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"A scratch on the finger," says Dr W. A. F. BROWNE, "precipitates the fever of drunkards; and if he survives the danger of typhus, he escapes with the loss of memory, and remains an imbecile for months."*

Dr GORDON, of the London Hospital, says he kept an account of the causes of disease for twelve months :-The result was, that nearly three-fourths were found to be strictly attributable to the effects of spirits, after every possible allowance had been made. The result was 65 per cent upon some thousands. The conclusion of experience is, that very nearly two-thirds of the diseases among our countrymen are referrible to the noxious influence of ardent spirits."+

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In the great Fever which raged in London, in 1739,—the æra of the gin-mania,—the Drinkers were the first and greatest victims. Dr SHORT observes :-"The like was the fate of all tipplers, dram-drinkers, and punch-merchants,-scarcely any other died of this severe fever."+

The Asiatic Cholera, too, singles out the drinker with fatal precision, where it leaves the sober generally unscathed. So well known was this fact, that the authorities at Philadelphia closed the grog-shops as a nuisance to the public health (§ 81). In Albany, the same year, it was found that while only 1 in 2500 of the teetotalers were seized, 1 in 60 of the general population perished. The Volksvriend for August, 1854, states that "out of 900 persons who died in Rotterdam last year from Cholera, only three were abstainers." It is the same at home. In Newcastle, within a period of two months of the ravages of Cholera, it struck down one drinker out of 56, of course a far greater proportion of drunkards; but only 1 in 625 of the teetotalers. It was found, throughout the country, that it always broke out afresh after a festival occasion, when the people consumed a little more drink than usual. With an accumulation of such facts before him, the Registrar-General was fully justified in issuing the following emphatic warning in one of his Reports.

"A person drinks to excess, in a few hours he is suffering from diarrhoea;

Drink,' by the Rev. DAWSON BURNS, which appears in the Temperance Chronicle for July, 1856, drawn up with great care and skill. He arrives at a conclusion which, we believe, is far under the truth; exhibiting the annual loss of life of the United Kingdom as follows:

By intemperance directly

..27,050

Total.

By its sequences, (as disease, accident, etc.) 20,25154,263

By limited drinking

The latter item falls very far short of the reality, as the statistics of Col. SYKES prove. Add to this National Loss of Life, the terrible acquisition of Crime, and in connexion with these two items alone, it is but the bare statement of naked fact to affirm, that the Traffic creates an army of Criminals more numerous and costly than our army of Soldiers, and inflicts upon our citizens annually a Mortality twofold greater than that which our army suffered in its two years' campaign in the Crimea, from the carnage of battle and the fatality of pestilence combined!

* On Intemperance and Insanity. Edinburgh, 1852.

+ Report on Drunkenness, 1834, p. 195.

Chronological History of the Seasons, vol. ii, p. 251. London, 1759.

and the disease runs through its stages to a fatal termination. When cholera is at the door, temperance in the use of intoxicating liquors, AND AN ALMOST TOTAL ABSTINENCE FROM GIN AND OTHER SPIRITS, BECOME EXTREMELY NECESSARY FOR THE PRESERVATION Of life."

It is the same with Fevers, typhus, yellow fever, and others. Dr CARTWRIGHT, of New Orleans, writes in 1853, to the Boston Medical Journal:

--

"The yellow fever came down like a storm upon this devoted city, with eleven hundred and twenty-seven dram shops in one of the four parts into which it has been divided. It is not the citizens proper, but the foreigners, with mistaken notions about the climate and country, who are the chief supporters of these haunts of intemperance. About five thousand of them died before the epidemic touched a single citizen or sober man, so far as I can get at the facts."

The Bristol Mercury, of the 17th September, 1853, says:—

"The ship Louisa, Captain Reece, from this port to Demerara, has returned with all the crew in good health, not having lost a single man, although the yellow fever is raging in that country to an unparalleled extent. The Captain, with great discretion and kindness, supplied his crew constantly with fresh meat and quinine each day, and issued no spirits. By these judicious means the whole escaped the fearful disease."*

The Report on Cholera, from the College of Physicians, speaking of the proved prophylactics and counteractives, has the following significant passage :

