Chapter III: Part 3

He ascertained too (not guessed, or inferred, but _ascertained_, watch in hand) that such things as mustard, horse-radish, and pepper retard digestion. At the close of his invaluable work Dr. Beaumont appends a long list of "Inferences," among which are the following: "That solid food of a certain texture is easier of digestion than fluid; that stimulating condiments are injurious to the healthy system; that the use of ardent spirits _always_ produces disease of the stomach if persisted in; that water, ardent spirits, and most other fluids, are not affected by the gastric juice, but pass from the stomach soon after they have been received." One thing appears to have much surprised Dr. Beaumont, and that was, the degree to which St. Martin's system could be disordered without his being much inconvenienced by it. After drinking hard every day for eight or ten days, the stomach would show alarming appearances of disease; and yet the man would only feel a slight headache, and a general dulness and languor.

If there is no comfort for drinkers in Dr. Beaumont's precious little volume, it must be also confessed, that neither the dissecting-knife nor the microscope afford us the least countenance. All that has yet been ascertained of the effects of alcohol by the dissection of the body favors the extreme position of the extreme teetotalers. A brain alcoholized the microscope proves to be a brain diseased. Blood which has absorbed alcohol is unhealthy blood,--the microscope shows it. The liver, the heart, and other organs, which have been accustomed to absorb alcohol, all give testimony under the microscope which produces discomfort in the mind of one who likes a glass of wine, and hopes to be able to continue the enjoyment of it. The dissecting-knife and the microscope so far have nothing to say for us,--nothing at all: they are dead against us.

Of all the experiments which have yet been undertaken with a view to trace the course of alcohol through the human system, the most important were those made in Paris a few years ago by Professors Lallemand, Perrin, and Duroy, distinguished physicians and chemists. Frenchmen have a way of co-operating with one another, both in the investigation of scientific questions and in the production of literature, which is creditable to their civilization and beneficial to the world. The experiments conducted by these gentlemen produced the remarkable effect of causing the editor of a leading periodical to confess to the public that he was not infallible. In 1855 the Westminster Review contained an article by Mr. Lewes, in which the teetotal side of these questions was effectively ridiculed; but, in 1861, the same periodical reviewed the work of the French professors just named, and honored itself by appending a note in which it said: "Since the date of our former article, scientific research has brought to light important facts which necessarily modify the opinions we then expressed concerning the _rôle_ of alcohol in the animal body." Those facts were revealed or indicated in the experiments of Messrs. Lallemand, Perrin, and Duroy.

Ether and chloroform,--their mode of operation; why and how they render the living body insensible to pain under the surgeon's knife; what becomes of them after they have performed that office,--these were the points which engaged their attention, and in the investigation of which they spent several years. They were rewarded, at length, with the success due to patience and ingenuity. By the aid of ingenious apparatus, after experiments almost numberless, they felt themselves in a position to demonstrate, that, when ether is inhaled, it is immediately absorbed by the blood, and by the blood is conveyed to the brain. If a surgeon were to commit such a breach of professional etiquette as to cut off a patient's head at the moment of complete insensibility, he would be able to distil from the brain a great quantity of ether. But it is not usual to take that liberty except with dogs. The inhalation, therefore, proceeds until the surgical operation is finished, when the handkerchief is withdrawn from the patient's face, and he is left to regain his senses. What happens then? What becomes of the ether? These learned Frenchmen discovered that most of it goes out of the body by the road it came in at,--the lungs. It was breathed in; it is breathed out. The rest escapes by other channels of egress; it all escapes, and it escapes unchanged! That is the point: it escapes without having _left_ anything in the system. All that can be said of it is, that it entered the body, created morbid conditions in the body, and then left the body. It cost these patient men years to arrive at this result; but any one who has ever had charge of a patient that has been rendered insensible by ether will find little difficulty in believing it.

Having reached this demonstration, the experimenters naturally thought of applying the same method and similar apparatus to the investigation of the effects of alcohol, which is the fluid nearest resembling ether and chloroform. Dogs and men suffered in the cause. In the moisture exhaled from the pores of a drunken dog's skin, these cunning Frenchmen detected the alcohol which had made him drunk. They proved it to exist in the breath of a man, at six o'clock in the evening, who had drunk a bottle of claret for breakfast at half past ten in the morning. They also proved that, at midnight, the alcohol of that bottle of wine was still availing itself of other avenues of escape. They proved that when alcohol is taken into the system in any of its dilutions,--wine, cider, spirits, or beer,--the whole animal economy speedily busies itself with its expulsion, and continues to do so until it has expelled it. The lungs exhale it; the pores of the skin let out a little of it; the kidneys do their part; and by whatever other road an enemy can escape it seeks the outer air. Like ether, alcohol enters the body, makes a disturbance there, and goes out of the body, leaving it no richer than it found it. It is a guest that departs, after giving a great deal of trouble, without paying his bill or "remembering" the servants. Now, to make the demonstration complete, it would be necessary to take some unfortunate man or dog, give him a certain quantity of alcohol,--say one ounce,--and afterwards distil from his breath, perspiration, &c., the whole quantity that he had swallowed. This has not been done; it never will be done; it is obviously impossible. Enough has been done to justify these conscientious and indefatigable inquirers in announcing, as a thing susceptible of all but demonstration, that alcohol contributes to the human system nothing whatever, but leaves it undigested and wholly unchanged. They are fully persuaded (and so will you be, reader, if you read their book) that, if you take into your system an ounce of alcohol, the whole ounce leaves the system within forty-eight hours, just as good alcohol as it went in.

