Intemperance and its Remedy.^*

Amongst the most hopeful signs of the present day is the awakening of the Christian Church to the terrible and, hitherto, but little regarded and abounding evil of intemperance. And it is indeed time for the Church of the living God to shake off her apathy and set herself in earnest to seriously and exhaustively examine into the causes of this great and growing vice, and if possible discover an effectual remedy. In the solution of this problem it is but too often forgotten that we have to deal mainly with a physical evil. It is in virtue of the physical effects of alcohol on the brain of man that there arises so plentiful a crop of social, moral, mental, and spiritual mischief; and, therefore, if we desire to thoroughly comprehend the causation of intemperance we are, on the very threshold of our inquiry, constrained to examine into the physical influence of alcohol on the human economy. Alcohol, the one common ingredient for which all alcoholic liquids are used, is a narcotico-acid poison of the most deadly nature. A pint of claret contains 2 oz. of it, a pint of London stout oz., a pint of port or Bherry 4 oz., a pint of brandy 104 oz., and a pint of rum 15 oz. One ounce of alcohol having been known to kill a child seven years of age, it will at once be apparent that a pint of average malt liquor contains more poison than will kill a seven-year-old; a pint of claret sufficient to kill two such children; a pint of sherry, four; a pint of brandy, ten; and a pint of rum, fifteen children. All alcoholic beverages, therefore, are, beyond a few unimportant constituents simply watery solutions of this poison, alcohol, and the dilution with water does not alter in the slightest the nature and tendency of the alcohol contained in any particular drink. The greater the dilution the more are the effects of the poison diminished, or, in other words, the less the amount of alcohol consumed the less poisonous effect does it produce. Its first interference is with the organs of page 4 digestion. Alcohol, being of a thirsty nature, seizes upon water wherever that exists, and thus at once begins its work as a disturber or the functions of the living body by depriving the mouth and salivary glands of a portion of their natural moisture; and in this way the use of alcoholic liquors, so far from quenching the natural desire for fluid, simply irritates and provokes an artificial and unnatural thirst. The stomach is robbed of natural moisture in the same imperious way, the inner coats are irritated, inflamed, and ulcerated, and the natural process of digestion is rudely and seriously disturbed. A steadydaily perseverance in this irritation and ill-usage of the stomach greatly disturbs the digestive organs, and frequently induces, even in those who—though regular—are very careful and limited drinkers, that intractable and depressing disease, alcoholic dyspepsia. More than half of all the cases of this ailment that I have had under my care have been in the person of respectable, well-living, and orderly citizens against whom no one could whisper even a suspicion of intemperance. As a typo of the mere physical suffering accompanying digestive disturbance arising from a very limited indulgence in alcohol, I may narrate the case of a clergy, man who consulted me some time ago. He was thirty-eight years of age, and naturally of a wiry, healthy constitution, very active, of sanguine, nervous temperament, and of strictly regular habits. He stated that he was frequently subject to severe attacks of palpitation of the heart, suffered from constant nausea and flatulence, had little or no appetite, was afraid to be alone anywhere, and never went into the pulpit without a dread of dropping down dead. He was the very picture of misery, but after examining him carefully, and finding that he never smoked, I came to the conclusion that the fons et origo mali was the daily indulgence in one pint of beer and two glasses of wine, with occasionally half-a-glass of spirits as a nightcap, the latter allowance being resorted to only when in a state bordering on desperation from want of rest and sleep. I prescribed a gentle tonic, and insisted on total and immediate abstinence. He was exceedingly uncomfortable for the first fortnight, but after that time all the former distressing symptoms began rapidly and steadily to disappear till, in a couple of months, he described himself as a" freeman, emancipated and disenthralled by the genius of unconditional abstinence." Alcohol, now absorbed into the circulation, has a marked effect on the life's blood of the body. The corpuscles, whose vitality is so necessary to health, are contracted and shrivelled up and prematurely decay, and by this means the due purification of the blood is prevented, which, in addition to the deposit of free fatty globules, page 5 impoverishes the whole vital fluid, and thus weakens and poisons every organ and tissue in the system. It is through the agency of the vitiated blood of the mother that a large percentage of the mortality of infants is directly and indirectly caused by drinking. I have known half-a-glass of whisky taken by a nursing mother give rise, in a few hours, to the most alarming symptoms in an infant who ultimately made a very narrow recovery; and I have frequently had occasion to examine the bodies of infants whose deaths were clearly traceable to the direct effects of the alcohol imbibed at the maternal breast, the mother all the while unconscious of any possible mischief to her little darling from her own daily so-called "moderate" drinking. Many medical men have recorded instances where beer and porter were the sole cause of infantile diarrhœa, convulsions, and wasting sickness; and I have again and again been enabled to put an effectual stop to the disease and emaciation of infants at the breast by the simple prescription of non-alcoholic diet to the mother, or of unalcoholised and innocent artificial food to the child. The every-day prescription of "nourishing stout" to nursing mothers is not scientific medicine, but is the grossest quackery, and is but too often productive of most lamentable results to both mother and child; and the resort to alcoholic beverages in such circumstances is a practice that ought no longer to be tolerated in an educated and civilised community. Where the child's natural food is deficient in quantity, oatmeal gruel or porridge, cows' milk, farinaceous food, and good beefsteaks will accomplish all that is desired, but all the alcohol in the world will never add a drop to the store of real milk. It will only dilute, adulterate, and poison the previous scanty supply. Most distressing cases have come under my own observation, where the lowest depths of drunken degradation have been reached by females brought up as abstainers, whoso first introduction to the "maddening bowl" was reluctantly forced upon them on the unfounded plea that alcohol was imperatively demanded to support the constitution under the continuous drain arising from the nursing of strong and hungry children. For the mother and for the infant there is no nutriment in alcohol, but for both there is ever bodily risk and moral danger, and the only safe regimen is that prescribed of old by the great Ruler of the universe, when, with wine and strong drink forbidden, lie—