"Free Ventilation is, perhaps, the most efficient means of destroying the Cholera Poison." But free ventilation really signifies pure, oxygenated blood. Now, as PROUT long since, and LIEBIG more lately, have shown, (and their experiments have been confirmed by VIERORDT, DAVY, BÖCKER, and LEHMANN,) the action of Alcohol on the respiratory function is to stop the excretion of carbonic acid to an extent always corresponding to the amount imbibed. Hence, to use the most expressive phrase we can devise, Alcohol robs the blood of oxygen, lowers vital heat, and thus necessarily predisposes the system to zymotic disorders and plagues. In the case of the liberal drinker, the danger is frightfully aggravated. Professor ADAMS, then, was quite right in proposing to call every dramshop by the name of a 'Cholerashop'-the disease being, to all intents and purposes, dispensed with the dram. This brings us to an important principle of jurisprudence. The Report of the College of Physicians says:

"From among the great features of a cholera epidemic three stand forth as of paramount importance: one, the undoubted influence of locality and of the sanitary condition of towns and dwellings on the degree of severity with which the epidemic visits them; a second, the equally certain influence of season and temperature, together with some unknown condition of the atmosphere on the general prevalence and rate of extension of the epidemic; and a third, the share taken by human intercourse in deter

For numerous illustrations, see Works of Dr Lees. Vol. i. and iii. Carpenter's Human Physiology, 5th Edition, ? 63-65.

mining not only the progress of the epidemic, and the direction of its advance across a continent, but also its extension from continent to continent, and most probably its communication from one locality to another. "Now, with regard to the first of these features, there cannot be a doubt with regard to the action it calls for, as the duty and interest of every portion of the community. The more fortunate classes are, it is true, exposed to proportionately little danger, since they are often able to leave the neighborhood of spots in which the disease is raging, and usually dwell in the more elevated, open, and airy parts of towns, and in more spacious, cleanly, and less crowded houses.

"But it is also true that the power of the disease through a town is increased in proportion to the degree in which the conditions of insalubrity are present in various parts of it; and not merely the poor (who live in the spots where moisture and foul air feed the cause of the disease), BUT ALL

THE INHABITANTS ARE EXPOSED BY THE EXISTENCE OF THESE EVILS TO

A GREATER RISK OF BECOMING ITS VICTIMS. And further, it is certain that the more intensely the epidemic prevails in a large town, the more does the whole district for miles around suffer, and the more danger is there of its being propagated to other districts.

"By improving the drainage of low parts of the town, opening close courts, thinning the buildings in the more crowded parts, putting a stop to the burial of the dead in large cities; by improving the dwellings of the poor in respect of ventilation, giving them the means of maintaining a due warmth in their rooms without excluding the external air, and affording them the most important requisite, an abundant and constant supply of good water, by means of which they may attain cleanliness;-it cannot be doubted that the public authorities would not only lessen the ravages of the disease amongst the people dwelling in the localities thus improved, but also greatly weaken the force of the epidemic over a far wider space. All these things should be done before the pestilence comes, and in the time of its presence it would further be wise to enforce cleanliness and ventilation even in the interior of houses, by the removal of all obvious dirt, and the thorough cleansing of every surface of wall, floor, or ceiling, with the unsparing application of lime and of disinfecting liquids, the washing of furniture, and the exposure of it to the open air, the destruction of foul clothes, even of those worn by inmates of the house who are yet healthy, as well as those which belonged to the sick,-all these measures might reasonably be enforced during the winter, since at that season so great a result as the entire eradication of the pestilence might possibly be attained.”

In the Traffic there is an agency that promotes all the causes of disease which infect a neighborhood, and others not stated by the College Report. The body is a living house, and the Traffickers are engaged in the work of Poisoning it. It matters not to us who are injured or emperilled, whether they do it at the request of the Drunkard, or whether they even believe it to be such a process as we have described. Sanitary Reform ought not to wait upon the conviction of those who are ignorant, filthy, and vicious; for will their believing in the innoxiousness of putrefying matter or invisible miasms, save me or my child from the pestilential effects?

A true State is bound to legislate according to its own light, and not according to the ignorance of its selfish or stupid members. The Traffic, then, tried by this Sanitary Test, must be condemned. It keeps within the living temple waste matter, and thus defiles it-it drains away the conservative forces that

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resist the inroads of disease-it obstructs the natural ventilation of the vital chambers, and loads the blood with poisonous elements,-it lowers the flame and temperature of life-it expends the comforts of the people, and demoralizes them in circumstance and in soul,-and wherever it is established, it becomes a "fever-nest," injurious to the health of the vicinity. The traffic, therefore, ought to be proscribed as a Nuisance: either suppressed by the moral energies of the state, or, after the fashion of quarantine in infected districts, those who will drink and sell should be exiled to a district by themselves, and a cordon sanitaire drawn around them, to separate, as it were, the living from the dead.