There is a boy in Pickwick who swallowed a farthing. "Out with it," said the father; and it is to be presumed--though Mr. Weller does not mention the fact--that the boy complied with a request so reasonable. Just as much nutrition as that small copper coin left in the system of that boy, plus a small lump of sugar, did the claret which we drank yesterday deposit in ours; so, at least, we must infer from the experiments of Messrs. Lallemand, Perrin, and Duroy.

To evidence of this purely scientific nature might be added, if space could be afforded, a long list of persons who, having indulged in wine for many years, have found benefit from discontinuing the use of it. Most of us have known such instances. I have known several, and I can most truly say, that I have never known an individual in tolerable health who discontinued the use of any stimulant whatever without benefit. We all remember Sydney Smith's strong sentences on this point, scattered through the volume which contains the correspondence of that delicious humorist and wit. "I like London better than ever I liked it before," he writes in the prime of his prime (forty-three years old) to Lady Holland, "and simply, I believe, from water-drinking. Without this, London is stupefaction and inflammation." So has New York become. Again, in 1828, when he was fifty-seven, to the same lady: "I not only was never better, but never half so well; indeed, I find I have been very ill all my life without knowing it. Let me state some of the goods arising from abstaining from all fermented liquors. First, sweet sleep; having never known what sweet sleep was, I sleep like a baby or a plough-boy. If I wake, no needless terrors, no black visions of life, but pleasing hopes and pleasing recollections: Holland House past and to come! If I dream, it is not of lions and tigers, but of Easter dues and tithes. Secondly, I can take longer walks and make greater exertions without fatigue. My understanding is improved, and I comprehend political economy. I see better without wine and spectacles than when I used both. Only one evil ensues from it; I am in such extravagant spirits that I must lose blood, or look out for some one who will bore or depress me. Pray leave off wine: the stomach is quite at rest; no heartburn, no pain, no distention."

I have also a short catalogue of persons who, having long lived innocent of these agreeable drinks, began at length to use them. Dr. Franklin's case is striking. That "water American," as he was styled by the London printers, whose ceaseless guzzling of beer he ridiculed in his twentieth year, drank wine in his sixtieth with the freedom usual at that period among persons of good estate. "At parting," he writes in 1768, when he was sixty-two, "after we had drank a bottle and a half of claret each, Lord Clare hugged and kissed me, protesting he never in his life met with a man he was so much in love with." The consequence of this departure from the customs of his earlier life was ten years of occasional acute torture from the stone and gravel. Perhaps, if Franklin had remained a "water American," he would have annexed Canada to the United States at the peace of 1782. An agonizing attack of stone laid him on his back for three months, just as the negotiation was becoming interesting; and by the time he was well again the threads were gone out of his hands into those of the worst diplomatists that ever threw a golden chance away.

What are we to conclude from all this? Are we to knock the heads out of all our wine-casks, join the temperance society, and denounce all men who do not follow our example? Taking together all that science and observation teach and indicate, we have one certainty: That, to a person in good health and of good life, alcoholic liquors are not necessary, but are always in some degree hurtful. This truth becomes so clear, after a few weeks' investigation, that I advise every person who means to keep on drinking such liquors not to look into the facts; for if he does, he will never again be able to lift a glass of wine to his lips, nor contemplate a foaming tankard, nor mix his evening toddy, nor hear the pop and melodious gurgle of champagne, with that fine complacency which irradiates his countenance now, and renders it so pleasing a study to those who sit on the other side of the table. No; never again! Even the flavor of those fluids will lose something of their charm. The conviction will obtrude itself upon his mind at most inopportune moments, that this drinking of wine, beer, and whiskey, to which we are so much addicted, is an enormous delusion. If the teetotalers would induce some rational being--say that public benefactor, Dr. Willard Parker of New York--to collect into one small volume the substance of all the investigations alluded to in this article,--the substance of Dr. Beaumont's precious little book, the substance of the French professors' work, and the others,--adding no comment except such as might be necessary to elucidate the investigators' meaning, it could not but carry conviction to every candid and intelligent reader that spirituous drinks are to the healthy system an injury necessarily, and in all cases.

The Coming Man, then, so long as he enjoys good health,--which he usually will from infancy to hoary age,--will _not_ drink wine, nor, of course, any of the coarser alcoholic dilutions. To that unclouded and fearless intelligence, science will be the supreme law; it will be to him more than the Koran is to a Mohammedan, and more than the Infallible Church is to a Roman Catholic. Science, or, in other words, the law of God as revealed in nature, life, and history, and as ascertained by experiment, observation, and thought,--this will be the teacher and guide of the Coming Man.

