Chapter I: The Secret of the Alcohol Habit (1)

“Consistency is the Test of Truth.”—WILBERFORCE.

Among the strange legends of the Middle Ages there are certain traditions which have evidently a figurative significance, and whose origin has often been traced to the allegorical mythology of an earlier age. An allegory of that sort is the legend of the “Marvel of Nikolsburg,” near Vienna; a miraculous image that appeared always an inch higher than the person standing before it. “It overtopped a giant, and all but condescended to the stature of a dwarf,” says the tradition.

That image is a symbol of nature. The lowest savage must dimly recognize the fact that man can not measure his cunning against the wisdom of the Creator, and the highest development of science has only revealed its own incompetence to imitate, or even comprehend, the structural perfection of the simplest living organism. The Author of life deals only in masterpieces; the marvelous fitness of his contrivances is as infinite in his smallest as in his greatest works, and the apparent exceptions from that rule can nearly all be traced to the influence of abnormal circumstances. Our own interference with the order of nature has caused the discords in the harmony of creation which furnish the chief arguments of pessimism. The winter torrents which devastate the valleys of southern France with a fury which Condorcet calls the “truculence of a vainly worshiped heaven,” flowed in harmless brooks till the hand of man destroyed the protecting forests that absorbed and equalized the drainage of the Alpine slopes, the same imprudence has turned the gardens of the East into deserts and obstructed with sandbars the channels of once navigable rivers. The wanton extermination of woodbirds has revenged itself by insect plagues. Consumption, that cruel scourge of the human race, is the direct consequence of the folly which makes us prefer the miasma of our tenement-prisons to the balm of God’s free air. We are too apt to confound the results of our sins against nature with the original arrangements of Providence. But the strangest instance of that mistake is the fallacy which has long biased our dealings with the curse of the alcohol habit. Drunkards plead their inability to resist the promptings of an imperious appetite. Their friends lament the antagonism of nature and duty, the weakness of the flesh frustrating the resolves of a willing spirit. Even temperance orators dwell on the dangers of “worldly temptations,” of “selfish, sensual indulgences,” as if the alcohol habit were the result of an innate propensity—deplorable in its collateral consequences, but withal entitled to the compromising concessions which ascetic virtue owes to the cravings of an impetuous natural instinct. In other words, we palliate a flagrant crime against the physical laws of God, as if nature herself had lured us to our ruin; the votaries of alcohol plead their ignorance, as if the Providence that warns us against the sting of a tiny insect and teaches the eye to protect itself against a mote of dust, had provided no adequate safeguards against the greatest danger to health and happiness.

And yet those safeguards would abundantly answer their protective purpose if persistent vice had not almost deadened the faculty of understanding the monitions of our physical conscience. It is true that the stimulant-thirst of the confirmed drunkard far exceeds the urgency of the most impetuous instincts, but by that very excessiveness and persistence the far-gone development of the alcohol habit proves what the mode of its incipience establishes beyond the possibility of a doubt, namely, the radical difference of its characteristics from those of a natural appetite. For,

1. UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF ALIMENTARY SUBSTANCES IS PROPORTIONED TO THE DEGREE OF THEIR HEALTHFULNESS AND THEIR NUTRITIVE VALUE.—To the children of nature all hurtful things are repulsive, all beneficial things attractive. Providence has endowed our species with a liberal share of the protective instinct that teaches our dumb fellow-creatures to select their proper food, and even in this age of far-gone degeneration the dietetic predilections of children and primitive men might furnish the criteria of a general food reform. No creature is misled by an innate craving for unwholesome food, nor by an instinctive aversion to wholesome substances. Our natural repugnance to nearly all kinds of “medicines,” _i. e._, virulent stimulants, has already begun to be recognized as a suggestive illustration of that rule. A child’s hankering after sweetmeats is only an apparent exception, for, as Dr. Schrodt observes, the conventional diet of our children is so deficient in saccharine elements that instinct constantly strives to supply an unsatisfied want. Human beings fed chiefly on fruit syrups would instinctively hanker after farinaceous substances. The savages of our northwestern prairies are as fond of honey as their grizzly neighbors. Nurslings, deprived of their mothers’ milk, instinctively appreciate the proper component parts of artificial surrogates. Sailors in the tropics thirst after fruit, after refrigerating fluids, after fresh vegetables. In the arctic seas they crave calorific food—oil or fat.

