Page images
PDF
EPUB

He must be so perfectly aware that such patients are often most in need of supervision, that I cannot suppose this to be his meaning; but I fear he will be so interpreted by the reckless advocates of change.

I am well aware that I can have given no satisfaction to most of my readers. Few will have had the patience to go through a paper on a special subject such as this, unless they are already enthusiasts in the matter of lunacy law reform. To such I have not addressed myself, and they will consider what I have written is a half-hearted apology for a system they deem intolerable. But, if anyone with an open mind has followed me, I would press him to bear in mind the conditions of the problem which confronts us. I think I have given reasons for supposing that any radical changes would do more harm than good. There are already far too many lunatics detained in private houses without any legal supervision at all; a more rigorous process of certification would add largely to their number. There are plenty of poor chronic lunatics leading comparatively normal lives in private asylums; their collection into great public institutions would assuredly not increase their happiness. For the sake of both these classes, I earnestly trust no considerable change may be made in the law. But I also think much may be done to relieve the public from not entirely unreasonable fears. It is because I believe this to be possible that I have attempted a task which I trust I may see taken up by some one of larger experience and better judgment than myself.

J. R. GASQUET.

LORD BRAMWELL ON DRINK: A REPLY.

I HAVE no doubt that many total abstainers have, during the last weeks, been referred to Lord Bramwell's pamphlet as a triumphant refutation of what is politely called their 'craze.' As there are said to be from three to four millions of total abstainers in England, and as large numbers of them are to be found in the ranks of professional men, of officers, of members of the Legislature, and of the clergy of all denominations, it would be a misfortune if their position was as untenable and their practice as much to be reprehended as Lord Bramwell maintains. Many of them are far better qualified than I am to defend their principles against these animadversions; but, as I have been allowed to take some part in the Temperance movement, I have felt it a public duty to state some of the reasons by which we have been influenced, and to explain why we are not at all shaken in our purpose by the arguments now adduced against us.

6

Lord Bramwell begins by saying that his cause needs no apology, because it is just, moral, and in conformity with the practice of all mankind. If so, what need is there to be so much moved by those whom he evidently regards as a small and wrong-headed minority? It is because, as he assures us, they have said, and have been permitted by their opponents to say, We are the righteous, the good, the virtuous; and you are wicked, bad, vicious!' Now I would respectfully ask Lord Bramwell who has ever said this? Can he, out of reams of Temperance literature, adduce a single sentence to that effect? I have attended Temperance meetings in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Durham, Sunderland, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Derby, London, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge, and many other large towns, and I have never heard anything distantly approaching to such an allegation. There is not a single reasonable advocate of temperance who would not regard so Pharisaic and uncharitable a judgment as perfectly detestable. Of course when a cause is taken up by advocates of all degrees of wisdom and unwisdom, it is quite possible that, from lack of education, or in the heat of argument, or in the excessive fervour of sincere but ill-regulated zeal, some of them

may have used language which might constructively be pressed to this absurd conclusion. But a cause must be judged on its own merits, not by the most extravagant and unaccredited utterances of its least competent partisans. For myself, I can only say that, during nine years of total abstinence, I have never so much as told young persons in confirmation classes, or even children in my own national schools, that it is their duty to abstain; and as for morally condemning millions of wise and virtuous men who are not abstainers, I know no total abstainer who would not heartily despise himself if he could be guilty of a judgment so wholly unwarrantable.

Lord Bramwell must surely be aware of two very patent facts; the one that the chair is very frequently taken at Temperance meetings by clergymen and gentlemen who at once open the proceedings with the remark that they are not abstainers; the other, that the great Church of England Temperance Society is avowedly founded upon a double basis, and that the non-abstaining section of it is intended to be in all respects as honoured and as prominent as the other. As regards the vast mass of English abstainers, it is a wholly groundless charge to say that they pride themselves upon their own practice in the matter; and still more to say that they condemn or desire to encroach upon the independent judgment or the moral liberty of their neighbours.

I do not think that the cause of 'Drink' will be much strengthened by the wholesale arraignment of nature involved in Mr. Justice Maule's remark that water is not drink ;' but passing over this, we come to the admission that 'drink' which, in excess, makes a man contemptible and ridiculous, and would ruin the health and kills the unhappy wretch who persistently takes it to excess,' is yet a good thing, which the world would act very foolishly if it gave up, because it does an immense deal more good, and gives a vast deal of pleasure and enjoyment to those who take it with good sense and moderation.' In favour of this view Lord Bramwell appeals to the practice of the world, 'with the exception of the followers of the crazy fanatic and impostor Mahomet.' It is not worth while pausing to inquire whether history will accept this description as adequately representing the great Prophet of Arabia, or whether his mighty and beneficent influence in saving whole nations from the curse of intemperance does not go far to outweigh many of his errors. But I challenge the proposition that because drink gives a vast deal of pleasure and enjoyment' it therefore does an immense deal more good than harm.' The two results are not in pari materia. The good takes the form of a sensuous pleasure, a passing exhilaration; the harm takes the form not only of disease, and pain, and waste, but, as Lord Bramwell admits, of insanity and crime and death. The pleasure is insignificant, the harm is deadly. The luxury which is so often purchased at a fatal price by the individual may also, in the form of physical de