A single certainty in a matter of so much importance is not to be despised. I can now say to young fellows who order a bottle of wine, and flatter themselves that, in so doing, they approve themselves "jolly dogs": No, my lads, it is because you are dull dogs that you want the wine. You are forced to borrow excitement because you have squandered your natural gayety. The ordering of the wine is a confession of insolvency. When we feel it necessary to "take something" at certain times during the day, we are in a condition similar to that of a merchant who every day, about the anxious hour of half past two, has to run around among his neighbors borrowing credit. It is something disgraceful or suspicious. Nature does not supply enough of inward force. We are in arrears. Our condition is absurd; and, if we ought not to be alarmed, we ought at least to be ashamed. Nor does the borrowed credit increase our store; it leaves nothing behind to enrich _us_, but takes something from our already insufficient stock; and the more pressing our need the more it costs us to borrow.

But the Coming Man, blooming, robust, alert, and light-hearted as he will be, may not be always well. If, as he springs up a mountain-side, his foot slips, the law of gravitation will respect nature's darling too much to keep him from tumbling down the precipice; and, as he wanders in strange regions, an unperceived malaria may poison his pure and vivid blood. Some generous errors, too, he may commit (although it is not probable), and expend a portion of his own life in warding off evil from the lives of others. Fever may blaze even in his clear eyes; poison may rack his magnificent frame, and a long convalescence may severely try his admirable patience. Will the Coming Man drink wine when he is sick? The question is not easily answered.

One valuable witness on this branch of the inquiry is the late Theodore Parker. A year or two before his lamented death, when he was already struggling with the disease that terminated his existence, he wrote for his friend, Dr. Bowditch, "the consumptive history" of his family from 1634, when his stalwart English ancestor settled in New England. The son of that ancestor built a house, in 1664, upon the slope of a hill which terminated in "a great fresh meadow of spongy peat," which was "always wet all the year through," and from which "fogs could be seen gathering towards night of a clear day."[2] In the third generation of the occupants of this house consumption was developed, and carried off eight children out of eleven, all between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. From that time consumption was the bane of the race, and spared not the offspring of parents who had removed from the family seat into localities free from malaria. One of the daughters of the house, who married a man of giant stature and great strength, became the mother of four sons. Three of these sons, though settled in a healthy place and in an innoxious business, died of consumption between twenty and twenty-five. But the fourth son became intemperate,--drank great quantities of New England rum. He did _not_ die of the disease, but was fifty-five years of age when the account was written, and then exhibited no consumptive tendency! To this fact Mr. Parker added others:--

"1. I know a consumptive family living in a situation like that I have mentioned for, perhaps, the same length of time, who had four sons. Two of them were often drunk, and always intemperate,--one of them as long as I can remember; both consumptive in early life, but now both hearty men from sixty to seventy. The two others were temperate, one drinking moderately, the other but occasionally. They both died of consumption, the eldest not over forty-five.

[2] Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker. By John
Weiss. Vol. II. p. 513.

"2. Another consumptive family in such a situation as has been already described had many sons and several daughters. The daughters were all temperate, married, settled elsewhere, had children, died of consumption, bequeathing it also to their posterity. But five of the sons, whom I knew, were drunkards,--some, of the extremest description; they all had the consumptive build, and in early life showed signs of the disease, but none of them died of it; some of them are still burning in rum. There was one brother temperate, a farmer, living in the healthiest situation. But I was told he died some years ago of consumption."

To these facts must be added one more woful than a thousand such,--that Theodore Parker himself, one of the most valuable lives upon the Western Continent, died of consumption in his fiftieth year. The inference which Mr. Parker drew from the family histories given was the following: "Intemperate habits (where the man drinks a pure, though coarse and fiery, liquor, like New England rum) tend to check the consumptive tendency, though the drunkard, who himself escapes the consequences, may transmit the fatal seed to his children."

There is not much comfort in this for topers; but the facts are interesting, and have their value. A similar instance is related by Mr. Charles Knight; although in this case the poisoned air was more deadly, and more swift to destroy. Mr. Knight speaks, in his Popular History of England, of the "careless and avaricious employers" of London, among whom, he says, the master-tailors were the most notorious. Some of them would "huddle sixty or eighty workmen close together, nearly knee to knee, in a room fifty feet long by twenty feet broad, lighted from above, where the temperature in summer was thirty degrees higher than the temperature outside. Young men from the country fainted when they were first confined in such a life-destroying prison; the maturer ones _sustained themselves by gin_, till they perished of consumption, or typhus, or delirium tremens."

To a long list of such facts as these could be added instances in which the deadly agent was other than poisoned air,--excessive exertion, very bad food, gluttony, deprivation. During the war I knew of a party of cavalry who, for three days and three nights, were not out of the saddle fifteen minutes at a time. The men consumed two quarts of whiskey each, and all of them came in alive. It is a custom in England to extract the last possible five miles from a tired horse, when those miles _must_ be had from him, by forcing down his most unwilling throat a quart of beer. It is known, too, that life can be sustained for many years in considerable vigor, upon a remarkably short allowance of food, provided the victim keeps his system well saturated with alcohol. Travellers across the plains to California tell us that, soon after getting past St. Louis, they strike a region where the principal articles of diet are saleratus and grease, to which a little flour and pork are added; upon which, they say, human life cannot be sustained unless the natural waste of the system is retarded by "preserving" the tissues in whiskey. Mr. Greeley, however, got through alive without resorting to this expedient, but he confesses in one of his letters that he suffered pangs and horrors of indigestion.