But in no climate of this earth is man afflicted with an instinctive hankering after alcohol. To the palate of an unseduced boy rum is as repulsive as corrosive sublimate. I do not speak only of the sons of nature-abiding parents, but of the children of vice, left to the guidance of their enfeebled, but not intentionally perverted, instincts. The intuitive bias even of such is in the direction of total abstinence from all noxious stimulants, for nature has willed that all her creatures should begin the pilgrimage of life from beyond the point where the roads of purity and vice diverge. In their projects for the abolition of the stimulant habit, temperance people are, indeed, rather inclined to underrate the difficulties of a total cure of a confirmed poison vice, but equally apt to _overrate the difficulty of total prevention_. The supposed effects of an innate predisposition can generally be traced to the direct influence of a vicious education. Jean Jacques Rousseau expressed his conviction that a fondness for intoxicating liquors is nearly always contracted in the years of immaturity, when the deference to social precedents is apt to overcome the warnings of instinct, but that those who have escaped or not yielded to the temptations of that period would ever afterward be safe. Dr. Zimmerman, too, admits that “home influences are too often mistaken for hereditary influences.” And boy topers are not always voluntary converts. The year before I left my native town (Brussels), I found a drunken lad on the platform of the railway depot and carried him to the house of a medical friend, who put him to bed and turned him over to a policeman the next morning. The little fellow was recognized as an old offender, but when the court was going to send him to a house of correction my friend offered to take him back, and, on condition of keeping him away from his parents, was permitted to take care of him, and finally made him his office-boy. His parents were ascertained to be both habitual drunkards, but their son (_æt. 11_), showed no inclination to follow their example, and voluntarily abstained from the light wines which now and then made their appearance on the doctor’s table—though he never missed an opportunity to rejoin his old playmates, and, as his patron expressed it, “was a dangerous deal too smart to be entrusted with the collection of bills.” Six months after his last scrape I found him alone in the doctor’s office, where he had collected a private library of picture papers and illustrated almanacs. “What made you get so drunk last Easter?” I asked him, “are you so fond of brandy?”

“_Nenni, mais Pa m’en fit prendre_,” he replied—“father _made_ me drink it.”

2. THE INSTINCTIVE AVERSION TO ANY KIND OF POISON CAN BE PERVERTED INTO AN UNNATURAL CRAVING AFTER THE SAME SUBSTANCE.—Poisons are either repulsive or insipid. Arsenic, sugar of lead, and antimony, belong to the latter class. To the first-born children of earth certain mineral poisons were decidedly _out of the way substances_, against which nature apparently thought it less necessary to provide special safeguards. But, though less repulsive than other poisons, such substances are never positively attractive, and often (like verdigris, potassium, etc.), perceptibly nauseous. Vegetable poisons are either nauseous or intensely bitter. Hasheesh is more unattractive than turpentine. Opium is acrid caustic. Absinthe (wormwood extract) is as bitter as gall. Instinct resists the incipience of an insidious second nature.

But that instinct is plastic. If the warnings of our physical conscience remain unheeded, if the offensive substance is again and again forced upon the unwilling stomach, nature at last chooses the alternative of compromising the evil, and, true to her supreme law, of preserving existence at any cost, prolongs even a wretched life by adapting the organism to the exigencies of an abnormal habit. She still continues her protest in the feeling of exhaustion which follows every poison-debauch, but permits each following dose of the insidious drug to act as a temporary re-invigorant, or at least as a spur to the functional activity of the exhausted organism, for the apparent return of vital vigor is, in fact, nothing but a symptom of the morbid energy exerted by the system in its efforts to rid itself of a deadly intruder, for each new application of the stimulus is as regularly followed by a distressing reaction. And _only then_ the slave of the unnatural habit becomes conscious of that peculiar craving which is entirely distinct from the promptings of a healthy appetite—a craving uncompromisingly directed toward a special—once repulsive—substance, a craving defying the limiting instincts which indicate the proper quantum of wholesome foods and drinks, a craving which each gratification makes more irresistible, though for the time being each indulgence is followed by a depressing reaction. The appetite for wholesome substances—however palatable—is never exclusive. A child may become passionately fond of ice cream, yet accept cold water and fruit cake as a welcome substitute. A predilection for honey, strawberries, or sweet tree fruits will not tempt the admirers of such dainties to commit forgery and highway robbery to indulge their penchant—as long as their kitchen affords a supply of savory vegetables. Unnatural appetites have no natural limits; but the art of the best pastry cook would hardly induce his customers to stupefy and bestialize themselves with his compounds. There are no milk topers, no suicidal potato eaters, no victims of a chronic porridge passion. In spite of occasional surfeits the craving for alimentary substances increases and decreases with the needs of the organism, while that of the poison drinker yields only to the temporary extinction of consciousness.

