Chapter 13

"The brain works more quickly, more energetically, more freely."

"After drinking a certain amount I can live more in an hour than I could ordinarily in a month," etc. ----

These men who believe that alcohol improves the mind, stimulating it to better effort, constitute a very large class, perhaps the largest class of those who drink to excess.

We wish we could persuade such men that they are mistaken in believing that excessive alcohol feeds the brain.

The man who has drunk too much, and thinks that his mind is working splendidly, might learn something by studying any sort of machinery when the belt slips off the wheel, or the screw of a steamer when the power of the waves throws the screw out of the water.

While the belt is securely attached, doing its works, it turns slowly and monotonously.

While the screw is buried in the water, fighting its way and pushing its load ahead, it turns slowly and laboriously.

When the belt slips off or the screw comes out of the water, the whole thing is changed. The screw whizzes around like lightning.

The belt rattles and dances.

The screw in the water and the machinery doing its work properly are like the sober brain.

The brain that is made abnormal by alcohol is simply the screw out of water, the misplaced machine belt. The brain is no longer connected with the working realities of life. It has lost its balance and its function. It works rapidly and aimlessly. It moves with wonderful swiftness, but it accomplishes nothing.

Let men who drink too much, believing that the action of their minds is improved by drinking, think over this proposition about the machinery and see if there is not something in it to interest them.

How much actual work does this alcoholized brain turn out? What do they actually DO "next day"?

TRY WHISKEY ON YOUR FRIEND'S EYEBALL

Your friend drinks too much, or drinks temperately but unwisely.

You may entreat, or argue, or abuse, or threaten.

You may show your friend the happy home where rum never enters.

You may lead him through the alcoholic ward at Bellevue.

Such sights may produce an impression. But usually they do not.

The man who possesses, indulges and keenly enjoys an overwhelming passion--for drink or any other vice--is rarely moved by your fine talk, for the reason that he believes in his wily soul that you do not know what you are talking about.

Mr. Lecky, in his history of European morals, page 135, volume I., observes:

"That which makes it so difficult for a man of strong, vicious passions to unbosom himself to a naturally virtuous man is not so much the virtue as THE IGNORANCE OF THE LATTER."

You are naturally virtuous. Your drinking friend is naturally and proudly bad. He thinks you do not know what you are talking about when you ask him to give up drink. ----

When you start out to cure a vicious friend by arguing with him, do you ever reflect how little you know what goes on within him? Suppose that in his nerves there is a craving ten thousand times louder and stronger than your most virtuous arguments? What good will those arguments do? No use whispering poetry to a man in a boiler shop. No use humming a love song in a whirlwind.

The poetry, the song, are out of place. Any sort of argument save the most powerful is wasted on a man whose soul is filled with the racket of a dominating passion, such as drink or gambling. ----

Just two things can cure a drunkard--two things, and nothing else on earth.

First, his own cold reason and strength of will.

Second, the growth within him of some passion stronger than his love of drink.

Love of his children, love of a woman, will cure a drunkard (but we earnestly advise any woman to make sure he is cured before trusting her future to him). Ambition--which includes every form of vanity and self-delusion--will cure a drunkard, and has cured many thousands. Even the miser's passion of economy may outweigh love of drink and cure the lesser desire. ----

To cure a drunkard, try to arouse within him some desire stronger than his desire to drink. Any boy will stop smoking to play football or to excel in any sort of athletics. You reach his vanity. What preaching could produce the same effect?

If you feel that you must use argument, try such arguments as will appeal to the man himself, not such as seem sound to you in your fine state of virtue.

The American drunkard is usually manufactured by the vile American habit of drinking pure whiskey or cocktails. No other race, except among the most degraded classes, absorbs crude spirits as stupidly as this race. ----

Suppose you have a young friend whose tendency to drink "straight" whiskey makes you nervous. You see what it is leading to. Instead of trying to make a teetotaler of him, try to transform him into a sensible drinker. ----

When your friend orders his whiskey, start off as follows:

Tell him you take it for granted that he knows all about the mucous membrane. He will say that he does--for it is our American mania to want to appear wise.

Casually state that of course he knows the covering of his eyeball is identical in all important respects--especially as regards sensitiveness--with the lining of his stomach; in fact, of his whole interior from his mouth down.

He will assent and gravely pour out his poison.

Then say to him:

"Just dip the tip of your finger in that whiskey and put the finger to your eye-ball."

If he does so he will feel the eye smart. The eyeball will become inflamed, and sight for a moment will be difficult.

Then let him dilute the whiskey with water--four or five parts water to one of whiskey. That dilution, rubbed into the other eye, instead of irritating it, will act as a gentle stimulant. It will produce an agreeable effect.