All such facts as these--and they could be collected in great numbers--indicate the real office of alcohol in our modern life: _It enables us to violate the laws of nature without immediate suffering and speedy destruction_. This appears to be its chief office, in conjunction with its ally, tobacco. Those tailors would have soon died or escaped but for the gin; and those horsemen would have given up and perished but for the whiskey. Nature commanded those soldiers to rest, but they were enabled, for the moment, to disobey her. Doubtless Nature was even with them afterwards; but, for the time, they could _defy_ their mother great and wise. Alcohol supported them in doing wrong. Alcohol and tobacco support half the modern world in doing wrong. That is their part--their _rôle_, as the French investigators term it--in the present life of the human race.

Dr. Great Practice would naturally go to bed at ten o'clock, when he comes in from his evening visits. It is his cigar that keeps him up till half past twelve, writing those treatises which make him famous, and shorten his life. Lawyer Heavy Fee takes home his papers, pores over them till past one, and then depends upon whiskey to quiet his brain and put him to sleep. Young Bohemian gets away from the office of the morning paper which enjoys the benefit of his fine talents at three o'clock. It is two mugs of lager-bier which enable him to endure the immediate consequences of eating a supper before going home. This is mad work, my masters; it is respectable suicide, nothing better.

There is a paragraph now making the grand tour of the newspapers, which informs the public that there was a dinner given the other evening in New York consisting of twelve courses, and keeping the guests five hours at the table. For five hours, men and women sat consuming food, occupying half an hour at each viand. What could sustain human nature in such an amazing effort? What could enable them to look into one another's faces without blushing scarlet at the infamy of such a waste of time, food, and digestive force? What concealed from them the iniquity and deep vulgarity of what they were doing? The explanation of this mystery is given in the paragraph that records the crime: "There was a different kind of wine for each course."

Even an ordinary dinner-party,--what mortal could eat it through, or sit it out, without a constant sipping of wine to keep his brain muddied, and lash his stomach to unnatural exertion. The joke of it is, that we all know and confess to one another how absurd such banquets are, and yet few have the courage and humanity to feed their friends in a way which they can enjoy, and feel the better for the next morning.

When I saw Mr. Dickens eating and drinking his way through the elegantly bound book which Mr. Delmonico substituted for the usual bill of fare at the dinner given by the Press last April to the great artist,--a task of three hours' duration,--when, I say, I saw Mr. Dickens thus engaged, I wondered which banquet was the furthest from being the right thing,--the one to which he was then vainly trying to do justice, or the one of which Martin Chuzzlewit partook, on the day he landed in New York, at Mrs. Pawkins's boarding-house. The poultry, on the latter occasion, "disappeared as if every bird had had the use of its wings, and had flown in desperation down a human throat. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the assembly. The sharpest pickles vanished, whole cucumbers at once, like sugar-plums, and no man winked his eye. Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and an awful thing to see." Of course, the company adjourned from the dining-room to "the bar-room in the next block," where they imbibed strong drink enough to keep their dinner from prostrating them.

The Delmonico banquet was a very different affair. Our public dinners are all arranged on the English system; for we have not yet taken up with the fine, sweeping principle, that whatever is right for England is wrong for America. Hence, not a lady was present! Within a day's journey of New York there are about thirty ladies who write regularly for the periodical press, besides as many more, perhaps, who contribute to it occasionally. Many editors, too, derive constant and important assistance, in the exercise of their profession, from their wives and daughters, who read books for them, suggest topics, correct errors, and keep busy editors in mind of the great truth that more than one half the human race is female. Mrs. Kemble, who had a treble claim to a seat at that table, was not many miles distant. Why were none of these gifted ladies present to grace and enliven the scene? The true answer is: _Wine and smoke_! Not _our_ wine and smoke, but those of our British ancestors who invented public dinners. The hospitable young gentlemen who had the affair in charge would have been delighted, no doubt, to depart from the established system, but hardly liked to risk so tremendous an innovation on an occasion of so much interest. If it had been put to the vote (by ballot), when the company had assembled, Shall we have ladies or not? all the hard drinkers, all the old smokers, would have furtively written "not" upon their ballots. Those who drink little wine, and do not depend upon that little; those who do not smoke or can easily dispense with smoke,--would have voted for the ladies; and the ladies would have carried the day by the majority which is so hard to get,--two thirds.