"Made choice to rear
His mighty champion, strong above compare,
Whose drink was only from the limpid brook."

It is also mainly through the alcoholic vitiation of the blood that the greater part of the rheumatism and gout which so afflict our population is induced. And I refer to all classes when I make this statement. These two diseases are to be met with as generally amongst the poor as amongst the rich, and I have rarely found them disassociated from the regular drinking of beer, porter, or wine. There is but one cure for all forms of alcoholic rheumatism and gout, and that is total abstinence. Where the disease has existed so long, and the system has become so depraved that a perfect cure is hopeless, still abstinence will alleviate the discomfort and lessen the distress. In 1,540 cases of gout that have fallen to my lot, only one was in the person of a life abstainer, and he inherited the disease as a legacy from his port wine-loving ancestors. The impoverishment and vitiation of the blood lead to the building up of a badly-nourished and weakly frame quite unfitted to withstand, without serious damage, the wear-and-tear of modern civilised life. Every organ in the body is supplied with deficient nourishment, every tissue is deteriorated by the constant and regular use of alcohol even in quantities far short of drunkenness. But, though every part suffers, some organs are more liable to be affected than others. Alcohol has a special affinity for the liver and the brain, and the continued and repeated irritation and congestion of the structure of both these organs leads in the long run to serious functional and organic disease. The heart, however, is perhaps the first sufferer, and certainly has to bear the brunt of the alcoholic attack. The result of well-authenticated experiments shows that the drinking of two glasses of port or sherry in a period of twenty-four hours compels the heart to undergo additional work equivalent to the person having to lift 3 ½ tons one foot high, and even one glass of wine daily causes an excess of four per cent, in the number of the heart's pulsations. Is it not reasonable to conclude, then, that some disease of the heart or blood-vessels must eventually result from a continuous daily over-action such as so limited an allowance of alcohol involves if spread over a lengthened series of years? In addition to the disease induced by constant and persistent overwork, alcohol is a very common cause, indeed the most common cause, of that very frequent affection known as fatty degeneration of the heart, and I have been able to trace three-fourths of all my cases of chronic disease of the heart, whether functional or organic, either to the alcoholic degeneration of tissue, or to the effect of alcoholic overaction, or to both causes combined. I am constantly meeting with cases where young persons have been promaturely, though gradually, cut off by alcoholic page 7 poisoning, one of the most recent being a man whom I found dead in bed, and whose body I found to be a mass of alcoholic fatty degeneration of the muscular tissue. Though only thirty-seven, and though his friends testified that he never was known to be drunk, the verdict of the coroner's jury was "death from alcoholic poisoning." But all these disastrous results put together are as nothing compared with the long array of mental and moral evils which flow from the narcotic action of alcohol on the brain and nervous system.