In a state of nature every normal function is associated with a pleasurable sensation, and instead of resulting in agonizing reactions a feast of wholesome food is followed by a state of considerable physical comfort—“the beatific consciousness of perfect digestion,” as Baron Brisse describes the pleasures of the after dinner hour. But no length of practice will ever save the poison slave from the penalties of his sins against nature. Each full indulgence is followed by a full measure of woful retributions, while a half indulgence results in a half depression to the verge of world-weary despondency, or fails to satisfy the lingering thirst after a larger dose of the same stimulant. And every poison known to modern chemistry can beget that specific craving. “Entirely accidental circumstances, the accessibility of special drugs, imitativeness and the intercourse of commercial nations, the mere whims of fashion, the authority of medical recommendations, have often decided the first choice of a special stimulant, destined to become a national beverage” and a national curse. The contemporaries of the Veda writers fuddled with _soma-wine_, the juice of a narcotic plant of the Himalaya foothills. Their neighbors, the pastoral Tartars, get drunk on _Koumiss_, or fermented mare’s milk, an abomination which in Eastern Europe threatens to increase the list of imported poisons, while opium is gaining ground in our Pacific States as fast as lager beer, chloral and patent “bitters” on the Atlantic slope. The French have added _absinthe_ to their wines and liquors, the Turks _hasheesh_ and opiates to strong coffee. North America has adopted tea from China, coffee from Arabia (or originally from Ceylon), tobacco from the Caribbean savages, highwines from France and Spain, and may possibly learn to drink Mexican aloe-sap, or chew the coca leaves of the South American Indians. _Arsenic_ has its votaries in the southern Alps. _Cinnebar_ and _acetate of copper_ victimize the miners of the Peruvian Sierras. The Ashantees are so fond of _sorghum beer_ that their chieftains have to keep special bamboo cages for the benefit of quarrelsome drunkards. The pastor of a Swiss colony in the Mexican State of Oaxaca told me that the mountaineers of that neighborhood befuddle themselves with _cicuta syrup_, the inspissated juice of a kind of _hemlock_ that first excites and then depresses the cerebral functions, excessive garrulity being the principal symptom of the exalted stage of intoxication. A decoction of the common _fly toadstool_ (_agaricus maculatus_) inflames the passions of the Kamschatka natives, makes them pugnacious, disputative, but eventually splenetic (Chamisso’s “_Reisen_,” p. 322). The Abyssinians use a preparation of _dhurra-corn_ that causes more quarrels than gambling. It is a favorite beverage at festivals, and is vaunted as a remedy for various complaints, though Belzoni mentions that it makes its votaries more subject to the attacks of the Nile fever. According to Professor Vamberg, the Syrian Druses pray, though apparently in vain, to be delivered from the temptation of _foxglove tea_. Comparative pathology has multiplied these analogies till, in spite of the arguments of a thousand specious advocates, there is no valid reason to doubt that the alleged innate craving for the stimulus of fermented or distilled beverages is _wholly abnormal_, and that _the alcohol habit is characterized by all the peculiarities of a poison vice_.

3. ALL POISON HABITS ARE PROGRESSIVE.—There is a deep significance in that term of our language which describes an unnatural habit as _growing upon_ its devotees, for we find, indeed, a striking analogy between the development of the stimulant habit and that of a parasitical plant, which, sprouting from tiny seeds, fastens upon, preys upon, and at last strangles its victims. The seductiveness of every stimulant habit gains strength with each new indulgence, and it is a curious fact that that power is proportioned to the original repulsiveness of the poison. The tonic influence of Chinese tea is due to the presence of a stimulating ingredient known as _theïne_, in its concentrated form a strong narcotic poison, but forming only a minute percentage of the component parts of common green tea. On the Pacific coast of our country thousands of Chinese immigrants carry their thrift to the degree of renouncing their favorite beverage, but neither considerations of economy nor of self-preservation will induce the same exiles to break the fetters of the opium habit. Not one hasheesh-eater in a hundred can hope to emancipate himself from the thraldom of his vice. The guests of King Alcohol, too, would make their reckoning without their host in hoping to take in the fun of intoxication as a votary of pleasure would engage in a transient pastime: his palace is an Armida castle, that rarely dismisses a visitor.

“In describing the effects of the alcohol habit,” says Dr. Isaac Jennings, “I want to impress the reader with another feature of it—its perpetuity. It can never be put off during the lifetime of the individual; it may be covered up to appearance, but it can not be effaced.… It seems to be a common impression that alcohol circulates through the body, excites the action of the heart and liver, quickens and enlivens the animal spirits, and then passes off, and leaves no trace of its visitation, or at most only a temporary loss of power, which is soon restored by a self-moved power pump. This is a great and fundamental error. Every drop of alcohol that enters the stomach inflicts an injury that will continue as long as the old stock lasts, and reach even to the young sprouts. It may not be enstamped on them in precisely the same way, but it will affect essentially the same parts.” (“Medical Reform,” pp. 173-175.)

“If a man was sent to hell,” says Dr. Rush, “and kept there for a thousand years as a punishment for drinking, and then returned, his first cry would be, ‘Give me rum, give me rum!’”

“The infernal powers blindfold the victims of their altars,” says Lessing, and the stimulant vice seems, in fact, to weaken not only the physical constitution of its votaries, but their moral power of resistance, and often even the faculty of realizing the perils of their practice, as if the poison had struck its roots into the very souls of its victims.

But the alcohol habit grows outward, as well as inward. We have seen that each gratification of the poison vice is followed by a depressing reaction. But his feeling of exhaustion is steadily progressive, and the correspondingly increased craving for a repetition of the stimulant dose forces its victim _either to increase the quantity of the wonted tonic, or else to resort to a stronger poison_. The experience of individual drunkards probably corresponds to the international development of the alcohol habit. Its first devotees contented themselves with moderate quantities of the milder stimulants: must, hydromel and light beer. But such tonics soon began to pall, and the jaded appetite of the toper soon resorted to strong wines, to hard cider, and finally to brandy and rum. Others increased the quantity, and learned to drink horse-pails full of beer, in which “diluted and harmless form” many German students manage to absorb a quart of alcohol per day.

“People sometimes wonder,” says Dr. Jennings, “why such and such men, possessing great intellectual power and firmness of character in other respects, can not drink moderately and not give themselves up to drunkenness. They become drunkards _by law_—fixed, immutable law. Let a man with a constitution as perfect as Adam’s undertake to drink alcohol, moderately and perseveringly, with all the caution and deliberate determination that he can command, and if he could live long enough he would just as certainly become a drunkard—get to a point where he could not refrain from drinking to excess—as he would go over Niagara Falls when placed in a canoe in the river above the falls and left to the natural operation of the current. And proportionally as he descended the stream would his alcoholic attraction for it increase, so that he would find it more and more difficult to get ashore, until he reached a point where escape was impossible.” (“Medical Reform,” p. 176.)