It was a wise man who discovered that a small quantity of excellent soup is a good thing to begin a dinner with. He deserves well of his species. The soup allays the hungry savage within us, and restores us to civilization and to one another. Nor is he to be reckoned a traitor to his kind who first proclaimed that a little very nice and dainty fish, hot and crisp from the fire, is a pleasing introduction to more substantial viands. Six oysters upon their native shell, fresh from their ocean home, and freshly opened, small in size, intense in flavor, cool, but not too cold, radiating from a central quarter of a lemon,--this, too, was a fine conception, worthy of the age in which we live. But in what language can we characterize aright the abandoned man who first presumed to tempt Christians to begin a repast by partaking of _all_ three of these,--oysters, soup, _and_ fish? The object is defeated. The true purpose of these introductory trifles is to appease the appetite in a slight degree, so as to enable us to take sustenance with composure and dignity, and dispose the company to conversation. When a properly constituted person has eaten six oysters, a plate of soup, and the usual portion of fish, with the proper quantity of potatoes and bread, he has taken as much sustenance as nature requires. All the rest of the banquet is excess; and being excess, it is also mistake; it is a diminution of the sum-total of pleasure which the repast was capable of affording. But when Mr. Delmonico had brought us successfully so far on our way through his book; when we had consumed our oysters, our cream of asparagus in the Dumas style, our kettle-drums in the manner of Charles Dickens, and our trout cooked so as to do honor to Queen Victoria, we had only picked up a few pebbles on the shore of the banquet, while the great ocean of food still stretched out before us illimitable. The fillet of beef after the manner of Lucullus, the stuffed lamb in the style of Sir Walter Scott, the cutlets à la Fenimore Cooper, the historic pâtés, the sighs of Mantalini, and a dozen other efforts of Mr. Delmonico's genius, remained to be attempted.

No man would willingly eat or sit through such a dinner without plenty of wine, which here plays its natural part,--supporting us in doing wrong. It is the wine which enables people to keep on eating for three hours, and to cram themselves with highly concentrated food, without rolling on the floor in agony. It is the wine which puts it within our power to consume, in digesting one dinner, the force that would suffice for the digestion of three.

On that occasion Mr. Dickens was invited to visit us every twenty-five years "for the rest of his life," to see how we are getting on. The Coming Man may be a guest at the farewell banquet which the Press will give to the venerable author in 1893. That banquet will consist of three courses; and, instead of seven kinds of wine and various brands of cigars, there will be at every table its due proportion of ladies, the ornaments of their own sex, the instructors of ours, the boast and glory of the future Press of America.

Wine, ale, and liquors, administered strictly as medicine,--what of them? Doctors differ on the subject, and known facts point to different conclusions. Distinguished physicians in England are of the opinion that Prince Albert would be alive at this moment if _no_ wine had been given him during his last sickness; but there were formerly those who thought that the Princess Charlotte would have been saved, if, at the crisis of her malady, she could have _had_ the glass of port wine which she craved and asked for. The biographers of William Pitt--Lord Macaulay among them--tell us, that at fourteen that precocious youth was tormented by inherited gout, and that the doctors prescribed a hair of the same dog which had bitten his ancestor from whom the gout was derived. The boy, we are told, used to consume two bottles of port a day; and, after keeping up this regimen for several months, he recovered his health, and retained it until, at the age of forty-seven, the news of Ulm and Austerlitz struck him mortal blows. Professor James Miller, of the University of Edinburgh, a decided teetotaler, declares _for_ wine in bad cases of fever; but Dr. R. T. Trall, another teetotaler, says that during the last twenty years he has treated hundreds of cases of fevers on the cold-water system, and "not yet lost the first one"; although, during the first ten years of his practice, when he gave wine and other stimulants, he lost "about the usual proportion of cases." The truth appears to be that, in a few instances of intermittent disease, a small quantity of wine may sometimes enable a patient who is at the low tide of vitality to anticipate the turn of the tide, and borrow at four o'clock enough of five o'clock strength to enable him to reach five o'clock. With regard to this daily drinking of wine and whiskey, by ladies and others, for mere debility, it is a delusion. In such cases wine is, in the most literal sense of the word, a mocker. It seems to nourish, but does not; it seems to warm, but does not; it seems to strengthen, but does not. It is an arrant cheat, and perpetuates the evils it is supposed to alleviate.

The Coming Man, as before remarked, will not drink wine when he is well. It will be also an article of his religion not to commit any of those sins against his body the consequences of which can be postponed by drinking wine. He will hold his body in veneration. He will feel all the turpitude and shame of violating it. He will not acquire the greatest intellectual good by the smallest bodily loss. He will know that mental acquisitions gained at the expense of physical power or prowess are not culture, but effeminacy. He will honor a rosy and stalwart ignoramus, who is also an honest man, faithfully standing at his post; but he will start back with affright and indignation at the spectacle of a pallid philosopher. The Coming Man, I am firmly persuaded, will not drink wine, nor any other stimulating fluid. If by chance he should be sick, he will place himself in the hands of the Coming Doctor, and take whatever is prescribed. The impression is strong upon my mind, after reading almost all there is in print on the subject, and conversing with many physicians, that the Coming Doctor will give his patients alcoholic mixtures about as often as he will give them laudanum, and in doses of about the same magnitude, reckoned by drops.