"Inflaming wine, pernicious to mankind,
Unnerves the limbs, and dulls the noble mind."

Alcohol is, in fact, an anaesthetic, or nerve-paralyser, and the flush that one feels overspread the face immediately after the ingestion of the smallest quantity that will produce this effect on any particular person, is but the first symptom of the paralysis of the vasomotor nerves, and is of the same nature, though greatly less in degree, as the complete paralysis of unconscious and comatose drunkenness. The soothing, comforting sensation consequent on the swallowing of a single glass of wine is, from a scientific point of view, a part of the same physiological effect as is the oblivion in which many drinkers are accustomed to temporarily drown their griefs and cares. And it is this lulling of the senses by the paralysis of brain and nerve that renders the habit of drinking and the downward tendency to more frequent and deeper potations so insidious and dangerous. The restraints of public and social opinion, the hallowed charm of the family circle, and the sacred influence of spiritual considerations guard most of us, by God's grace, from yielding to the narcotic and benumbing fascinations of alcohol, but the number of the victims of both sexes, in all ranks and conditions of life, alike amongst the learned and the unlearned, the accomplished and the ignorant, who have fallen a prey to this "tricksy spirit," attests but too truly the power of this most deadly and subtile poison. After careful investigation, I am satisfied that at least 100,000 are slain directly by intemperance every year in Britain. Mental and moral obliquity, irritable temper, the most brutal crimes, and the most drivelling, as well as the most uncontrollable, insanity are all forms of mental and moral perversion arising from the use of alcohol, and all these evils are wrought mainly through the narcotic and paralysing influence of alcohol on the brain and nervous system. Bear this in mind, and the only radical and effectual remedy is not far to seek. There is but one way to prevent drunkenness, and that is to cease drinking altogether. Let the members page 8 of the Christian Church become abstainers in a body, and no longer uphold the respectability of the habit of ordinary drinking by the ægis of their example; and let, at the same time, the Permissive Bill, or any other efficient method of removing public temptations to drinking, be put in force, and a blow will be dealt at the present rampant power of the whole liquor influence which will lay the tyrant Alcohol low, and stay his destroying ravages on the Church and the nation. And no one need have any hesitation in adopting the practice of total abstinence on the score of health. Many a learned volume has been written on the diseases produced by drinking and drunkenness, as many as forty different ailments having been described by different authors as arising from the use of alcohol; but I have never yet heard of any disease described by any medical author as arising from the practice of total abstinence. All the vital statistics I have been able to procure, whether of insurance societies, sick clubs, or various services—military, naval, and civil—unmistakably bear witness to the fact that deaths and cases of disease amongst drunkards are four times as numerous, and amongst moderate or careful drinkers twice as numerous as the deaths and cases of disease amongst water-drinkers in the same circumstances. I regret to be compelled to say, what I have already stated to medical audiences, that many clergymen and others desirous of throwing in their lot with the abstinence movement have been prevented from so doing only by medical advice, and I therefore feel called upon to record my deliberate opinion that you are just as able as any medical man to judge of the healthful-ness or the contrary of the practice of abstinence. The commonest plea on which good men are generally deterred from taking the "cold-water plunge," is that of a weak heart. How often have I been told, "My doctor tells me I have a weak heart, and I am liable at any moment to fall down and die; and I cannot do without some spirits-and-water." Well, I have already spoken of the tremendous extra labour imposed on the heart by even very small quantities of alcohol, and I put it to you as men and women of common-sense, if the frequent resort to an agent which greatly increases the heart's work can by any possibility be good for that organ, especially when in a weak and enfeebled state. The truth is, that if a heart be weak it should not be subjected to the influence of an agent which will give it more to do, but it ought to be treated as if it were really weak—viz., by rest, freedom from excitement, and non-stimulating and nourishing food. By these means—and by these means alone—even a very weak heart can be kept in a tolerably healthy and serviceable state. And if at any time the heart's page 9 action suddenly flag, I have verified from a not inconsiderable experience that Liebig's extract of meat and Brand's essence of beef, with external warmth, are generally as efficient as, and are decidedly less dangerous than, brandy or any other alcoholic liquid. For those, and I know more than one clergyman who is in this predicament, who feel that they cannot go about with comfort unless they carry in their pocket some cardiac stimulant against an emergency, I am in the habit of recommending a pocket pistol of carbonate of ammonia in camphor water, and I have not yet found reason to regret the advice. We all have weak hearts, and we are all liable to fall down dead at any moment, but let me distinctly state to any sufferers from even organic disease of the heart, that, other things being equal, they will in all probability feel better, physically enjoy life more, and live longer on water than on alcohol and water; while if, as is generally the truth in such cases, the disturbance is functional and not organic, the most of their distressing symptoms will vanish ere they have long foresworn the deceptive anaesthetic. (Several cases were here given, showing the marked improvement in both young and old, suffering from heart disease, following the adoption of total abstinence.) Alcohol, even when in times of bodily and mental weariness it gives a feeling of relief, is but a broken reed after all. To the weary it imparts no strength, to the worn it supplies no real comfort. All that it does is, through its anaesthetic action, to disguise the true state of affairs, and to blunt our sensations of languor and of worry; but, as far as any real strength of body or mind is concerned, the promises of this physical arch-deceiver are nothing but a mockery, a delusion, and a snare. It draws imprudently from the stock of strength and force which ought to be reserved for the emergencies of life, and physiological bankruptcy is but too often the fatal result. (The speaker here stated that three winters ago he was ordered by high medical authority to take certain definite doses of alcohol when worn out and threatened with overpowering pain in the region of the heart. The alcohol, acting as an anaesthetic, warded off the attacks for the moment, but the consequence was that, ere the winter was half over, he was taken suddenly and alarmingly ill, and was quite prostrated. He had become physiologically bankrupt, and narrowly escaped with his life. Since his recovery he had used no alcohol, and had accomplished nearly three times the former amount of professional work, with frequent public efforts in addition, and had not broken down yet while confining his potations to such nourishing and innocent beverages as milk, chocolate, and the only wine worthy of the name, and that page 10 could with any propriety be called "a good creature of God"—unfer-mented and unintoxicating wine). Even in extraordinary circumstances of mental and bodily exhaustion, and when the jaded intellectual worker loathes the very sight of food, alcohol affords no speedier temporary relief than extract of meat, soups, coffee, or other liquid foods, while these latter are free from any dangerous sequela). In the Ashantee Expedition, those who took coffee before the evening meal rose next day less languid and with less headache than those who took rum; but the men who regaled themselves with meat extract, though they found their refresher not quite so pleasing to the palate, awoke with no headache, and stepped out like true British soldiers, clear in head and light in heart, and