Now and then the votaries of the stimulant habit exchange their tonic for a stronger poison. Claude Bernard, the famous French pathologist, noticed that the opium vice recruits its female victims chiefly from the ranks of the veteran coffee drinkers. In Turkey, too, strong coffee has prepared the way for tobacco and opium; in Switzerland arsenic eaters have exchanged their kirschwasser for a more potent tonic; many French and Russian hard drinkers have learned to prefer ether to brandy.

But no poison vice can be cured by milder stimulants. The Beelzebub of alcohol does not yield to weaker spirits; hence the fallacy of the _antidote plan_. Nothing was formerly more common with temperance people of the compromise school than to comfort converted drunkards with stimulating drugs and strong coffee, in the hope that the organism might somehow be induced to acquiesce in the _quid pro quo_. That hope is a delusion. The surrogate may bring a temporary relief, but it can not satisfy the thirst for the stronger tonic, and only serves to _perpetuate the stimulant diathesis_—the poison hunger which will sooner or later revert to the wonted object of its passion. Unswerving loyalty to the pledge of the total abstinence plan is not at first the easiest, but eventually the surest way. For even after weeks of successful resistance to the importunities of the tempter, a mere spark may rekindle the smothered flames. “What takes place in the stomach of a reformed drunkard?” says Dr. Sewall—“the individual who abandons the use of all intoxicating drinks? The stomach by that extraordinary self-restorative power of nature gradually resumes its natural appearance. Its engorged blood-vessels become reduced to their original size, and a few weeks or months will accomplish this renovation, after which the individual has no longer any suffering or desire for alcohol. It is nevertheless true, and should ever be borne in mind, that such is the sensibility of the stomach of the reformed drunkard that a repetition of the use of alcohol, _in the slightest degree, and in any form, under any circumstances_, revives the appetite; the blood vessels again become dilated, and the morbid sensibility of the organ is reproduced.”

The use of any stimulating drug may rewaken the dormant propensity, and it will not change the result if the stimulant has been administered in the form of a medical prescription. Strong drink is a mocker, in disease as well as in health, and the road to the rum shop leads through the dispensary as often as through the beer garden.

The logical conclusion of all these premises thus reveals the two-fold secret of the alcohol habit: _the anomaly of its attractiveness and the necessity of its progressiveness_, and we at last recognize the truth that the road to intemperance is paved with mild stimulants, and that the only safe, consistent and effective plan of reform is total abstinence from all stimulating poisons.

A TRIP TO THE YOSEMITE.

BY MISS FRANCES E. WILLARD, President of W. C. T. U.

The famous San Joaquin Valley is as large as the State of Ohio. It opens into the Sacramento Valley, and the two are about six hundred miles long. A plow could go the length of both and never touch a stone. In the San Joaquin they have a ranche where the gang plow starts in the morning, goes on a straight line all day, turns back and plows its twin furrow the next, having thus retraversed the length of one California farm.

It was through seven hours by rail of this valley that we went, in a southeasterly direction, from San Francisco to Madera, where two coaches were waiting to carry us over the one hundred miles in a northeasterly direction that still separated us from the wonderland ruled by “El Capitan.” There were twenty-three of us, and “none smoked or chewed, or drank or swore,” as I was credibly informed by our “El Capitan,” the Rev. Dr. Briggs. By the way, if Chautauqua wants a first class attraction let this name go on the list. We traveled rapidly. I counted thirty different horses on our coach in one day. We killed rattlesnakes, that is, the Dr. did, marching squarely forward and whacking them unmercifully with his stout cane, while we women, securely perched on our high seats in the coach, really enjoyed the sight. We saw horse-shoes enough for wholesale good luck, scattered along the road. We believe, and always shall, that we perceived a bear track, and wondered if it was made by famous “Club Foot Joe”—whose annals are they not in all the Tourist’s Chronicles? We told stories all strictly true. There was no Baron Münchausen amongst us, though had prosaic Easterners been within earshot of our driver they might perhaps have promulgated a different declaration. We did not fear robbers, for “a count” developed the fact that in our coach—chiefly inhabited by ministers, their wives, and sundry visiting philanthropists—gold watches were the only “plunder,” and these were all inscribed “Presented by” to that degree that no well regulated “road agent” would have wished such a “free advertisement” of his base conduct, as these trophies must have furnished. We sang old songs of the fireside and sanctuary, talked of the Chautauquas east and west, “marked” our favorite trees in “the ample forest of Bishop timber” (to be revealed after next General Conference), and regulated the affairs of the nation generally. We fitted ourselves out with a “local government” administered on the everlasting principles of justice and equality, _i. e._, we counted the women _in_, not _out_. I copy our rules from the log book of the expedition:

1. Unquestioned submission to constituted authority.

2. Silence when entering the valley.

3. Wives, be obedient to your husbands.—_The Chaplain._

4. Wives, don’t you do it.—_The Chaplain’s wife._

5. Whenever a dispute arises, the vote of every woman shall count two.—_A widower._

6. Eat dinner often.—_Little Walter Bland._

7. No one shall be required to speak grammatically on this trip.—_F. E. W._

All of which were unanimously adopted except the one about “counting two,” which evoked a loud dissent.