We drinkers have been in the habit, for many years, of playing off the wine countries against the teetotalers; but even this argument fails us when we question the men who really know the wine countries. Alcohol appears to be as pernicious to man in Italy, France, and Southern Germany, where little is taken except in the form of wine, as it is in Sweden, Scotland, Russia, England, and the United States, where more fiery and powerful dilutions are usual. Fenimore Cooper wrote: "I came to Europe under the impression that there was more drunkenness among us than in any other country,--England, perhaps, excepted. A residence of six months in Paris changed my views entirely; I have taken unbelievers with me into the streets, and have never failed to convince them of their mistake in the course of an hour.... On one occasion a party of four went out with this object; we passed thirteen drunken men within a walk of an hour,--many of them were so far gone as to be totally unable to walk.... In passing between Paris and London, I have been more struck by drunkenness in the streets of the former than in those of the latter." Horatio Greenough gives similar testimony respecting Italy: "Many of the more thinking and prudent Italians abstain from the use of wine; several of the most eminent of the medical men are notoriously opposed to its use, and declare it a poison. One fifth, and sometimes one fourth, of the earnings of the laborers are expended in wine."

I have been surprised at the quantity, the emphasis, and the uniformity of the testimony on this point. Close observers of the famous beer countries, such as Saxony and Bavaria, where the beer is pure and excellent, speak of this delicious liquid as the chief enemy of the nobler faculties and tastes of human nature. The surplus wealth, the surplus time, the surplus force of those nations, are chiefly expended in fuddling the brain with beer. Now, no reader needs to be informed that the progress of man, of nations, and of men depends upon the use they make of their little surplus. It is not a small matter, but a great and weighty consideration,--the cost of these drinks in mere money. We drinkers must make out a very clear case in order to justify such a country as France in producing a _billion and a half of dollars'_ worth of wine and brandy per annum.

The teetotalers, then, are right in their leading positions, and yet they stand aghast, wondering at their failure to convince mankind. Mr. E. G. Delavan writes from Paris within these few weeks: "When I was here thirty years since, Louis Philippe told me that wine was the curse of France; that he wished every grapevine was destroyed, except for the production of food; that total abstinence was the only true temperance; but he did not believe there were fifteen persons in Paris who understood it as it was understood by his family and myself; but he hoped from the labors in America, in time, an influence would flow back upon France that would be beneficial. I am here again after the lapse of so many years, and in place of witnessing any abatement of the evil, I think it is on the increase, especially in the use of distilled spirits."

The teetotalers have underrated the difficulty of the task they have undertaken, and misconceived its nature. It is not the great toe that most requires treatment when a man has the gout, although it is the great toe that makes him roar. When we look about us, and consider the present physical life of man, we are obliged to conclude that the whole head is sick and the whole heart is faint. Drinking is but a symptom which reveals the malady. Perhaps, if we were all to stop our guzzling suddenly, _without_ discontinuing our other bad habits, we should rather lose by it than gain. Alcohol supports us in doing wrong! It prevents our immediate destruction. The thing for us to do is, to strike at the causes of drinking, to cease the bad breathing, the bad eating, the bad reading, the bad feeling and bad thinking, which, in a sense, necessitate bad drinking. For some of the teetotal organizations might be substituted Physical Welfare Societies.

The Human Race is now on trial for its life! One hundred and three years ago last April, James Watt, a poor Scotch mechanic, while taking his walk on Sunday afternoon on Glasgow Green, conceived the idea which has made steam man's submissive and untiring slave. Steam enables the fifteen millions of adults in Great Britain and Ireland to produce more commodities than the whole population of the earth could produce without its assistance. Steam, plus the virgin soil of two new continents, has placed the means of self-destruction within the reach of hundreds of millions of human beings whose ancestors were almost as safe in their ignorance and poverty as the beasts they attended. At the same time, the steam-engine is an infuriate propagator; and myriad creatures of its producing--creatures of eager desires, thin brains, excessive vanity, and small self-control--seem formed to bend the neck to the destructive tyranny of fashion, and yield helplessly to the more destructive tyranny of habit. The steam-engine gives them a great variety of the means of self-extirpation,--air-tight houses, labor-saving machines, luxurious food, stimulating drinks, highly wrought novels, and many others. Let _all_ women for the next century but wear such restraining clothes as are now usual, and it is doubtful if the race could ever recover from the effects; it is doubtful if there could ever again be a full-orbed, bouncing baby. Wherever we look, we see the human race dwindling. The English aristocracy used to be thought an exception, but Miss Nightingale says not. She tells us that the great houses of England, like the small houses of America, contain great-grandmothers possessing constitutions without a flaw, grandmothers but slightly impaired, mothers who are often ailing and never strong, daughters who are miserable and hopeless invalids. And the steam-engine has placed efficient means of self-destruction within reach of the kitchen, the stable, the farm, and the shop; and those means of self-destruction are all but universally used.

Perhaps man has nearly run his course in this world, and is about to disappear, like the mammoth, and give place to some nobler kind of creature who will manage the estate better than the present occupant. Certainly we cannot boast of having done very well with it, nor could we complain if we should receive notice to leave. Perhaps James Watt came into the world to extinguish his species. If so, it is well. Let us go on eating, drinking, smoking, over-working, idling, men killing themselves to buy clothes for their wives, wives killing themselves by wearing them, children petted and candied into imbecility and diphtheria. In that case, of course, there will be no Coming Man, and we need not take the trouble to inquire what he will do.