"Like to prove most sinewy swordmen."

And then there is the lurking danger in the alcoholic pick-me-up. To no one is a resort to alcohol, in mental or bodily exhaustion, more dangerous than to the brain-worker. "The mind attuned to highest flights of thought" is the most susceptible to the narcotic influence of nerve poisons, and thus amongst the most abandoned of drunkards have been men of the most refined natures and the most cultivated intellects. The fate of Pitt, Sheridan, and Porson shows how utterly unavailing are the defences raised by the loftiest aspirations, the keenest wit, and the most profound learning—

"Boundless intemperance in nature is a tyranny;

It hath been the untimely emptying of the happy throne,

And fall of many kings."

Intemperance not only abounds in our midst, but, unhappily, notwithstanding the depression existing throughout the various departments of manufacture and commerce, is increasing in spite of all the efforts hitherto made to arrest its progress. The police returns of Scarborough, Manchester, Liverpool, and London are but the most recent proofs of this alarming increase. And the most deplorable feature of this extension of the evil is that it shows a marked increase in the amount of female intemperance. My own practice, too, has revealed to me within the last three years an indulgence in secret drunkenness amongst this sex in the middle and upper classes of such a nature and extent as to appal the stoutest heart. I am continually being consulted as to the cure of habitual drunkenness in the persons of accomplished ladies, respectable fathers of families, physicians and surgeons, lawyers, and page 11 clergymen. During the past twelve months there has been an increase of 30 per cent, in the amount of female drunkenness in Edinburgh, and the chaplain of the gaol in Liverpool assures me that there were 300 more females than males committed to prison for drunkenness and allied offences during the year. And all this evil arises from the use of a poison which is quite unnecessary and in no way advantageous to healthy existence. Let us consider the hapless case of the helpless dipsomaniac. The cure of habitual drunkenness is one of the most trying and difficult tasks that can fall to the lot of anyone. I have personally inspected many institutions established for this end alone, I have carefully examined the records of all such published efforts, both in this country and in America, and I have been working hard for the last twenty-two years in the same cause, and I find that not more than 30 per cent, of male inebriates have been permanently reformed, and, most sad to relate, not more than 3 per cent, of females. I am thankful, however, to be able to record that Mrs. Clayton and other individual workers, and the Good Templars, have met with much greater success, and I know personally of more females reformed during the last three years than during the entire preceding portion of my professional life. Such has been the happy issue in the case of a lady of independent fortune to whom I was repeatedly called when she was suffering from dipsomania. On one occasion her friends told me she was lying upon the floor of her room dead, but I found her only dead drunk. After taking and breaking the total abstinence pledge four different times, she took it once again, throwing herself upon the Lord for strength, and with His aid—encouraged and cheered in her practice of abstinence by many Christian and abstaining friends—she has thus far triumphed over her besetting sin, and is now as truly temperate as, when one of an abstaining family—

"She knelt before her mother's feet, And

prayed, with folded hands to God."