The first day we rode seventy-two miles, stopping at Clark’s hospitable caravansary, and kindly permitting sweet sleep to knit up the raveled sleeve of care. Decoration Day (May 30th) came next, and with patriotic intent we had made out a program, intending to “celebrate” in the chapel built for Dr. Vincent when he conducted a miniature “Chautauqua Assembly” in the Yosemite a few years since. But when, after a mountain ride of half a day, surrounded by inclined planes of evergreens, each of which would have been a world’s wonder, at the East, with superb curves in the road evermore opening fresh vistas of illimitable height, verdure and beauty, we rounded

INSPIRATION POINT,

“there was no more spirit in us.” Nay, rather the spirit of beauty and divinity so possessed us that “plans” and “programs” sunk into oblivion. Word-pauperism oppresses one upon this height as nothing else on earth. There is in Europe a single revelation of art which has power to silence the chatter even of fashion’s devotees, and that is Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. I have been in its seraphic presence for hours at a time, but never heard a vocal comment. The foamiest natures are not silenced by Niagara, by Mt. Blanc, by the Jungfrau’s awful purity, or the terrors of Vesuvius for their flippant tones have smitten me in all these sacred places. But from the little child in our midst—a bright faced boy of four—to the rough, kind hearted driver, not one word was spoken by our party as

THE HEAVENLY VISION

framed in fleecy, flying clouds, greeted our thoughtful eyes and spoke of God to our hushed souls. Except beside the dying bed of my beloved I have never felt the veil so thin between me and the world ineffable—supernal. What was it like? Let no pen less lofty than that of Milton, less atune with nature’s purest mood than that of Wordsworth, hope to “express unblamed” the awful and ethereal beauty of what we saw. “Earth with her thousand voices praises God,” sang the great heart of Coleridge, from the vale of Chamouni, but here, the divine chorus includes both earth and heaven, for El Capitan rears his head into the sky, Sentinel, Cathedral Rocks and sky-climbing clouds rest while the symphony of eighteen waterfalls rounds out the diapason.

“The rolling year is full of Thee,
Forth in the gentle spring Thy beauty walks,
Thy tenderness and love.”

These tuneful words of Thompson’s “Seasons” express the milder mood of nature, but who can fitly tell of the condensed impressions about God made by a valley only six miles long, one mile wide, and half a mile high, wherein every form of solemn, majestic and pastoral beauty are combined. A holy awe rested upon us, and tears were in all eyes. At last the sacred silence was broken by a rich voice, beloved by me for many a year, as Mrs. Dr. Bentley lead the “_Gloria in Excelsis_,” in which the jubilant soprano harmonized with the melodious bass of humanity’s united utterance of praise. “O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker,” these inspired words leaped to our lips, and we found that beyond all poets was the fitness of dear old words, our mothers taught us from the book of God, in this supreme moment of our experience. “The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before Him,” “What is man that Thou art mindful of him,” “Stand in awe and sin not:” these were the first words that came to us, and I believe we shall be better men and women always for that vision of eternity from which the curtain of mystery was for a moment drawn aside. We learned afterward that as our coaches rolled on into the valley a third rounded “Inspiration Point,” and Judge ⸺ of Sydney, Ohio, a dear old gentleman, rose to his feet, clasped his hands as if in prayer, and exclaimed “Mercy! mercy! Have I lived seventy-six years that I might see this glory! _God made it all!_” and he lifted up his voice and wept. Such a scene as that is once for a life time.

We saw the valley from an hundred points of view afterward, we waved our good-bye to it a week later from this very point, but the first remains the unmatched view—its like will never greet our eyes again—not in this world.

As we sped onward into the valley one of us said: “I never felt before such pity for the blind.”

THE HOSPITALITIES OF NATURE.

BY THE REV. HUGH MACMILLAN, D.D., LL.D., F.R.S.E.

Some objects are repellant and exclusive. They give no shelter or support to any created thing. They suffice for themselves, and stand out clearly defined in their distinct and independent existence. The surface of the snow is barren; the chilly glacier has no communion with the mountain glen through which it passes. The clear, sharp-cut crystal harbors no stain from earth or sky to show its sympathy with the materials out of which it sprang. The marble rock, like the snow, does not invite the green things of the soil around it to share its existence with it, and give to and take from it an element of picturesqueness and beauty.

And yet, as in human society, when social laws overbear private plans, and the social design is fulfilled in spite of selfish opposition, so in nature the substances that seek to exclude others are made to contribute to the general harmony and the beautiful balancing of creation. The very snow is made to be friendly and hospitable, for it nourishes on its stainless bosom a simple, one-celled plant which grows with such rapidity and in such marvelous profusion that it gives to whole fields of polar and alpine snow a deep crimson hue, as if a creature’s blood had dyed them. In the shallow parts of water melted on the surface of the glacier by the hot noonday sun may be seen jelly-like masses of vegetation; while under the stones which the rocks around hurl down upon it, as if in anger at its hostility, may be found lively colonies of the small black glacier flea. Nature will not allow this cold, frigid substance to maintain a separate existence; for beside bowlders from the rocks, she persists in soiling its surface with dirt-bands and masses of débris from the crumbling mountain-side, so that a line of demarcation between ice and earth can not be drawn, and the glacier blends with the rest of the mountain; while the sky claims kindred with the deep cerulean blue that shines in the crevasses. Marble, too, takes on the warm golden tint of the sunset, and is stained by time with a russet hue that brings it into partnership with the common rocks, with which all things make friends—the mosses, the lichens, the vines and birds. Even the hardest crystals and precious stones have occasional cavities filled with fluids, which indicate their origin. Nay, so anxious is nature to assimilate every object, that on the thatch of man’s lowly cottages she plants her tufted mosses; on the slates of his statelier roofs she paints her frescoes of golden lichens; and even on his windows she produces not only the iridescence of age, but also a growth of curious, minute algæ. On his dark unsightly cinder-walks, which seem like spots of ink disfiguring nature’s fair page, she makes her dandelions to open their sunshine; and on the raw new walls which he builds around his possessions, to separate them from nature’s wastes, she spreads her hoary nebulæ of vegetation. Man’s works are thus made kindred to the earth and the elements; and nature, by her hospitalities, makes them at home in every situation.