[ocr errors]

generacy and moral degradation, cost far] too dear to the race. The general enjoyment of stimulants can hardly, in our opinion, be fairly weighed against the destruction which drink has caused in age after age-and especially since the fatal discovery of ardent spirits-to millions of human bodies and human souls. A workman who was rolling into a publican's cellar a cask of whisky gave the cask a kick, and was overheard remarking to his comrade, 'I wonder how many curses there are in that cask.' A Christian, in an age of rapid intoxicants, in a country of which drunkenness is the worst national vice, may be excused from accepting Lord Bramwell's conclusions when he finds that centuries and millenniums ago those conclusions were rejected even by Jews and by Pagans. Men who knew nothing of the infinite value which Christianity attaches to every human soul -men who lived in lands where wine was still a pure and natural product, and in ages comparatively unscourged by intemperancehave yet thought very differently from the English judge. Some of the Rabbis believed that the vine was the forbidden tree. The discovery of wine in the Scripture narrative is instantly followed by a Patriarch's degradation, a son's infamy, and the curse of an entire branch of the human family. In those four verses (Gen. ix. 20-24), says Rabbi Oved the Galilean, there are no less than thirteen vaus,' and each vau stands for a woe upon the human race. Very bitter and decisive are the many apologues in which some of the wisest Rabbis of Israel have expressed their opinion that intoxicating drink has been more of an evil than a good to mankind. Let us turn to Pagan antiquity. Propertius was certainly no temperance fanatic, yet Propertius sings, Vino forma perit, vino consumitur ætas.' There is surely a pathetic sincerity in the remark of the learned and thoughtful Pliny, who, after describing all the difficulties which attend the culture of the vine, concluded his sketch with the words: Tanto opere, tanto labore et impendio constat quod hominis mentem mutet ac furorem gignat hominibus huic sceleri deditis.' The legendary Thracian king was not the only one who, even in the days of classical antiquity, resisted the worship of

Bacchus, who first from out the purple grape
Crushed the sweet poison of misusèd wine.

While men are what they are-more prone, as Aristotle says, to intem-
perance than to moderation ;3 while alcohol is what it is-in itself a
deleterious poison, which, like other lethal agents, has the fatal
property of creating for itself in many constitutions a morbid crave;
while into modern drinks-the stupefying beers, the heady porters,
the burning brandies, the maddening gins, and rums, and whiskies
with which so many of our working classes are destroying themselves—
1, the Hebrew 'and.'
2 Sanhedrin, f. 70, 1.

3 Εὐκατάφοροι ἐσμεν μᾶλλον πρὸς ἀκολασίαν ἢ πρὸς κοσμιότητα. Aristot. Eth. Nic. ii. 8, § 8.

[ocr errors]

so disproportionate an amount of alcohol is introduced; it is a question perfectly open to discussion whether drink' does not do infinitely more harm than good. Against the dictum of Lord Bramwell I will set that of two thousand members of the medical profession in 1846, who signed a declaration to the effect that total and universal abstinence from alcoholic liquors and intoxicating beverages of all sorts would greatly contribute to the health, the prosperity, the morality, and the happiness of the human race.'

[ocr errors]

"Weigh drinking in the balance,' says Mr. Joseph Cowen, the eloquent member for Newcastle; weigh it honestly-all its alleged advantages and all its admitted ills-and pronounce whether it is not wanting. Put on one scale all the much-prized conviviality it produces, and the doubtful medical testimony that is quoted in its support. Put on the other side the material and moral, the individual and national loss that it inflicts; the criminality, the pauperism, the woes that cannot be measured by arithmetic, the cries of perishing children, and the wrecks of noble intellects-can any man doubt which scale will ascend?'

The argument on which Lord Bramwell almost exclusively relies is that drink is a source of great pleasure and enjoyment. Perhaps he may not have tried whether abstinence, undertaken from generous motives, is not a source of even greater pleasure. Thousands of those who once enjoyed their glass of beer or their glass of sherry with the keen relish which Lord Bramwell describes, would assure him that they derive from total abstinence, even physically and mentally, a pleasure far purer and more keen. I will not now enter into the overwhelming and constantly increasing evidence that abstinence conduces to health and to longevity; nor more than allude to the certainty that, for many persons, alcohol, even in quantities conventionally deemed moderate, is subtly deleterious. I will not speak of the many vitiated constitutions for which the strength and the amount of the stimulant must constantly be increased, nor of the hundreds of families which might have been very happy, but into which a tendency to drink has introduced anguish and degradation such as cannot adequately be described. I cannot in this brief paper state even a fraction of our indictment of the evils caused by drink. But I may assert, from the experience of thousands of total abstainers, that they have found alcohol to be for themselves, if not a harmful, at least an entirely needless luxury. In these hard days the majority of struggling middle-class families, no less than the vast multitudes of poor and unemployed, would find that the money which they now needlessly spend upon wine, beer, or spirits would benefit them in a multitude of better ways. To the labouring class generally, total abstinence often means the difference between beggary and respectability, between rags and decency, between success and ruin, between true homes and what Carlyle called 'worse than Dantean hells.' Putting the question

« PreviousContinue »