The Distracted Preacher (17 page)

The contracted question then comes to be whether John Jones is diseased or vicious while he is still sober, and when he is about to drink the “brewed enchantment,” knowing all the effects which it will have upon him?

Now, there are several causes and qualities of this condition which are common to the notion of disease and to that of vice:

a.
The tendency to disease is sometimes hereditary and so is that to vice.

b.
The causes of acquired disease are sometimes small, gradual, and accumulative, and so are those of vice.

c.
By continuance and repetition diseased conditions become inveterate, and so do vicious ones, indeed by far the more so; and it would be a happy thing for mankind if the clergy could reform men with the same success which doctors attain in curing them.

d.
Disease is cured by removing the cause,
sublatâ cansâ tollitur effectus,
and vice is abrogated by the same means; and in both, when the cause returns, the effect is reproduced.

These seem to be the common qualities of the two conditions.

Some of the qualities by which they are differentiated would seem to be:

a.
Disease consists solely and entirely in some change in the organization, which is often known to, and is always thinkable by, the physician. This is a matter of certainty. But it is not known that vice consists in, or is even accompanied by, any such change. Certain vices may produce such a change, as an effect, but such changes are not known to exist as constituent conditions of vice; and if they do exist, they are too obscure for our present means of observation, or even for our power of thinking of them by analogy or imagination.

If it be admitted that both vice and disease are dependent upon states of the organism, a consideration of one fact will suffice to prove that these states are very different: In the early stages of disease, and especially of nervous and mental disease, there may be no changes after death appreciable by our senses or means of examination; but in later periods of such disease such changes are mostly to be found. But in uncomplicated vice, whatever its duration and whenever death may occur, no such causal changes can be observed.

If there be really no difference between vice and disease, all punishment, nay, even any reprobation, is unjust. Physicians should replace the magistrate and the priest, and courts, prisons, and churches be converted into hospitals.

b.
The causes of disease are physical, and the last link in the chain of causation—that is to say, the causal condition—is invariably so. Emotion may be the exciting cause, but there is always a physical link intervening, generally in the form of disordered innervation. The cause of vice, on the other hand, is always moral, even where the conditions of the vice are grossly material and sensual.

c.
The remedies for disease are mostly physical, and are invariably of a physiological nature. Even “medicine for the mind diseased,” in what is called the moral treatment of insanity, is really directed to the material condition of the organ. The remedies for vice are of a different nature, and are mainly directed to elicit opposing desire, to make indulgence more immediately painful, and to influence the judgment.

d.
The successful result of remedies, which in one case we call cure and in the other reform, is very different. The cure of disease establishes a healthy condition of the body; the reform of vice establishes a virtuous condition of mind, and, even should the latter be looked upon as a condition of the emotional functions of the brain, the notion of it is different from that of merely physical health.

e.
With some exceptions, persons suffering from mental disease are not conscious of their misfortune. “Le premier degre” dans l'homme apres la raison,” says La Bruyere, “ce serait de sentir qu'il l'a perdue; la folie meme est incompatible avec cette connaissance.” The vicious man is generally conscious of his vice, which, unless thoroughly brutalized, he regards with shame and remorse. Disease may occasion regret, but not remorse.

f.
Few men are diseased, but all are vicious. The one state is an accident to man's nature, the other is an element of it. And, with regard to the vice of drunkenness, there never yet was found a tribe of savages so unsophisticated that they needed more than the opportunity and the first lesson to plunge headlong into the abyss. The first debauch may be the fault of ignorance, as perhaps that of Noah was when “he drank of the wine and was drunken;” but the savages of all climes are habitual drunkards
in posse.
And the wild theory that habitual drunkenness is a disease supposes that the existence of a keg of fire-water will convert a camp of Indians into madmen while even they have not yet tasted it, for while they are sober they will barter their possessions, their liberty, almost life itself, for its enjoyment.

If we examine the condition of a man who has what is called an irresistible and uncontrollable desire to imbibe strong drink by these tests, we cannot fail to see that it is not that of disease, but that of vice.