Some objects are more hospitable than others. The beech, of all trees, is perhaps the most self-contained. It fills out its trunk so thoroughly; its bark is so hard and stuffed and rounded with its wood, that it has not a rift nor a crevice in which any living thing might find refuge. No moss forms a green tuft upon it; no leafy or shrubby lichen finds a foothold on its smooth bark. And even the crustaceous species that consist of a mere film of gray matter grow thinner on its hard repellant surface than on the rock itself. They cling so closely that they can not be separated. No botanist would go to the beech expecting to find on its trunk the wealth of lowly plants in which he delights. To the entomologist it is equally uninteresting, the number of insects that frequent it being exceedingly few. Nor is it chosen usually by birds to build their nests on its boughs. Darwin mentions that worms hardly ever make their curious castings under its shade. The ground beneath it nourishes no green grasses, and only its brown mast and polished, three-cornered nuts carpet the soil.

Why is the beech so inhospitable? Why does it thus stand alone, apart from the rest of creation, and proudly maintain its own self-sufficient existence? It is indeed one of the grandest of our forest trees. Nothing can be lovelier than its translucent foliage in spring, making, as Coleridge says, “the level sunshine glimmer with green light.” Nothing can be more splendid than its blaze of amber tints lighting up the woodland in autumn like a pillar of fire. Its shade is ample; its leaves are sweet and tender; its nuts pleasant and nutritious. And yet all creatures, with the exception of the pig, which feeds upon its nuts, seem to shun it; and hardly any moss or lichen ornaments its trunk and arms with its quaint jewelry. It stands in the inanimate world of pictures around us as a type of a thoroughly selfish and unsocial nature. Only the lover seeks it to carve upon its smooth, hard bark the name of the beloved one, fondly hoping that it may long retain, clear and sharp as if cut in stone, the cherished inscription. But even this tender secret it refuses to keep; its trunk swells, and the letters become dilated and distorted, and in a few years a new growth smooths out and obliterates the name, without leaving a trace on its callous wood. Perhaps this smoothness and hardness of the bark and wood, as well as the dryness of its shade—for no other woods are so free from damp and so pleasant to walk in as beech woods—may be the reason why it shelters so little dependent life. Even the raindrops refuse to linger about it, and though the sunbeams may play through the green meshes of its transparent foliage and tremble on the lines of silky hairs that project from the margins of its young leaves “like eyelashes from the margin of the eyelid,” yet without moisture the light can favor no growth of fern or moss or lichen, which loves a damp atmosphere; and without these lowly plants no insect or bird life can flourish.

Another inhospitable tree is the pine. Its degree of selfishness varies with the species, some being much more tolerant of alien life than others; the common larch being, perhaps, the least exclusive, and the aurucaria the most. The trunk and branches of the larch are covered from head to foot with tufts and rosettes of hoary lichens, which cling specially to this tree and give it a most venerable appearance; but the aurucaria surrounds itself with an impenetrable armor of vegetable spears and daggers, within whose formidable circle no living thing dare intrude. I once saw a squirrel skipping along a lawn, and suddenly stopping at the foot of a tall, wide-spreading aurucaria, it looked up at the bristling trunk and branches with evident astonishment, as if it had never seen anything of the kind before; and with an expression of disappointment and fear that was almost human, and certainly was exceedingly comical, it turned away and climbed up a more propitious looking species of pine near at hand. But whatever may be the case in regard to individual trees, the pine tribe in its social character is decidedly inhospitable. A pine wood is one of the loneliest scenes in nature, not merely as regards the intrusion of man, but as regards the intrusion of any other living thing. Nothing breaks up its uniformity and monotony. It has none of the rich variety of life that characterizes other woods. The seasons themselves make no impression upon it, for it is dressed in perennial green, and it retains its shade alike in summer’s heat and winter’s desolation. It prevents all undergrowth; no brambles dare to stretch their long, trailing, thorny arms—like the feelers of some creature of prey—within its guarded enclosure. No wild roses can open their trembling petals white with fear, or crimson with blushes, in its solemn sanctuary. No hazel bush will drop there its ringlets of smoking catkins in spring, or its ruddy clusters of nuts in autumn. No mimic sunshine of primrose tufts, no pale star-beams of anemone or sorrel will light up its gloom. No glimpses of blue sky are let into it by hyacinths, or bluebells, or violets. To all the lowly plants that find refuge in other woods, and in turn adorn and beautify their hosts, the pine trees in their dignified independence refuse admission. No song of bird or hum of insect is heard beneath their boughs. And on the ground below, strewn deep with a carpet of brown needles and emptied cones that have silently dropped in the course of long years from overhead, and are slow to decay, only a few yellow toadstools and one or two splendid scarlet mushrooms make up for the painful dearth of vegetation. It seems as if the balsamic breath of the pines, which is so wholesome to human life—guarding off all fevers and infectious diseases—were as deadly as the upas shade to other forms of life.