When your friend has experimented with the whiskey "straight" and diluted, deliver to him this little lecture:

"One drop of pure whiskey on your eyeball makes it hard to use the eye. That glass of whiskey that you are now pouring into yourself would blind you absolutely, at least for a time. If straight whiskey has such an effect on the covering of the eyeball, must not its effect be equally injurious to the covering of the stomach and intestines, which is the same as that of the eye?

"If diluting your whiskey makes it so much better as an eye-wash, would not diluting it make it better also as a 'stomach-wash'?"

One other thing: When you argue with a drunkard don't tell him that any man can cure himself if he will "only be a man." The drunkard knows that that is not so. Tell him, on the contrary, that not one man in fifty, not one woman in a hundred, can overcome the drink habit.

He will wink his tired eyes at you and say: "I want you distinctly to understand that I'm one in a hundred." Tell him how difficult it is--not how easy--and thus stir up his ambition. ----

Above all, when you start out to admonish or despise the victim of bad habits, just remember that you have no notion whatever of what you criticise. Not one drunkard in a hundred has will power to cure himself. Not one "virtuous" man in a thousand has imagination enough to realize the drunkard's temptation and suffering. We offer to your consideration this other extract from Lecky's book, quoted above:

"The great majority of uncharitable judgments in the world may be traced to a deficiency of imagination. * * * To realize with any adequacy the force of a passion we have never experienced, to conceive a type of character radically different from our own, * * * requires a power of imagination which is among the rarest of human endowments."

WHAT ARE THE TEN BEST BOOKS?

An interesting discussion progresses in Chicago. Mr. Sam T. Clover has asked this startling question:

"If you were bound for a desert island, and could take with you only ten books, which ten books would you select?"

Whoever is refined and well read in Chicago seems to have answered Mr. Clover's question. Mr. Clover introduces each guesser with a graceful speech; then the guesser solemnly names ten books.

The selections are, from the moral viewpoint, admirable. The Bible is omitted rarely, and the Rubaiyat never. It is amazing to see how many inhabitants of Cook County would be unhappy on a desert island without Col. Omar. ----

It may not be permissible for a Yellow Editor to break into a Cook County literary fiesta. We dislike to run the risk--but we shall run it.

First we remark that a man living on a desert island needs no books at all.

Reading books is an idle occupation unless you make your reading profitable to other human beings, and that you cannot do on a desert island.

The trouble with many readers is this: They read as though they WERE on a desert island. They sop up literature or facts as a sponge sops up water; then, like human sponges, do nothing with their wisdom. They read for themselves; they read to increase their egotism and self-approval, and for no other purpose. ----

But, after walking into an intellectual parlor above our station in life, it certainly does not become us to be finicky.

We'll tell as quickly as possible what it is that surprises us:

NOT ONE COOK COUNTY THINKER MENTIONS A BOOK ON ASTRONOMY.

A man on a desert island has a little sand, some goats and a few miles of ocean around him--nothing else in sight.

But above him, and on the low plains of the horizon, the great universe is spread out. Vega flashes overhead, beckoning to this little solar system that is rolling on toward her.

The old, benevolent stars look through cold space at our little sun that was not even hatched in their yesterday.

The Milky Way, that Mississippi of the sky, rolls across the thousands of billions of miles of space.

The messenger-boy comets go on their long, elliptical errands. The colored planets and moons, the nebular masses and the cold, dead worlds lying in the silent morgue of eternity tell the wonderful story of cosmic grandeur.

We should think that a man on a desert island, living constantly in contemplation of God's real work, would want to study that work.

The greatest book ON MEN that ever was written on this earth is but an analysis of the emotions of imperfect human minds. A good ASTRONOMY is a guide book of GOD'S kingdom.

Many Cook County litterateurs select Carlyle for a desert island companion. Have they not observed that Carlyle's mind was fixed on contemplation of the universe?--"the eternal silences" were his friends. And when he seeks monkeyfied human soldiers, booted and spurred, he asks, "What thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his hunting dogs across the zenith in a leash of sidereal fire?"

O, Cook County thinkers, inhabitants of a small corner of this small ant-hill, drop your alcohol-loving tentmaker--Omar--forget your half-hearted fondness for Milton. Buy "Ball's Story of the Heavens," or even some simpler astronomy; spend four dollars and four weeks finding out how grand is our real home, the boundless, beautiful universe.

THE MARVELLOUS BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE--A LESSON IN THE TEXAS FLOOD

A tidal wave and hurricane combined have destroyed thousands of lives in one small corner of the globe.

After the first excitement and horror, the creditable outpouring of help, there should be thankfulness in the hearts of the many millions who live on safely.

Do you ever think of the wonderful protection, the marvellous precision in celestial mechanics that guard you as you travel through space? ----

The oceans, seas and lakes contain water enough to cover the entire surface of the earth to a depth of six hundred feet, if the earth's surface were actually round.