The passion for drink, however habitual and forcible it may be, is not associated with any physical change in the organism. The indulgence of it produces changes which generally lead the drinker through a life of misery to an early grave, but even this effect is not constant, and before it has taken place the organism of the drunkard may be, and sometimes is, a thoroughly healthy one. If alcohol be a poison, it is not a very rapid one; and the statement which Dr. Forbes Winslow made before the Parliamentary Committee, that “very often with chronic drunkards, on examination after death, if you apply a light to the fluid in the ventricles of the brain it ignites into a flame,” seems to need verification. If found to be correct, it points to one use to which a drunkard might be applied: he might be distilled.

But a drunkard is such before he is drunken and in his sober intervals, and we are considering the condition of his brain when it is not “saturated with alcohol;” and this, I say, may be perfectly healthy. Excessive indulgence in other sensual vices—lust, for instance—will sometimes cause organic changes, such as softening of the spinal cord, but while the vice is only part of the character there are no such changes; they are the physical results of physical indulgence. The same is even true of the more purely mental vices, as anger, the physical results of which sometimes lead to morbid changes of the heart.

Then the
cause
of the desire to drink, the
motive
influence, is not physical, but moral. A man drinks because he likes it; he likes the taste of the liquor, and still more the exhilaration which follows, and even the
narcosis
which succeeds. There can be no doubt that drinking, and even drunkenness, is pleasureable to the vast majority of mankind; and if drinking brandy were as harmless as eating ripe fruit, it would be difficult to make it a vice. But the effects on mind and body are such that the present pleasure is grievously outweighed by the subsequent pain. The pain of exhaustion is the first which comes, and drives the man back to the stimulant, weaving the web of habit. The drunkard, like all other vicious men, prefers the present pleasure to the absence of pain in the future, that is, to future pleasure. He is a bad moral calculator, ever running counter to the wise maxim of Seneca, “Sic praesentibus utaris voluptatibus, ut futuris non noceas.”

The remedies for
drink craving,
as it has been called, are all moral. Even the inebriate asylum is a moral remedy directed to change the character, not to cure the disease; for if cure only were aimed at, the drunkard would be dismissed in a few days, as soon as he could digest his food and sleep o' nights like sober folk; but the cry is that he must be detained for not less than two years, in order that his character may be changed by absence of temptation. This surely is directed to the moral side of his nature.

All punishment of course is moral; whether it is of that sure and constant form which the drunkard draws upon himself — “Oh, sir, to wilful men, The injuries which they themselves procure, Must be their schoolmasters”—or the precarious punishment inflicted by the State or by society, its influence is purely moral. But whether by removal of temptation, or by self-inflicted suffering, or by punishment, the result aimed at is always a change in the drunkard's character, not in his health; and this change we call a reform not a cure. That this change is really so rare is an indication of its nature, the eradication of an inveterate habit of mind. The American physicians who gave evidence before Mr. Dalrymple's Committee asserted that they
cured
34 percent of the drunkards who were admitted into their asylums, and it might be so far true, that this proportion of their patients were sober and healthy when they left their asylums. But the Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland, who possess large opportunities for observation, have come to a very different conclusion as to the frequency of the real reform of a drunkard. These public men of large views and wide experience, who have watched the considerable number of habitual drunkards who place themselves voluntarily in the Scotch asylums, and who also officially visit the Scotch inebriate asylums to see that no really insane persons are detained therein, in their Reports for 1872, 1873, and 1874, stated their opinion that “It is possible that prolonged compulsory abstinence from alcoholic liquors may restore to habitual drunkards the power of self-control, and enable them to resist the craving to which when at liberty they succumb. Our experience, however, does not give us much reason to expect this result.”

And to this passage in the first of these reports, the following very remarkable addition is made: “
Indeed it would not be easy to point out one single case of permanent and satisfactory reform.”