*

§ 115. The next topic naturally follows from the preceding. IDIOCY, in fact, is the sin of the Parent visited upon the Children. That poison which, taken in excess, contracts life within the body of the mother, and transmits impaired and feeble constitutions to the unhappy offspring who are born, must, by natural law, affect the brain. Hence the frightful number of 'Naturals', as they are called by the country people, to mock the Civilization we profess, and to hamper our progress towards a true one. A Viennese Physician, Dr BERNACKI, now of New York, told the writer, as an illustration in point, that he had in youth a friend, a Doctor to one of the Austrian Regiments, who possessed the finest intellectual endowments and moral character at the time of his marriage. His first son was a noble, healthy fellow. But the appetite for drink had been engendered, and he went from bad to worse. He had five other children: but of these, one was imbecile, and all the rest absolutely idiotic ! Dr Howe, in his celebrated Reports on Idiocy, states that, out of 300 idiots whose history he could learn, 145 had free, habitual drinkers for parents. He names the case of one drinker who had seven idiotic children. The harvest of Idiocy and insanity that we are now reaping was in part sown in the debauchery of the last century; and we shall require a generation of Temperance to get rid of the crop. EDWARD OXFORD, who shot at the Queen, was the grandson of a man who made himself insane with drink, and who transmitted the warp to two of his children. One son was insane for awhile: the other, the father of Edward, always, though not confined. He, too, was alternately drunk and industrious, and often violently assaulted his wife. During her second pregnancy, he starved and maltreated her, and grinned and jabbered in her presence like an ape. The child was an idiot, with contorted, apish features. In her fourth pregnancy, his conduct was atrocious. Once he fractured her head with a quart-mug. The would-be regicide was born-imbicile, wayward, partly capable of education, but destructive and un

Out of 1097 cases of crime, 11 are ascribed to weak mind';-only 10 to Idleness and Want together. See Reports of Prisons, 1841, N. and E. district, p. 68.

trustable. In the sister country of Ireland, where spirits are so freely used, we find that there are no less than 4,906 of these unfortunate victims of sin (chiefly the fruits of the Traffic) in the Pauper Asylums and Workhouses.

Dr W. S. HALLARAN, in his Observations on Insanity, published at Cork in 1818, pointed out the growing addiction of the people to whisky, as one of the permanent and increasing causes of insanity-and observes that "he is not singular in remarking, that a vast proportion of our most useful artizans and industrious poor have been untimely sufferers from this extensive growth of human depravity." The Superintendents of several of the Pauper Lunatic Asylums, in reply to queries, have distinctly stated that from one-third to one-half of their patients had been made by whisky-drinking.* At the Cork Lunatic Asylum, says Dr HALLARAN, out of 383 male patients, 103 had been deranged through the use of whisky.+

§ 116. There is, however, another kind of idiocy-Dementiawhich we may call the self-inflicted. If the first was a fruit of guilt, this is of its very essence. Deliberately to annihilate the powers of mind and body is at once the highest crime against society, and the deepest sin against self. It is more than converting oneself into a lazar or a brute: for, in the process of mental extinction, the drinker passes through so many stages of excitement and fury as to endanger the life and disturb the happiness of others. But how can Society consistently rebuke him? how can it prohibit the process and the termination, while itself licenses the agent and machinery that impels to them? end is 'drivelling imbecility' to the sinner and the victim, ere the curtain falls cost and confusion to the community which aids and abets him.

The

§ 117. Dr W. A. F. BROWNE, of the Crichton Institution, Dumfries, in some admirable papers, has ably investigated this question. He observes, as the result of his enquiry : "The conclusion that 19.57, or nearly one-fifth of the cases of derangement which break up the peace of families, and over-people asylums and workhouses, is owing to intemperance and dissoluteness, appears so frightful, and so fraught with suggestion of the rottenness of the frame-work of society, that we are fain to regard the picture as descriptive of another age. But no

Dublin, 1830.

even

* Inquiry into the influence of Spirituous Liquors, p. 60. + It may be noted, that while on the Continent, as at Paris, Milan, etc., the insane Females outnumbered the Males; in Ireland the reverse holds good. This proves, either that a peculiar cause of insanity operates in the male population of Ireland-where the women certainly do not drink whisky like the men, and are not so exposed to the temptations of the Public-house,-or that the women of the Continent indulge more universally in home-drinking of wine, or eau de vie. This may be illustrated by the case of Scotland, where, notwithstanding a greater amount of education, there is one female to 1343 females committed for crime, to one in 1565 in England. The explanation is the fatal temptations furnished to female dram-drinking by the sale of whisky in grocers' and confectioners' shops.

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