How widely different is it with the oak! This of all trees—of all living things—is the most hospitable; and in this respect it is well chosen as the badge of England, which has the proud distinction of affording a refuge to every political outcast and victim of ecclesiastical tyranny throughout the world, and fosters by its love of freedom and constitutional government, every type and variety of human life. A whole book might easily be written upon the multitude of living things that obtain food and shelter from the oak. The natural history of its inmates and boarders is like that of a garden, or, indeed, a county. Some creatures are peculiar to it, and find their home nowhere else; and to many more that are free to come and go, it extends a kindly welcome. Were it to perish altogether from off the face of the earth, many insects and plants would disappear utterly. The insect population alone of the oak tree, including beetles, butterflies, and a great variety of tiny creeping things which none but a naturalist cares for, or is aware of, would furnish materials for study of a most interesting and absorbing kind for many summer weeks together. When we do not see themselves, we see the evidence of the existence and working of the insects in the great variety of curious galls which they produce upon the trunk and branches: oak apples that hang on the twigs like some mysterious unknown fruit, and are as wondrously fashioned, although excrescences and abortions of the vital sap, as the legitimate acorn cups and eggs themselves; and beautiful golden-brown spangles that crowd all the under-surface of the withering leaves in autumn like the seeds, or the “fairy’s money,” as it is called, on the back of the ferns, thus linking the oak leaf and the fern leaf—the highest and the lowest type of vegetation—together in the wondrous unity of nature by a strange similitude of appearance. But it is among the plants that we find the most beautiful occupants of the oak tree. The ivy climbs up its trunk, which affords admirable support for its myriads of little feet, and changes its glossy leaves, as it creeps higher and higher, from the deeply-cut angular pattern to the oval and pointed one; and at the top it waves its airy sprays among the oak leaves, and produces beside the acorns at the extremities of the branches, the light-green flowers that blossom only when the plant has nothing to cling to and must shift for itself; as if nature were taking care that when the life of the individual was in danger, the life of the race should at least be made sure. Then there is the mystic mistletoe, with all its dim and sacred associations with the Druid-worship of our remote ancestors. It clings still closer to the oak, for it is not an epiphyte like the ivy—merely making use of the tree for support—and finding its food independently from the soil and air—but a partial parasite that strikes its root into the substance of the oak, and while to some extent feeding upon its prepared juices, is capable of showing a little independent spirit and working for its own support, as is evident from the fact of its having green leaves, which, however pale, can still decompose, to some extent, the sunshine into materials of growth. The mistletoe is thus a partial boarder of the oak; it gets, so to speak, its principal meal from it, while for its lighter refreshment it is dependent upon its own resources. A beautiful emblem truly it is, thus growing on our royal English tree. According to the suggestive mythology of our ancestors, which had, indeed, much in it of the deeply philosophical, as well as of the practical and religious, the oak was Hesus, the god best and greatest, strongest and ever-during; and the mistletoe was man weak and poor, but living in him and clinging to his everlasting arms.

It would be almost impossible to enumerate the various kinds of mosses, lichens, and ferns, that show a preference for the oak, and share its grand and liberal hospitality. Its trunk seems as if made to harbor those lowly lilliputian members of the vegetable kingdom, whose quaint forms and curious properties harmonize so well with the fairy scenery of midsummer night’s dreams. Unlike the smooth bark of the beech, made to keep all visitors aloof, the bark of the oak is full of furrows, crevices, irregularities, porches and outbuildings as it were, where wandering seeds find lodgement, and first tender growths can secure their hold against scorching sunbeam and cruel wind. The huge patriarch, hoary with years, whose lifetime bridges across the whole history of England, allows the tiny imps of vegetation that are but of yesterday—the perpetual infants, so to speak, of plant life, freely to clamber over its roots and arms, and hang upon its rugged bosses which time has used so cruelly, reducing them almost to bone and muscle, their emerald bracelets of moss, their plumes of polypody ferns, and their rosettes of lichen, adorning the magnificent old grandfather of the woods with the ornaments of youth and beauty! What a wonderful picturesqueness do these lowly forms of life, crowding around the oak as it grows in years and in size, give to it! They richly repay the hospitality they receive in the added charm they impart to the forest patriarch. They show an exquisite sympathy even with its weaknesses, hiding its defects by their fairy sprays, and covering its dead members with a lovely pall of vegetable velvet.

