Chapter 12

There is growing throughout the land to-day a conviction--which has its core of truth--that many people eat too much meat; and not a few see a remedy in vegetarianism and Fletcherism. If this prejudice swells in a similar way, the time may come when one State after the other will declare slaughtering illegal, confiscate the meat-packing houses, and prohibit the poisonous consumption of beef and the killing of any creature that can look on us with eyes. Other groups are fighting coffee and tea, and we may finally land in nuts and salads. Yes, according to this line of legislative wisdom, there is no reason for prohibiting only alcohol. Do I go far beyond the facts in asserting that in certain States the same women and men who are publicly against every use of alcohol are also opposed to the "drugs" of the physicians and speak of them privately as poisons? Not the Christian Scientists only--in intellectual Boston thousands of educated women speak of drugs and nervine as belonging to a medieval civilization which they have outgrown. The same national logic may thus lead us to laws which will prohibit every physician from using the resources of the drug-store--if they have not all simply to go over to osteopathy.

_A Spring Flood of Emotional Legislation_

The question of the liquor trade and temperance--which is so widely different from a hasty prohibition--has engaged the minds of all times and of all nations, and is studied everywhere to-day with the means of modern science. But this spring flood of prohibition legislation which has overrun the States shows few signs of deeper connection with serious study and fewer signs of profit from the experiments of the past. When the Chinese government made laws against intemperance about eleven hundred years before Christ, it can hardly have gone more hastily to work than the members of this movement of the twentieth century after Christ. It is unworthy of women and men who want to stand for sobriety to allow themselves to become intoxicated with hysterical outcries, when a gigantic national question is to be solved, a question which can never be solved until it is solved rightly. A wrong decision must necessarily lead to a social reaction which can easily wipe out every previous gain.

Progress is to be hoped for only from the most careful analysis of all the factors of this problem; yet, instead, the nation leaves it to the unthinking, emotional part of the population. In the years of the silver agitation it was a matter of admiration to any foreigner, the wonderful seriousness with which large crowds listened in a hundred towns, evening after evening, to long hours of difficult technical discussion on currency; sixteen to one was really discussed by the whole nation, and arguments were arrayed against arguments before a decision was reached. Is it necessary that the opposite method be taken as soon as this problem is touched--a question far more complex and difficult than the silver question, and of far more import to the moral habits and the development of the nation? When leading scholars bring real arguments on both sides of the problem, their work is buried in archives, and no one is moved to action. But when a Chicago minister hangs the American flag over his pulpit, fastens a large patch of black color on it, declares that the patch stands for the liquor evil which smirches the country, denounces wildly the men who spend for whiskey the money which ought to buy medicine for sick children, and then madly tears the black cloth from the stars and stripes and grinds it under his heel--then thousands rush out as excited as if they had heard a convincing argument. And this superficiality is the more repellent because every glimpse below the surface shows an abundance of cant and hypocrisy and search for cheap fame and sensationalism and still more selfish motives mingled with the whole movement; even the agitation itself, with its threats of ruin, borders too often on graft and blackmail and thus helps to debauch the public life.

_Alcohol and the Brain_

Those who seriously study, not merely the one or the other symptom, but the whole situation, can hardly doubt that the demand of true civilization is for temperance and not for abstinence, and that complete prohibition must in the long run work against real temperance. But nothing is more characteristic of the hysterical caprice of the masses than the constant neglect of this distinction. Even the smallest dose of alcohol is for them nothing but evil, and triumphantly they seize on isolated statements of physiologists who acknowledge that every dose of alcohol has a certain influence on the brain. This is at once given the turn that every glass of beer or wine "muddles" the brain and is therefore a sin against the freedom of man.

Certainly every glass of beer has an influence on the cells of the brain and on the mind; so has every cup of tea or coffee, every bit of work and every amusement, every printed page and every spoken word. Is it certain that the influence is harmful because an overdose of the same stimulants is surely poisonous? Boiling water is most dangerous for the body on account of its strong heat: is a bath in lukewarm water therefore also harmful? To climb Mount Blanc would overtax my heart: is it therefore inadvisable for me to climb the two flights to my laboratory? Of course, under certain conditions it might be wise to take account of the slightest influences. Without being harmful, they might be unsuited to a certain mental purpose. If I were to take a glass of beer now in the morning, I should certainly be unable to write the next page of this essay with the same ease; the ideas would flow more slowly. But does that indicate that I did wrong in taking last night, after a hard day's fatiguing work, a glass of sherry and a glass of champagne at a merry dinner-party, after which nothing but light conversation and music were planned for the rest of the evening? Of course, alcohol before serious intellectual work disturbs me; but hearing a hurdy-gurdy in the street or thinking of the happy news which a letter has just brought to me, or feeling angry over any incident, disturbs me just as much. It is all the same kind of interference; the brain centers which I used for my intellectual effort are for a while inhibited and thus unfit for the work which I have in hand. When the slight anger has evaporated, when the pleasurable excitement has subsided, when the music is over, I can gather my thoughts again, and it is arbitrary to claim that the short blockade of ideas was dangerous, and that I ought to have avoided the music or the pleasure or the wine.