But probably the instinct of self-preservation will assert itself in time, and an antidote to the steam-engine will be found before it has impaired the whole race beyond recovery. To have discovered the truth with regard to the effects of alcohol upon the system was of itself no slight triumph of the self-preserving principle. It is probable that the truly helpful men of the next hundred years will occupy themselves very much with the physical welfare of the race, without which no other welfare is possible.

INEBRIATE ASYLUMS, AND A VISIT TO ONE.

There are two kinds of drunkards,--the Regular and the Occasional. Of each of these two classes there are several varieties, and, indeed, there are no two cases precisely alike; but every drunkard in the world is either a person who has lost the power to refrain from drinking a certain large quantity of alcoholic liquor every day, or he is one who has lost the power to refrain from drinking an uncertain enormous quantity now and then.

Few get drunk habitually who can refrain. If they could refrain, they would; for to no creatures is drunkenness so loathsome and temperance so engaging as to seven tenths of the drunkards. There are a few very coarse men, of heavy, stolid, animal organization, who almost seem formed by nature to absorb alcohol, and in whom there is not enough of manhood to be ashamed of its degradation. These Dr. Albert Day, the superintendent of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, sometimes calls Natural Drunkards. They like strong drink for its own sake; they have a kind of sulky enjoyment of its muddling effect upon such brains as they happen to have; and when once the habit is fixed, nothing can deliver them except stone walls and iron bars. There are also a few drunkards of very light calibre, trifling persons, incapable of serious reflection or of a serious purpose, their very terrors being trivial and transitory, who do not care for the ruin in which they are involved. Generally speaking, however, drunkards hate the servitude into which they have had the misfortune to fall; they long to escape from it, have often tried to escape, and if they have given up, it is only after having so many times slidden back into the abyss, that they feel it would be of no use to climb again. As Mrs. H. B. Stowe remarks, with that excellent charity of hers, which is but another name for refined justice, "Many a drunkard has expended more virtue in vain endeavors to break his chain than suffices to carry an ordinary Christian to heaven."

The daily life of one of the steady drunkards is like this: upon getting up in the morning, after a heavy, restless, drunkard's sleep, he is miserable beyond expression, and almost helpless. In very bad cases, he will see double, and his hands will tremble so that he cannot lift to his lips the glass for which he has a desire amounting to mania. Two or three stiff glasses of spirituous liquor will restore him so far that he can control his muscles, and get about without betraying his condition. After being up an hour, and drinking every ten or fifteen minutes, he will usually be able to eat a pretty good breakfast, which, with the aid of coffee, tobacco, and a comparatively small quantity of liquor, he will be able to digest. After breakfast, for some hours he will generally be able to transact routine business, and associate with his fellows without exciting their pity or contempt. As dinner-time draws near he feels the necessity of creating an appetite; which he often accomplishes by drinking some of those infernal compounds which are advertised on the eternal rocks and mountain-sides as Bitters,--a mixture of bad drugs with worse spirits. These bitters do lash the torpid powers into a momentary, morbid, fierce activity, which enables the victim to eat even a superabundant dinner. The false excitement subsides, but the dinner remains, and it has to be digested. This calls for an occasional drink for three or four hours, after which the system is exhausted, and the man feels dull and languid. He is exhausted, but he is not tranquil; he craves a continuation of the stimulant with a craving which human nature, so abused and perverted, never resists. By this time it is evening, when all the apparatus of temptation is in the fullest activity, and all the loose population of the town is abroad. He now begins his evening debauch, and keeps up a steady drinking until he can drink no more, when he stumbles home to sleep off the stupefying fumes, and awake to the horror and decrepitude of a drunkard's morning.

The quantity of spirituous liquor required to keep one of these unhappy men in this degrading slavery varies from a pint a day to two quarts. Many drunkards consume a quart of whiskey every day for years. The regular allowance of one gentleman of the highest position, both social and official, who made his way to the Inebriate Asylum, had been two quarts of brandy a day for about five years. The most remarkable known case is that of a hoary-headed man of education and fortune, residing in the city of New York, who confesses to taking "fifty drinks a day" of whiskey,--ten drinks to a bottle, and five bottles to a gallon. One gallon of liquor, he _says_, goes down his old throat every day of the year. Before he is fit to eat his breakfast in the morning he has to drink twelve glasses of whiskey, or one bottle and one fifth. Nevertheless, even this poor man is able, for some hours of the morning, to transact what people of property and leisure call business, and, during a part of the evening, to converse in such a way as to amuse persons who can look on and see a human being in such bondage without stopping to think what a tragedy it is. This Old Boy never has to be carried home, I believe. He is one of those most hopeless drunkards who never get drunk, never wallow in the gutter, never do anything to scare or startle them into an attempt to reform. He is like a certain German "puddler" who was pointed out to me in a Pittsburg iron-works, who consumes exactly seven dollars' worth of lager-bier every seven days,--twenty glasses a day, at five cents each. He is also like the men employed in the dismal work of the brewery, who are allowed as much beer as they can drink, and who generally do drink as much as they can. Such persons are always fuddled and stupid, but seldom drunk enough to alarm their neighbors or themselves. Perhaps they are the only persons in all the world who are in any degree justified in passing their lives in a state of suspended intelligence; those of them at least whose duty it is to get inside of enormous beer barrels, and there, in darkness and solitude, in an atmosphere reeking and heavy with stale ale, scrape and mop them out before they are refilled. When you see their dirty, pale faces at the "man-hole" of the barrel, down in the rumbling bowels of the earth, in one of those vast caves of beer in Cincinnati, you catch yourself saying, "Drink, poor devils, drink! Soak what brains you have in beer!" What can a man want with brains in a beer-barrel? But then, you think again, even these poor men need their brains when they get home; and _we_ need that they should have brains on the first Tuesday in November.

