WILL THE COMING MAN DRINK WINE?

Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, Issue 39, 29 June 1878, Page 4

WILL THE COMING MAN DRINK WINE?

[ContUMtgd from our last.)

The inhalation, therefore, proceeds un--lil the surgical operation is finished, when j the handkerchief is withdrawn from the yatient's face, and he is left to regaiu his ' senses.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 oame in at, —the lungs. It was breathed iu ; it is breathed out. The rest escapes by other channels of egress ; it all escapes, and it escapes unchanged I That is the poiut; it escapes without having left anything in the system. All that can be said of it is, that it entered the body, oreated morbid conditions in tho body, and then left the body. It cost these patient men years to arrive at this result; but anyone who has ever had charge of a patient that has been rendered insensible by other 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 tho fluid nearest resembling ether and chloroform. Dogs and men suffered in the cause. Iu tho moisture exhaled from the pores of a drunken dog's skin,these ounning Frenchmen detected the alcohol which had made him drunk. They proved it to exist in the breath of a man, at six o'olock in the evening, who had drank 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 wholo 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 tho 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 oue ounce, —and afterwards distil from his breath, perspiration, &c, the whole quantity that ho had swallowed. This has not been done; it never will be done; it is obviously impossible. Enough has been di mo 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 bo will you be reader, if you read their books) that, if you take it into your system an ounce of alcohol, the whole ounce leaves 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 tho 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, pluß a small lump of sugar, did the olaret which we drank yesterday deposit in ours; so, at least, we must infer from tho experiments of Messrs. Lallemand, Pcrrin. 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. 1 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 stimulent whatever without benefit. Wo all remember Bydney Smith'sstrong sentences on this point, scattered through the volume which contains the correspondence of that delicious humourist and wit. " I like London better than ever I liked it before," he writes in the prime of his life (forty-three years old) to Lady Hollond, " 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-sevon, to the same lady: " I not only was never bettor, 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 fermonted 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 nuke greater exertions, without fatigue. My understanding is improved, and I comprehend political ocooomy. i I see better without wine and spectacles than when I used both. Only one evil ensues from it; lam in such extravagant spirits that I must Iwe blood, or look out tor some one who will bore or •depress me. Pray leave off wine: tho stomach is quite at rest; no heartburn, 80 pain, no distention."

I have also a short catalogue of pe> sens who, having long lived innocent of these agrcoablo drinks, began at length to use them. Dr. Franklin's case is king. That " water American," as he

\ras styled by the London printers, whose ceaseless puzzling of beer he ridiculed in his twciitii-th year, drunk wine in his BJxtifltb with trie freedom- usual at that period among persons of good estate. " At parting," ho writes in 1708, when ho was sixty-two, " after we had drank a bottle anil a half of claret each, Lord Clare hugged and kissed me, protesting he never iu 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 stone and gravel. Perhaps, if Franklin had remained a " water American," he would have annexed Canada to tho United States at the peace of 1782. An agonising attack of stone laid him on his hack 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 conolude from all this ? Aro 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 r>? pessary, but are always in some degree hurtful. This truth becomes so clear, after a few weeks' investigation, that I advise every person who meanß to keep on drinking such liquors not to look into the facts ; for if ho does, he will never again be ablo 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 flavour 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, asid 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. Willurd 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 Cuming 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 what 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 aro forced to borrow excitement because you have squandered your natural gaiety. 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 neighbours 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 bo 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 bo, may not be always well. If, as he springs up a mountain-side, bis 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, be 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 oloar eyes; poison may rack his magnificent frame, and a long convalescence may severely try his admirable patience. Will tho Coming Man drink wino whon he is sick ? Hero the testimony becomes contradictory. The question iB 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 ho woe already struggling with the discaso that terminated his existence, he wrote his friend, Dr. Bowdjtoh, " the consumptive history" of his family from IC.')4, when his stalwart Kuglish ancestor settled In Now Knglam). The son of that ancestor built a house, in ltin>.vpoi» tho slope of a hill which'terminated in "agnat fresh meadow of spongy peut," which was "always wrt all the year through," and from which " fugs could

bo seen gathering towards night of a ole.tr day." 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 timo consumption was the banc of tho race, and spared not tho offspring of parents who hod removed from the family seat into localities five 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 the ages of 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 fiftyfive years of age when the account was written, end then exhibited no consumptive tendency ! To this faot Mr. Parker added others:—

" I. I know a consumptive family living in a situation like that I havo mentioned for, perhaps, tho 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 othor but occasionally. They both died of consumption, the eldest not over forty-five. "2. Another consumptive family in such a situation as has been already described had many sons and several daughters. The (laughters were all temperate, married, scttlod elsewhere, had children, died of consumption, bequeathing it also to their posterity. But five of the sons, whom I knew, were drunkards, —some, of tho 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 Jlr. Parker drew from the family histories given was the following: "Intemperate habits (where the man drinks a pure, though coarsoand fiery, liquor, like New England rum) tend to chock 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 tho 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 tho country fainted when they were first confined in such a life-destroying prison ; tho 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 tho 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 fifteon 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 vigour, upon a remarkably short allowance of food, provided the victim keops 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 principle articles of diet are salcratus and grease, to which a littles flour and pork are added; upon which, they say, human life cannot be sustained unless the natural wasto of tho system is retarded by " preserving " the tissues in whiskey. Mr. Greely, however, got through alive without resorting to thia expedient, but he confesses in ono of his letters that he suffered pangs and horrors of indigestion. All suoh facts as theso—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 tho gin ; and those horsemen would have given up and perished but for the whiskey. Nature commanded those soldiers to rest, but they were onablod, for the moment, to disobey hor. Doubtless Nature wss even with tin-in 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—thoir role, as the French investigators term it—in the present life of the human race. (To be continued in our next.)