I thoroughly approve of, and heartily co-operate with, the Association lately formed to ask for compulsory powers from Parliament for the seclusion and detention of habitual drunkards, and I trust that our efforts will ere long be successful; but all the victims we could, by a legal enactment, deprive temporarily of their liberty, form but a comparatively small proportion of the slaves to intemperance. With God all things are possible, but He works through human means, and, so far as our present knowledge and experience go, there is but one remedy which, with Divine aid, will cure the drunkard, and that is the page 12 remedy of total abstinence. The victim must abstain entirely, and his wife, family, friends, and acquaintances must do so too, or he will not have a fair chance of reformation. But this is not enough. The Russian cannonade that mowed down "our noble six hundred" at Balaclava was directed by an enemy, an open, honest, and valiant foe; but the British Government, which ought to be the friend and protector of all its subjects, has planted, more thickly than the guns on the Russian heights, licensed mantraps on every hand to tempt and seduce to their former living death all of our own six hundred thousand drunkards who have, so far, successfully run the gauntlet of the murderous and destroying liquor batteries. To succeed in the prevention and cure of all drunkenness, habitual and occasional, you must spike the guns by total and immediate prohibition, or by that justest, fairest, and most practical of all the measures at present before Parliament—the Permissive Bill. The public-houses can be shut up and the liquor-traffic can be suppressed, as I well know from ten years' happy experience in the birthplace of the Maine Law—the State of Maine, once the most drunken, now the most sober State in the American Union. Much nonsense has been talked about the Maine Law by flying travellers who have passed but a few hours in Maine, but I here publicly declare, as I have repeatedly done before, and dare anyone who has a real acquaintance with the State to contradict me, that this law is now as well carried out as any other law in this now classic State. My most intimate friend and host in America was our distinguished representative, Mr. Consul Murray, who has been frequently, though wrongly, quoted, as stating that the Maine Law was a failure; and his very last official report to the Foreign Office bears ample testimony to the wondrous success of prohibitory legislation over five-sixths of that portion of the American continent within the consular jurisdiction of my old and valued friend. To all who desire to aid in that arduous yet Christ-like work, the reformation of the intemperate, let me earnestly appeal to openly take the pledge of total abstinence, not as a badge of craven servitude, but as an emblem of true freedom, not as a weakness to be ashamed of but a strength to be thankful for, not the manacle of a slave but the sign-manual of a conqueror. For years did I endeavour to haste to the rescue of strong drink's victims, but all my efforts were fruitless and my soul was faint within me till, challenged by a drunkard to the step I was urgently pressing upon him, I took the pledge, and now, thank God, I daily meet with those in whose redemption from this hideous bondage lie has honoured me with some little part. Faith- page 13 fulness to my own conscience, and to the great cause whose claims we are met to advocate, will not allow of the concealment of the fact that I dare not send a drunkard, for aid or advice in his struggle to emancipate himself from the fetters with which he is bound, to any one who is not a personal abstainer. I have seen most disastrous results follow from the adoption of such a course, and painful experience has taught me that it would be safer by far to send such an erring one to a fellow, drunkard, who would be but a beacon to avoid, while the moderate drinker, however sincere and pious he .may be, sets an example which the struggling victim, humanly speaking, has little hope of being able to follow, try he ever so hard. And I would be sadly wanting in the discharge of my duty were I to omit the declaration of my firm conviction, a conviction shared by all medical practitioners who have had experience in the treatment of the intemperate, that in no circumstances whatever, secular or sacred, in health or in disease (unless, it may be, in a state of unconsciousness), can a reformed drunkard ever safely taste of the intoxicating draught. The grace of God alone can enable such to stand fast in any circumstances, and to no penitent is the prayer "lead us not into temptation" more vital, this sin ever leaving a sting behind; the rescued inebriate, physically speaking,