It teaches us thus the touching lesson that the grandest things in nature may be made more beautiful and picturesque by the simplest—as the greatest man may be indebted for his chief happiness to the smiles and prattle of the little children that climb on his knee. And how open to all the flowers and shrubs of the wild wood are its wide-spreading arms! The grass may grow up to the very foot of its trunk unreproved by any dark frowning shadow cast by its leaves. The hyacinth may make a fragrant mist of blue about its roots, and the primrose need not blanch its sunny cheek as it creeps up to its venerable bole. Royal as it is, its dignity consists in its hospitality; and its nobility is indicated by its freeness of access and kindly generous welcome to all that may hold within it the sacred principle of life. The gates of its hospitality, like the Bukharian nobleman’s, are “nailed open.” Sturdy and independent as it is, there is thus no object that is more closely linked with the genial life of nature, that blends more harmoniously with the operations which different creatures carry on for their own advantage, and makes of them one genial system of mutual benefit.—_London Sunday Magazine._

PERPLEXITIES.

“Nothing can possibly fail, because the sole true end or object is redemption of man; and this is attained ever and for ever, with no exception, in good and evil, in each largest and most trivial thing.”—JAMES HINTON.

How crooked is our life! Its ins and outs
We can not scan;
How often do we say, “That’s just too late
And spoils our plan.”
How often we perplex ourselves, because
Of efforts vain,
And try, without success, to make things come
Round right again.

How disappointment will not let us hold
The course we would,
But throws us off from every hoped-for boon
That we think good.
How little things perplex our onward path
From day to day,
Seeming to render futile all our work,
Stopping our way.

Oh! could this crooked life be straightened out,
And every bit
Met fairly by another, point to point
In sequence fit;
The difficulties then were not so hard
To meet and bear,
Were there a carrying on of some wise plan,
And purpose fair.

What if the Master’s plan _be_ utter good,
Too vast, in sooth,
For us to grasp it with our puny powers?
In this grand truth,
For such it is—although things look not so
To our weak sight—
Lies the true meaning of these crooked things
If read aright.

The source of all the discord that we feel,
Is that our will
Is not made one with God’s, and so we strive
To make life still
A thing that we call good—a little good
That we can know;
Instead of in our ignorance content
God’s way to go.

CASTLE GARDEN.

BY C. E. BISHOP.

A song was popular about forty years ago, in which was couched an invitation to every nation to come along and make no delay, as “Uncle Sam is rich enough to give you all a farm.” At Castle Garden, since that invitation, respondent aliens to the number of over seven and a half million have “come along,” and Uncle Sam has redeemed the promise to all who applied. Yet, munificent as is this bounty, the State of New York bestows a more liberal hospitality, and a more beneficent care on the immigrant. During a discussion in a New York club lately of the question “What does this country owe to other nations?” a gentleman vehemently protested against the assumption couched in the question. “When a subject of another nation lands on our shores,” he said, “we meet him with food and raiment, find him occupation, and give him a farm. Talk about our owing other people anything! The obligation is all on the other side.”

The speaker did not half recite the obligation that the Empire State assumes on behalf of the stranger. It reaches out arms of protection to him, like a mother yearning across seas, almost from the time he sets sail. It meets the ship at the Lower Bay of New York, inspects its sanitary condition and that of the passenger; hears his complaints, and if he have any grievance, tries to remedy it. It receives him at Castle Garden, helps him to secure and check his baggage and buy a passage ticket to any point at lowest rates. It gives him his mail, if he have any waiting; telegraphs or writes the news of his arrival to his friends, if he have any in this country, and sends him and his baggage to them if his destination be in or near the city. It gives him food if he be hungry; medicine and nursing if he be ill; a Bible if he can read; sends him to an asylum, if he be _non compos mentis_, or back to Europe if he be a pauper. It changes his foreign coin into American on terms of equal value, and gives him a piece of paper with the whole transaction figured out so he can ponder over it and come back for explanations or corrections, if need be. It finds him a hotel, if he want one, the proprietor of which is under heavy bonds to kindly entreat the stranger and not overcharge him; it stands guard with big clubs to keep off biped wolves, and if, notwithstanding, in the exercise of his new-found liberty, he walk into pitfalls, it sends a detective or a policeman to secure him restitution. It finds him immediate occupation at prices that sound fabulous by the side of his old-time pittance; it furnishes interpreters, guides and guardians—in a word, exercises over him a wiser and more helpful paternalism of government than he has ever known. And all this paternal care it extends to him not only when he arrives; it stands ready to renew the guardianship at any time within a year thereafter if he return to Castle Garden and ask it. Most of this it does without charge to the immigrant; all of it is free if he have no money to pay withal. Not so much is done for any other visitor—not even for the titled and wealthy stranger. Nay, the opera singer or the champion pugilist receives less consideration. Really, the only “distinguished arrivals” in this country are the steerage passengers.

The State of New York stands guardian to the whole United States in this matter. Its little timely aid and provision of employment, its security extended to those destined inland, as well as the care it takes to prohibit entirely the landing of paupers and helpless ones, prevent many from becoming a public expense in other states.

Perhaps you are ready to give it credit, in all this, for Christian philanthropy. Not at all. It is enlightened self-interest on the part of the State. She is simply guarding the chief city of the country, which happens to be within her borders, from the peril and cost of unregulated immigration. And she takes care to make some one else pay all the bills, my friend. The expense of doing all this is chiefly met by a tax on the steamship lines, called “head-money;” a tax of two dollars a head, for all steerage passengers. And besides that she makes the steamship company, at its own expense, carry back to the old country any emigrant who has no money or friends in this. In collecting the head-money tax and in enforcing the restrictions against pauper immigration the State has indirectly the powerful aid of the United States government—a plain recognition of the fact that the whole duty properly belongs to the latter.