The same opinion was expressed to the Parliamentary Committee by Dr. Mitchell, one of these Commissioners, whose wise and cautious evidence ought to have had greater weight with his hearers than their Report indicates. This Committee appears to have examined witnesses with the main purpose of getting evidence in favour of a foregone conclusion, namely, the need of enacting a law for the commitment and incarceration of habitual drunkards in special institutions called inebriate asylums, and indeed the Chairman himself asked one of the witnesses (Q. 462) whether he had “considered the proposition which was lying at the back of this Committee,” namely, such an enactment.

Dr. Mitchell, however, plainly told the Committee that “ this proposed legislation does not deal with the causes of drunkenness; it deals with the other end of the evil;” and when asked (Q. 1211) by the Chairman whether he thought “that legislation of this kind would tend to diminish drunkenness throughout the country,” Dr. Mitchell replied: “I do not think it would; such legislation as is here contemplated would not tend to diminish drunkenness, except perhaps by its indirect effect in making the young feel that it was disgraceful ever to be drunk, and a dangerous thing to be often drunk, as that might lead to compulsory work and loss of liberty. In such legislation as is contemplated at present, we are simply mitigating a mischief, the growth of which we have made no well-directed effort to check. I should like to see it a compulsory part of all education for which the State pays, that the young should be taught that it is their duty to understand the laws by which God governs the world, and to pay a reverential respect to them.”

This is true wisdom, and would be right statescraft were it acted upon. Create a new sentiment among the people with regard to this most mischievous and degrading vice, and such a change of conduct will take place in the substratum of society as within a few years we have seen in its surface layer. If from public funds we were to create inebriate asylums for the drunken masses, “we should ruin the sober and well-doing, the class is so large.” We should, moreover, teach the pernicious doctrine that drunkenness is an uncontrollable morbid impulse, to be cured by treatment in a kind of hospital, and therefore that it is not a degrading vice to be resisted in its first beginnings, or to be overcome by resolute effort in its progress.

With regard to upper-class drunkards, for whose benefit public time and money was mainly spent by the Parliamentary Committee, it needs some patience to consider calmly all the maudlin sentiment which is written about them. Of late years the upper class of English has become sober, and its growing opinion stamps drunkenness more and more as a disgrace; and that some small proportion of its members are left behind in the shameful indulgence of the old vice is certainly not a matter of national concern. But they will ruin themselves! No doubt, and why should they not? Their possessions will be better placed in sober hands, and their undeserved social position will be yielded to the advance of more worthy candidates. But they will kill themselves! And this also is more likely than lamentable, especially if they leave no offspring to inherit the curse of their qualities. It would be a national, nay a world-wide blessing if alcohol were really the active poison which it is so often represented to be, that men who indulge in it might die off quickly. The French have somewhat improved upon pure spirit in this direction by the invention of absinthe, which causes epilepsy, and the Americans, with their vile compounds of raw whisky taken into empty stomachs, are far ahead of ourselves. An American drunkard who sticks to his work has a much better prospect of finishing it within a reasonably short time than the Englishman, whose usual habit it is to drink less poisonous liquor with or after food.

And if habitual drunkenness is so inveterate a vice that the Scotch Commissioners, in all their vast experience, have never met with a satisfactory instance of reform, is it not better, on all hands, that it should run a short than a long course? The thorough-going drunkard soon puts an end to his worthless existence, and there the evil stops; but he who prolongs the agony remains for an indefinite number of years a disgrace to his people and a danger to society, and, worse than all, sows the foul seed of hereditary mischief. Happily, drunkenness is a direct cause of sterility, to the extent of two-thirds of the children who would otherwise be born to sober parents, according to Lippich. But when drunkards do commit the
crime,
as Mill calls it, “ of bestowing a life “ which certainly has not “the ordinary chances of a desirable existence,” the beneficent law of nature steps in to prevent the permanent degradation of the race. Morel of Rouen has shown, in his remarkable work on “ Les Degenerescences Humaines,” how surely the race of the drunkard dies out in two or three generations after passing through the phases of nervous decay which we recognise as hereditary insanity and sterile idiocy. It is a new and awful example of the great conservative law of the Survival of the Fittest.