It is that _going home_ which makes drunkenness so dire a tragedy. If the drunkard could only shut himself up with a whiskey-barrel, or a pipe of Madeira, and quietly guzzle himself to death, it would be a pity, but it could be borne. He never does this; he goes home to make that home perdition to some good souls that love him, or depend upon him, and cannot give him up. There are men at the Asylum near Binghamton, who have admirable wives, beautiful and accomplished daughters, venerable parents, whose portraits are there in the patient's trunks, and who write daily letters to cheer the absent one, whose absence now, for the firsts time in years, does not terrify them. _They_ are the victims of drunkenness,--they who never taste strong drink. For _their_ deliverance, this Asylum stands upon its hill justified in existing. The men themselves are interesting, valuable, precious, worth every rational effort that can be made to save them; but it is those whom they left at home anxious and desolate that have the first claim upon our consideration.

With regard to these steady, regular drunkards, the point to be noted is this: very few of them can stop drinking while they continue to perform their daily labor; they absolutely _depend_ upon the alcohol to rouse their torpid energies to activity. Their jaded constitutions will not budge without the spur. Everything within them gapes and hungers for the accustomed stimulant. This is the case, even in a literal sense; for it seems, from Dr. Day's dissections, that the general effect of excessive drinking is to enlarge the globules of which the brain, the blood, the liver, and other organs are composed, so that those globules, as it were, stand open-mouthed, empty, athirst, inflamed, and most eager to be filled. A man whose every organ is thus diseased cannot usually take the first step toward cure without ceasing for a while to make any other demands upon himself. This is the great fact of his condition. If he is a true drunkard, i.e. if he has lost the power to do his work without excessive alcoholic stimulation, then there is no cure possible for him without rest. Here we have the simple explanation of Mrs. Stowe's fine remark just quoted. This is why so many thousand wives spend their days in torment between hope and despair,--hope kindled by the husband's efforts to regain possession of himself, and despair caused by his repeated, his inevitable relapses. The unfortunate man tries to do two things at once, the easiest of which is as much as he can accomplish; while the hardest is a task which, even with the advantage of perfect rest, few can perform without assistance.

The Occasional Drunkard is a man who is a teetotaler for a week, two weeks, a month, three months, six months, and who, at the end of his period, is tempted to drink one glass of alcoholic liquor. That one glass has upon him two effects; it rouses the slumbering demon of Desire, and it perverts his moral judgment. All at once his honor and good name, the happiness and dignity of his family, his success in business, all that he held dearest a moment before, seem small to him, and he thinks he has been a fool of late to concern himself so much about them. Or else he thinks he can drink without being found out, and without its doing him the harm it did the last time. Whatever may be the particular delusion that seizes him, the effect is the same; he drinks, and drinks, and drinks, keeping it up sometimes for ten days, or even for several weeks, until the long debauch ends in utter exhaustion or in delirium tremens. He is then compelled to submit to treatment; he must needs go to the Inebriate Asylum of his own bed-room. There, whether he raves or droops, he is the most miserable wretch on earth; for, besides the bodily tortures which he surfers, he has to endure the most desolating pang that a decent human being ever knows,--the loss of his self-respect. He abhors himself and is ashamed; he remembers past relapses and despairs; he cannot look his own children in the face; he wishes he had never been born, or had died in the cursed hour, vividly remembered, when this appetite mastered him first. As his health is restored, his hopes revive; he renews his resolution and he resumes his ordinary routine, subdued, distrustful of himself, and on the watch against temptation. Why he again relapses he can hardly tell, but he always does. Sometimes a snarl in business perplexes him, and he drinks for elucidation. Sometimes melancholy oppresses him, and he drinks to drive dull care away. Sometimes good fortune overtakes him, or an enchanting day in June or October attunes his heart to joy, and he is taken captive by the strong delusion that now is the time to drink and be glad. Often it is lovely woman who offers the wine, and offers it in such a way that he thinks he cannot refuse without incivility or confession. From conversation with the inmates of the Inebriate Asylum, I am confident that Mr. Greeley's assertion with regard to the wine given at the Communion is correct. That sip might be enough to awaken the desire. The mere odor of the wine filling the church might be too much for some men.