Of course, if we consider, for instance, the prevention of crime, we ought not to forget that some even of these slight inhibitions may facilitate a rash, vehement deed and check cool deliberation. In times of social excitement, therefore, alcohol ought to be reduced. But again this same effect, as far as the temperate use of alcohol is in question, may result from many other sources of social unrest. The real danger begins everywhere with intemperance: that is, with a lack of that self-discipline which is not learned but lost under the outer force of prohibition.

_The Case Psychologically_

Psychologically the case stands thus: alcohol has indeed an inhibitory influence on mind and body. The feeling of excitement, the greater ease of motor impulse, the feeling of strength and joy, the forgetting of sorrow and pain--all are at bottom the result of inhibition; impulses are let free because the checking centers are inhibited. But it is absurd to claim from the start that all this is bad and harmful, as if the word inhibition meant destruction and lasting damage. Harmful it is, bodily and socially, when these changes become exaggerated, when they are projected into such dimensions that vital interests, the care for family and honor and duty are paralyzed; but in the inhibition itself lies no danger. There is not the slightest act of attention which does not involve such inhibition. If I read in my study, the mere attention to my book will inhibit the ticking of the clock in my room and the noise from the street, and no one will call it harmful. As soon as my attention increases, and I read with such passion that I forget my engagements with friends and my duties in my office, I become ridiculous and contemptible. But the fact that the unbalanced attention makes me by its exaggerated inhibition quite unfit for my duties, is no proof that the slight inhibition produced by attentive reading ought to be avoided.

The inhibition by alcohol, too, may have in the right place its very desirable purpose, and no one ought to be terrified by such physiological statements, even if inhibition is called a partial paralysis. Yes, it is partial paralysis, but no education, no art, no politics, no religion, is possible without such partial paralysis. What else are hope and belief and enjoyment and enthusiasm but a re-enforcement of certain mental states, with corresponding inhibition--that is, paralysis--of the opposite ideas? If a moderate use of alcohol can help in this most useful blockade, it is an ally and not an enemy. If wine can overcome and suppress the consciousness of the little miseries and of the drudgery of life, and thus set free and re-enforce the unchecked enthusiasm for the dominant ideas, if wine can make one forget the frictions and pains and give again the feeling of unity and frictionless power--by all means let us use this helper to civilization. It was a well-known philosopher who coupled Christianity and alcohol as the two great means of mankind to set us free from pain. But nature provided mankind with other means of inhibition; sleep is still more radical, and every fatigue works in the same direction; to inhibit means to help and to prepare for action.

And are those who fancy that every brain alteration is an evil really aware how other influences of our civilization hammer on the neurones and injure our mental powers far beyond the effects of a moderate use of alcohol? The vulgar rag-time music, the gambling of the speculators, the sensationalism of the yellow press, the poker playing of the men and the bridge playing of the women, the mysticism and superstition of the new fancy churches, the hysterics of the baseball games, the fascination of murder cases, the noise on the Fourth of July and on the three hundred and sixty-four other days of the year, the wild chase for success; all are poison for the brain and mind. They make the nervous system and the will endlessly more unfit for the duties of the day than a glass of lager beer on a hot summer's evening.

_Drying up a Nation Emotionally_

What would result if prohibition should really prohibit, and all the inhibitions which a mild use of beer and wine promise to the brain really be lost? The psychological outcome would be twofold: certain effects of alcohol which serve civilization would be lost; and, on the other hand, much more harmful substitutions would set in. To begin with: the nation would lose its chief means of recreation after work. We know to-day too well that physical exercise and sport is not real rest for the exhausted brain-cells. The American masses work hard throughout the day. The sharp physical and mental labor, the constant hurry and drudgery produce a state of tension and irritation which demands before the night's sleep some dulling inhibition if a dangerous unrest is not to set in. Alcohol relieves that daily tension most directly.