"Bearing away the wound that never healeth,
The scar that will, in spite of cure, remain."

This particular branch of the temperance question I bring forward, not so much for public discussion as for private, personal, prayerful consideration, and I do most solemnly and affectionately ask of you, when alone with God, to think over the names of all your acquaintances, and see whether there be one drunkard, or one in danger of becoming such; and if there be but one I do most earnestly implore you, in the name of our common Master, to ask yourself this question, "Am I setting this falling brother a perfectly safe example?" I have asked myself this question, and the result is that while, as a practical physician and a scientific observer, I am bound to declare any use of alcoholic liquors as beverages to be, in a state of health, not only unnecessary and useless, but also questionable and unsafe, I am not ashamed to confess that, as a professing Christian, bought with a price, I dare now no more drink a social glass of wine than I dare frequent a gambling-house or patronise a racecourse—all these practices, whatever the abstract innocence of the amusements, being, in this our day and generation, fraught with eternal danger to vast multitudes.

'Christian, Christ for thee has died,
And for thy brother too.
See that his soul no woe betide
Through thoughtlessness in you.

Look upon yonder drunken slave,
Fettered in thought and limb,
Whose hopes lie only in the grave:
Go thou and ransom him.'

Such are my views as a physician on the great and growing intemperance of our land. Alcoholic liquor is quite unnecessary to man in a state of health, and all such beverages, in exact proportion to the quantity of alcohol they contain, and the physical capacity of the drinker to resist its poisoning influence, are neither more nor less than disturbers, or poisons. When taken in a large dose, they may quickly destroy life, like any other active poison; they may also destroy life more slowly, though not less surely, when taken in small and constantly-repeated quantities; and even when they do not directly cause death, they may so deteriorate the vital organs and lower the tone of the whole system as to induce various chronic disorders and render the body an easy prey to acute disease which might otherwise have been shaken off with impunity. To such conclusions was I compelled to come more than twenty years ago, when I had the honour of giving public utterance to them, and every day's experience and observation since have confirmed their soundness. Like chloroform, aconite, opium, and other deadly poisons, alcohol may be occasionally useful in medicine, though even here it has been mainly in emergencies that I have seen any benefit accrue from its administration—all the liquor I have thus prescribed during my entire professional career not amounting to as much as would fill a half-pint bottle; but on no scientific or physiological ground can I see the slightest excuse for its ordinary use. You may be aware of some occult spiritual good to be derived from a limited indulgence in alcohol which may outweigh the physical, mental, and moral evil we have seen resulting from its poisonous action on the brain and nervous centres; but, unless you can adduce proof of such counterbalancing advantages, it seems to me that there is but one course open to Christians of every denomination, and that is, to separate themselves altogether from the unclean thing. If we abstain and do all in our power to discountenance the ordinary drinking usages, great good will follow; but so long as we allow licensed public temptations to drinking, the complete cure and prevention of page 15 drunkenness will be an impossible task. Moral suasion, followed up by legal prohibition, will by God's grace prove a prompt and effectual remedy. The clerical and medical professions have, between them, an unlimited power for good in the deformation of the physical, moral, and social habits of the community at large; and let us all earnestly pray that the present increasing interest which the existence of the widespread intemperance around us is arousing in the Church of Christ will never slacken, but go on till it permeate all the Christians and true patriots amongst us with an earnest and irrepressible determination to search out every cause of this appalling evil, and adopt every suitable and lawful means of arresting, and, if possible, abolishing this common foe of our Church, our country, and our race.