On the intemperance of our country
On the intemperance of our country, the cause of its prevalence, and the means to be adopted for its suppression is an essay written by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1878 intended to be published for print, but never published.
The manuscript is held at the Toronto Public Library — Arthur Conan Doyle Collection (object number: 37131055014799D).
Essay
On the intemperance of our country, the cause of its prevalence, and the means to be adopted for its suppression. [1]
- Unless above himself he can,
- Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!"
- Daniels
"Were it possible to conceive the existence of a tyrant, who should compel his people to give up to him one third or more of their earnings, and require them at the same time to consumer a commodity that should brutalize and degrade them, destroy the peace and comfort of their families, and saw in themselves the seeds of premature death — what indignation meetings, what monster processions there would be! What appeals against a despotism so monstrous, and so unnatural! And yet such a tyrant exists amongst us — the tyrant of unrestrained appetite, whom no force of arms, or voices, or votes can resist, while men are willing to be his slaves." [2]
Thus graphically does an eminent author of the present day point out the evils produced by an inordinate love of drink, but content with a forcible exposition of its effects he broaches no scheme by which it may be checked. Many are the philippics thundered by the rightminded of every creed and nation against the evil; our Dickens has portrayed its most loathsome aspect, our Cruickshank waged war with it on canvas, but very few and very far between are the practical suggestions which may mitigate the evil. The problem is not merely to preserve those who have not fallen, but to reclaim those who have. While they remain the force of their influence and example, will ever counter-balance appeals addressed merely to the intellect, and prolong the curse from generation to generation. As to reclaiming a habitual drunkard by an appeal to his own degraded state, as well might a physician attempt to cure a victim to cholera by a graphic description of his cramps, his impeded respiration, his pallid lips, his sunken eye. It never was, and never will be done. We cannot believe that any man has been cured of drunkenness by the contemplation of the "Worship of Bacchus," or by reading the maudlin utterances of Mr. Dolls. A scourge desolating every class of society, and everywhere deeply rooted, needs some more forcible remedy than tracts and mild temperance orations. The whole nation must to its work of regeneration while its drunkards are still in a minority, or they may find it too late. I propose in this essay to glance at the causes which have brought about the present debased state of society, and then to run rapidly over the measures which seem to me to be best adapted to check the evil. I trust that at least it may give the reformer an accurate knowledge of the ground on which he has to build, and enabling him to avoid what has been proved to be quicksand and shifting soil, show him where his the firm rock, on which he may trust. If this humble end be attained the essayist will feel that he has carried that out which he had originally conceived, and given some help to the great cause which he has dearly at heart. At least he can ever appeal to the poet who sings:
- "Not all who seem to fail have failed indeed,
- "Not all who fail have therefore worked in vain,
- "For all our acts to many issues lead,
- "And out of earnest purpose, pure and plain,
- "Enforced by honest toil of hand or brain,
- "The Lord will fashion in His own good time,
- "Such ends as to His wisdom filthiest chime." [3]
The Causes of Drunkenness
After careful consideration of the causes, whether real or merely alleged, of the prevalence of drunkenness in these islands, I opine that they may all be included under the headings climatical, moral, social and hereditary. Into each of these we will now enquire, and endeavour, as far as in us lies, to ascertain how much influence may be ascribed to each. Then, having come to exact conclusions as to whence the evil arises, we shall be in a more fitting position to enquire determine the antidote, and where it should be applied. First then as to climatical causes.
Climatical Causes
Has the chilly English climate anything to do with the drunkenness of its inhabitants? A very convenient theory it is which absolves one from all personal responsibility, and throws the anus of one's actions upon some unimpeachable abstraction. If a disciple of the prophet bowstrings his wife it is "kismet" "destiny" "the will of Allah". If an Englishman degenerates into a sot it is "the climate." The thing strangles the unwary traveller, and strips him of his money, not because he is of a greedy and bloodthirsty disposition, but because "kishmu wills it." We do not believe the Briton's excuse to be more valid than that of the bowstringing turk, or the truculent thug. True that Spain and Portugal, Greece and Italy chance to be both hotter and more sober countries than ours; but we must bear in mind that they are all wine growing countries, and naturally consume their light home grown wines, in preference to alcohol. One has but to compare the statistics of drunkenness among the Anglo-Indians, and among their fellow countrymen at home, to be convinced of the fallacy of the theory, and many other examples will occur at once to any well-informed man. No, the root of the evil lies, not in our surroundings, but in ourselves, there the germ is to be found, and there the remedy is to be applied. Set us then seek for something more tangible under among the moral causes.