In huge reservoirs, which we call oceans, the earth's waters are stored for our use. Those vast volumes of water rest on the surface of a whirling sphere travelling through space at fearful speed. The slightest derangement, the slightest lack of balance in our motion round the sun, the slightest shifting of the poles, and mountains of water miles high would sweep over the continents and wipe out--not only one small city--but the entire human race. ----

Our existence here requires a precision so great that our minds can but feebly grasp it. Change the temperature of your body by but a few degrees and you die. But you travel through space safely, with a freezing ocean of ether about you. You travel in company with suns that throw out endless billions of degrees of heat. You are protected in a travelling hothouse, regulated exactly to suit your feeble strength and all your wants. ----

Did you ever see the small, black nose of a pug dog pressed against the window of a flying express train?

Have you ever seen that pug barking at the landscape whirling by?

Have you ever reflected on the utter inability of that pug to realize the marvellous intelligence and power that are whirling him along as he barks and wags his tail and enjoys himself calmly?

Kind reader, you and all of us, whirling along in this magnificently conducted express train called the earth--whirling onward to a destiny worthy of our habitation--are so many poor little pug dogs looking out at nature's marvels and looking out with less than pug-dog appreciation.

THE EARTH IS ONLY A FRONT YARD

The philosophers, political economists, lawmakers, editors, sociologists, and all the other would-be deep thinkers of this earth, are really engaged in a pretty small business.

We are like a swarm of human beings cast away on some desert island. This earth is our island, a little island in space, and it is a desert island and a badly arranged island in more ways than one. Many of us lack good dwellings, some of us lack food, all of us are worried about the future. The island is infested with mosquitoes and with diseases that we have not learned to conquer. There are many criminals on it that prey upon the honest people--criminals at the top and criminals at the bottom of society.

And all of those who think and sympathize with their fellow creatures are busy with the problem of putting things right on this little desert island that carries us along in the wake of the sun.

Most of us imagine that the most important work for men is the organization of life on this little planet. That is a very small and mean idea of man's real destiny.

When a man builds a house, the planning of sanitary arrangements must first be attended to. After that begin the real life and the real interests. That real life and those real interests are not confined to the front yard or the back yard of the man that owns the house. ----

So it will be some day with us who are now engaged in the detailed organization of the little home which we call the earth.

We are fixing up our moral plumbing--fighting poverty, injustice, and, above all, ignorance. We are fighting the meanness that comes of competition and the greater meanness that is based upon the dread of poverty in the future. Some of us are piling up millions that we can never use, while others suffer for lack of that which could be abundantly supplied.

All these little earthly questions that seem so big will be settled in time.

But a few years in the sight of Time--a few hundred centuries, perhaps, as we count them--and our earthly habitation will have been made fit to live in. We shall have eliminated the unfit--not by killing them off, but by educating them. We shall have solved the question of poverty by solving the question of production, and especially of distribution. We shall have developed a citizenship capable of earnest work, of sobriety and of moral decency, without the spur of want, imprisonment or the scaffold as necessary adjuncts.

In time the human race will have solved its little problems here--the problems that seem so vast to-day.

When that time comes we shall be like the man who has put his house in order, and our thoughts will not be confined to this little piece of ground. Then we shall appreciate the cosmic wisdom which has divided our day into darkness and light--the light for the enjoyment of the material beauties of our earthly home; THE NIGHT FOR THE STUDY AND ENJOYMENT OF THE VAST, MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE SPREAD OUT AROUND US.

Everybody knows that the aged require less sleep than the young. In the future, this will make old age what it ought to be, a blessing, because it will give to the old more hours of the night for contemplation of the Infinite and all its wonders.

Those of us who now think themselves very abstract when they speculate on the North Pole, or when they discuss the possibility of reclaiming the Desert of Sahara, will have their minds many millions of miles away from this earth a great deal of the time.

We shall communicate, perhaps, with our sister-planet, Venus--the planet most like ours in physical arrangement. We shall be intensely interested in that world, where it is always night on one side of the planet, and always day on the other.

We shall realize with deepest envy the fact that the constant, terrific currents of air whirling around Venus, in consequence of the extreme heat and the extreme cold on opposite sides of the planet, have developed a race as far superior to us as the trout in the swift-flowing brook is superior to the heavy-eyed catfish in the bottom of the pond. ----

We shall humbly beg for information from the superior inhabitants of other worlds, and perhaps wait with impatience for release from duty here which shall take us to a higher planetary existence. If we look backward at all, we shall consider our present selves simply as refined cannibals, who lived upon the labor and the suffering of our fellows instead of feeding upon their bodies. ----

It may seem ridiculous to predict that the time will come when the intelligent man's interests will be nearly all outside of the earth on which he lives.