Not less important would be the loss on the emotional side. Emotional desire for a life in beauty would yield to the triviality of usefulness. Puritanism has held back the real American spirit of artistic creation in fine arts and music and drama: prohibition without substitutes would crush still more the esthetic spirit in the brain of man and would make beauty still more the domain of women. Her more responsive physiological constitution does not need the artificial paralysis of the inhibiting centers. The mind of the average woman shows that lower degree of checking power which small alcoholic doses produce in the average man. But just therefore she and men of the female type cannot carry on alone the work of the nation. A national life without the artificial inhibitions of the restraining centers becomes for the large masses a matter of mere practical calculation and righteous dulness. Truly the German, the Frenchman, the Italian who enjoys his glass of light wine and then wanders joyful and elated to the masterpieces of the opera, serves humanity better than the New Englander who drinks his ice-water and sits satisfied at the vaudeville show, world-far from real art. Better America inspired than America sober. Can we forget that in almost all parts of the globe even religious life began with intoxication cults? God Indra was in the wine for the Hindus and Dionysius for the Greeks. It is the optimistic exuberance of life, the emotional inspiration, which alcohol brought into the dulness of human days, and the history of culture shows it on every page.

But with the emotion dries up the will. Mere righteousness needs no stimulation. But the American nation would never have achieved its world work if the attitude of resignation had been its national trait. Those pioneers who opened the land and awoke to life its resources were men who longed for excitement, for the intensity of life, for vividness of experience. The nation would not be loyal to its tradition if it were not to foster this desire of intense experience: the moderate use of alcohol is both training in such intensified conscious experience and training in the control and discipline of such states. The nation needs both, and as the child learns to prepare for the work of life by plays and games, so man is schooling himself for the active and effective life by the temperate use of exciting beverages which playingly awake those vivid feelings of success. The scholar and the minister and a thousand other individuals may not need this training, but the millions, the masses, cannot prepare themselves for a national career of effectiveness if this opportunity is taken from their lives. History shows it abundantly.

To be sure, all this is but half true, because, as we said, the individual, and finally the nation, may seek substitutes, may satisfy the craving for emotional excitement, for will elation, for intense experience, by other means than the oldest and most widely scattered. Zealotism in religious belief, tyranny and cruelty, sexual over-indulgence and perversion, gambling and betting, mysticism and superstition, recklessness and adventurousness, and, above all, senseless crimes have always been the psychological means of overcoming the emptiness and monotony of an unstimulated life. They produce, just like alcohol, that partial paralysis and create intense experiences. They thus take hold of the masses, so long as the social mind is not entirely dried up, with the necessity of a psychological law. There is no more dangerous state for a healthy, strong nation than mental monotony in the life of the masses. Catholic countries play to the imagination at least through the religion, monarchic countries have their own picturesqueness and color, America under prohibition pushes the masses into gambling and reckless excitements and sexual disorder and money-crazes and criminal explosions of the mind.

_The Temperance Experiment in Mohammedanism_

Has not history experimented sufficiently? Prohibitionist stump speakers may tell us that their cause means the hitherto unheard-of progress of civilization; the United States, after abolishing slavery for mankind, is called on to end also the tyranny of alcohol under which humanity has suffered for ages. But are there not two hundred millions of Moslems who are obedient to Mohammed's law, that wine drinking is sinful? What is the outcome? Of course, it is not inspiring to hear the boast of the Moslems that the Christians bring whiskey to Africa and bestialize the natives, while the Mohammedans fight alcohol. But aside from this, their life goes on in slavery and polygamy and semi-civilization. All the strong nations, all those whose contributions were of lasting value to the progress of mankind, have profited from the help of artificial stimulation and intoxicants.

But every strong nation remained also conscious of the dangers and evils which result from intemperance. On the whole, history shows that intemperance and abstinence alike work against the highest interests of civilization; temperance alone offers the most favorable psychological conditions for the highest cultural achievement. Intemperance mostly precedes the strongest periods in the life of a nation and follows them again as soon as decay has set in. Temperance, that is, sufficient use of intoxicants to secure emotional inspiration and volitional intensity, together with sufficient training in self-discipline to avoid their evils, always introduced the fullest blossoming of national greatness. Instinctively the American nation as a whole is evidently striving for such temperance, but a hysterical minority has at present succeeded in exaggerating the movement and in transforming it into its caricature, prohibition. The final result, of course, will be temperance, since the American nation will not ultimately allow itself to become an emasculated nation of dyspeptic ice-water drinkers without inspiration and energy, or permit vulgar amusements, reckless stock-gambling, sensationalism, adultery, burglary, and murder to furnish the excitement which the nerves of a healthy nation need.

