never closed, and the patient would not submit to the painful operation by which such wounds are sometimes closed artificially. He wore a compress arranged by the doctor, without which his dinner was not safe after he had eaten it.

By a most blessed chance it happened that this Dr. William Beaumont, stationed there on the outskirts of creation, was an intelligent, inquisitive human being, who perceived all the value of the opportunity afforded him by this unique event. He set about improving that opportunity. He took the young man into his service, and, at intervals, for eight years, he experimented upon him. He alone among the sons of men has seen liquid flowing into the stomach of a living person while yet the vessel was at the drinker's lips. Through the aperture (which remained two and a half inches in circumference) he could watch the entire operation of digestion, and he did so hundreds of times. If the man's stomach ached, he could look into it and see what was the matter; and, having found out, he would drop a rectifying pill into the aperture. He ascertained the time it takes to digest each of the articles of food commonly eaten, and the effects of all the usual errors in eating and drinking. In 1833, he published a thin volume, at Plattsburg on Lake Champlain, in which the results of thousands of experiments and observations were only too briefly stated. He appears not to have heard of teetotalism, and hence all that he says upon the effects of alcoholic liquors is free from the suspicion which the arrogance and extravagance of some teetotalers have thrown over much that has been published on this subject. With a mind unbiassed, Dr. Beaumont, peering into the stomach of this stout Canadian, notices that a glass of brandy causes the coats of that organ to assume the same inflamed appearance as when he had been very angry, or much frightened, or had overeaten, or had had the flow of perspiration suddenly checked. In other words, brandy played the part of a _foe_ in his system, not that of a friend; it produced effects which were morbid, not healthy. Nor did it make any material difference whether St. Martin drank brandy, whiskey, wine, cider, or beer, except so far as one was stronger than the other.

"Simple water," says Dr. Beaumont, "is perhaps the only fluid that is called for by the wants of the economy. The artificial drinks are probably _all_ more or less injurious; some more so than others, but none can claim exemption from the general charge. Even tea and coffee, the common beverages of all classes of people, have a tendency to debilitate the digestive organs.... The whole class of alcoholic liquors may be considered as narcotics, producing very little difference in their ultimate effects upon the system."