But to the savage of the Congo, squatted beside a decaying hippopotamus, gorging himself with the meat, with not a thought beyond that carcass or beyond the edge of the river, it would seem preposterous to speak of men whose interests range out over the entire world.

We look upon a man as very small to-day unless all knowledge interests him, unless his mind roams daily all over the civilized globe, sharing in the interests of all nations, in the literature, the discoveries and the activities of all nations.

To-day we, with our minds on little, material problems, our thoughts centred on this one little planet, as we lead our selfish lives, are like that Congo savage hacking away at the dead hippopotamus.

When night comes, we shut our eyes like the chickens, waiting for the light that means money-making or pleasure of the senses; or we go to theatres or to balls, or elsewhere, to shut out as far as possible all knowledge of that marvellous, unlimited creation to which we belong, and which it is our greatest privilege feebly to study. ----

The geography class of the future will be a class in astronomy. The real problems of the future will be the problems outside of this earth, and the real interests of the future will be interests connected with the universe at large.

We shall make of this earth a beautiful garden, inhabited by safe, happy human beings. We shall take pride in it, and enjoy it by day. Our intellectual lives will begin with the going down of the sun and the gradual appearance of those mighty neighbors in space that alone will interest the thinking man of future days.

LAST WEEK'S BABY WILL SURELY TALK SOME DAY

It is believed by scientists that the planet Mars may be striving at this moment to communicate with us. Lines of light are seen on her surface--on the border of that part of Mars known as Lake Iscarie--and men of learning believe that the Martians are trying to signal our earth.

Possibly they are trying.

Of this you may be sure: Sooner or later we shall communicate with all the planets, and perhaps through the giant sun receive news of outside solar systems.

We have lived comparatively but a few hours on this earth. The civilization on Mars is millions of years older than our own.

Although we are still primitive savages, we have done wonders already.

We can talk instantaneously with a Chinese sitting cross-legged on the under (or upper) side of our earth. We can send a message around the earth in a few seconds.

Of course we shall talk to Mars as soon as we get out of our cradle down here.

Look into an ordinary cradle where a week-old baby lies nursing his wrath or trying to talk to his toe. There are around him eighty millions of other human beings--fourteen hundred millions if you count all on earth--and he, the baby, cannot say one word to any of them. He does not even know his own mother.

Like humanity on this earth, he is busy growing up. He has not had time to spread out and get an interest in his surroundings.

His liver must get small--at the end of his milk diet. His legs must get straight and strong. He must learn to creep and walk. After a period as extensive in his life as a thousand centuries in the life of the race, he begins to talk to those about him.

We do not believe that the time has yet come for us to talk to the Martians, or to the inhabitants of any other older planet.

They may possibly be signalling to us up there, as a man inexperienced will signal to a new-born baby or even try to make it understand what he says.

It is probable, however, that Mars, far advanced in science, as superior to us as we are to new-born infants, would use the light only to attract our interest and let us know that when the time comes we have an old brother planet anxious to chat with this baby earth.

It will be most interesting when the talking time does come. The men who have lived, studied, experimented millions of years ahead of us will be able to tell us many things that we need to know.

Like the baby in the cradle, we are compelled now to discover everything for ourselves. Our old brother Mars, as soon as we can understand, may help us to take giant steps forward, just as a younger brother, as soon as he can speak, is taught by his elder in one of our families. ----

It will be interesting, also, to observe how we shall probably reject the good advice given us, as the young person here rejects the words of experience.

Suppose we could talk to Mars, and suppose the wise old people up there should tell us that millions of years of experience had made clear the fact that making money is a foolish occupation. How many of us would cease striving for money? The very scientist giving us the message would patent his interstellar talking process and die happy with a huge fortune.

How cheerful also will it be a million or so years hence! We shall then be like a very young child among the planets. Two of the older worlds will be talking, and we shall be permitted to listen, but not to interrupt.

We shall hear questions put as to our origin and destiny.

We know now that the sun, flying through space, is dragging us toward some unknown spot in the universe. Our older brothers in space will have definite ideas as to where we are going and why we are going there.

It will be interesting to follow their speculations, and occasionally, if permitted, to offer our feeble little ideas, as the smart boy occasionally speaks up before his elders.

Our future as one of a family of planets freely communicating with each other cannot be doubted.

He must have a dull imagination who believes that the eternal Law regulating matters here has put such limits to our possible development as would shut us out from a share in the big solar family life to which we belong.

THE GOOD THAT IS DONE BY THE TRUSTS THE MAMMOTH MADE OUR FIRST PATHS THROUGH THE FOREST

Every big movement in this world in some way or other does solid good in the long run, however irritating it may be before it is understood.