_The Securing of Temperance_

How temperance can be secured, the experiences of the older nations with a similar psychological type of national mind ought to be decisive. First of all, the beverages of strongly alcoholic nature ought to be fought by those of light alcoholic effect. The whiskey of the laborers must be fought by light healthy beer and perhaps by light American wines. Further, a systematic education in self-control must set in; the drunkard must not be tolerated under any circumstances. Above all, the social habits in the sphere of drinking must be entirely reshaped. They belong to a period where the Puritan spirit considered beer and wine as sinful and relegated them to regions hidden from decent eyes. The American saloon is the most disgusting product of such narrowness; its dangers for politics and law, health and economics, are alarming. The saloon must disappear and can be made to disappear perhaps by higher license taxation and many other means. And with it must disappear the bar and the habit of drinking standing and of mutual treating. The restaurant alone, with the hotel and the club, is the fit public place where guests sitting at tables may have beer and wine with their meals or after meals,--and all controlled by laws which absolutely forbid the sale of intoxicants to certain groups of persons, to children, to inebriates, and so on. As long as drinking means to the imagination of a considerable well-meaning minority of the nation the present-day repulsive life of saloons and bars, the minority will find it easy to terrorize and to whip into line the whole country. But if those relics of a narrow time disappear and customs grow which spread the spirit of geniality and friendly social intercourse over the foaming cup, the spell will be broken. Instead of being tyrannized over by short-sighted fanatics on the one side and corrupt saloon-keepers on the other, the nation will proceed with the unanimous sympathy of the best citizens to firm temperance laws which the sound instinct of the masses will really respect. Training in self-control as against recklessness, training in harmless hilarity and social enjoyment as against mere vulgar excitement and rag-time pleasures, training in respect for law as against living under hysterical rules which cannot be executed and which invite blackmail, corruption, and habitual disregard of laws--these are indeed the most needed influences on the social mind of the country.

THE MOVING FINGER WRITES

BY MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES

I

"... _and having writ, Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit Can lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a word of it._"

"About that letter of your uncle's? I take it you have no one to suggest?"

Thomas Carden glanced anxiously at the son in whom he had so great a confidence, and who was the secret pride of his eyes, the only love of his austere, hard-working life.

The two were a great contrast to one another. The older man was short and slight, with the delicate, refined, spiritual face so often seen in the provincial man of business belonging to that disappearing generation of Englishmen who found time to cultivate the things of the mind as well as the material interests of life; a contrast, indeed, to the tall, singularly handsome, alert-looking man whom he had just addressed, and whose perfect physical condition made him appear somewhat younger than his thirty-two years.

And yet, in spite or perhaps because of this contrast between them, the two were bound in the closest, if not exactly in the most confidential, ties of affection. And, as a matter of course, they were partners in the great metal-broking business of Josh. Carden, Thomas Carden and Son, which had been built up by three generations of astute, self-respecting citizens of Birmingham.

It was Easter Monday, and the two men were lingering over breakfast, in a way they seldom allowed themselves time to do on ordinary week-days, in the finely proportioned, book-lined dining-room of one of those spacious old houses which remain to prove that the suburb of Edgbaston was still country a hundred years ago.

Theodore Carden looked across the table meditatively. He had almost forgotten his uncle's letter, for, since that letter had been read and cursorily discussed, he and his father had been talking of a matter infinitely more important to them both. The matter in question was the son's recent engagement and coming marriage, a marriage which was a source of true satisfaction to the older man. His father's unselfish joy in the good thing which had befallen him touched Theodore Carden keenly, for the niche occupied in most men's minds by their intimate feminine circle was filled in that of the young man by the diminutive figure of the senior partner of Carden and Son.

As is perhaps more often the case than those who despise human nature believe, men sometimes have the grace to reverence and admire those qualities in which they know themselves to be deficient. Such a man was the younger Carden. To-day the depths had been stirred, and he let his mind dwell with a certain sense of shame and self-rebuke on his own and his father's ideals of human conduct. Even as a schoolboy, Theodore had come to realize how much more he knew of the ugly side of life than did his father. But then, old Mr. Carden was quite exceptional; he knew nothing--or so, at least, his son believed, and loved him for it--of the temptations, conflicts, victories, and falls of the average sensual man. Theodore's father had been engaged, at twenty, to a girl of his own age whom he had not been able to marry till twelve years later; she had left him a widower with this one child after five years of married life; and Thomas Carden, as he had himself once told his son in a moment of unwonted confidence, had been absolutely faithful to her before the marriage and since her death.