Moral Causes
I should be inclined to name as first of all the moral causes which render Englishmen subject to this degrading vice the love of excitement. It is as sad as it is true, that the same quality which has made us mistress of the seas, the same quality which has lead caused England's sons to toil over the searching plains of Africa, and the frigid icefloes of the North, and led them on whithersoever there were daring deeds to do, has, when a proper outlet was denied it, reduced them to a the beasts of the field. It has produced a Livingstone and a Franklin, and it has filled our asylums with dipsomaniacs, our hospitals with the victims of delirium tremens. A habitual gambler, a stockbroker who risks large sums of money on speculations, a merchant engrossed in his affairs, all these men are very rarely addicted to drink. Each is already provided with so much mental excitement that he can dispense with the additional stimulus of alcohol. One of the first steps in the cure of a drunkard should be to give him something to live for, something to excite and interest him. When the immortal Clive was engaged in the conquest of India, he applied urgently for recruits. The company at its wit's ends for men, shipped out about two hundred of the riff raff of London, many of them thrives, and nearly all of them drunkards. Yet those were the men who conquered at Plassey, and rivalled the Hindoos themselves in abstemiousness, and why this change? Because they were given a legitimate vent to that craving for excitement which had led them to the brandy bottle; they were given something to live for.
It has always seemed to me that there are in this country two classes of minds particularly liable to afield to this vice, and they form an excellent example of the moral cause. The general middle classes, "collective mediocrity," as Mills calls them, find enough to interest and excite their minds in the daily current of events in the world around. The first of the two intemperate types is the poor uneducated man, unable often to read, who has no means of ascertaining what is going on, no mental stimulus, save alcohol. The second class of mind is that which is too active to be satisfied with the jogtrot of daily events, and this includes our mental aristocracy, our poets, our painters, our authors. Who is there who cannot call to mind some drunkard, who in his sober moments was the intellectual chief of those around him, the cleverest, the most quick-witted of the company? Of this stamps were Addison and Burns, as also De Quincey and Coleridge, victims to a vice even more degrading, and more difficult to shake off this then is one of the great difficulties in devising a cure for the evil, that the classes especially affected by it differ from each other as widely as pole from pole.
An Englishman's want of true self respect is another of his stumbling blocks. What he calls his self respect means usually not what will really will respect himself for in his own heart, but rather what he imagines those around him will respect him for. Hence it is that he is too prone to initiate his friends in their vices, even against his judgement, and allows his fear of ridicule to stifle his own better instincts. There is a story told that in a certain South American village the inhabitants were all afflicted with that horrible malady goitre. Some travellers visited the village one day, whereupon the deformed wretches surrounded them, laughing and jeering at them, and calling to one another "Look at them, look, they have no goitre!" So from my experience in many villages in the midland counties of England the right minded are laughed at by the mentally deformed, until they consent to debase themselves to the same level. Smiles says that it takes a strong man to swim against the stream, while a dead fish can swim with it; unfortunately among our lower orders the dead fish type of intellect predominates. The strong minds which can resist when the tide sets in favour of drunkenness are very few and far between.
Besides the causes mentioned there is no doubt that the natural joviality and misplaced heartiness of the Britons is responsible for much. From this spring those abuses heated under the heading of social causes, abuses often trivial in themselves, but collectively exerting a powerful influence on society. Nor is the English mind usually of a domestic turn. A Frenchman or a German can pass evening after evening in the bosoms of their families, and not only have no inclination to leave it, but account it a hardship to be absent for one single occasion. the average Englishman needs as a rule some rough male intellect to rub his own against domestic happiness palls upon him and he departs, be it to his club, or to the village ale house, it is but another name for the same thing, and the same motive leads him to it. This craving for gregarious enjoyment I believe to be one of the causes which start many an Englishman on the downward path.
Briefly then, running over what we consider to be the weak points in the English mind, one or other of which probably has been fatal to every man who has yielded, we have the love of excitement, want of self restraint and self respect, propensity for following a bad example, natural joviality and finally gregariousness. We can call to mind no nation which has the same moral difficulties to vanquish, but on the other hand we believe the Englishman to abound in mental qualities, which, properly cultivated, might enable him to set his worse instincts at defiance. Let us hope the time is coming when his clear good sense and perseverance may overcome all obstacles, and a nation proud of its freedom may realize that "The Government of one's self is the only true freedom for the individual."
Social Causes
The drunkenness of the Anglo Saxon race is far from being a modern failing. It has been handed down to us together with many noble qualities from our remotest ancestors. The yellow-haired blue-eyed Saxons who struck terror into the Roman ranks at Alia, were objects of scam and derision to the abstemious Italians, who marvelled to see the men who seemed demi Gods in the fray, reduce themselves to the level of the brutes in honour of their victory. We know but little of the social customs of our forefathers prior to the Norman invasion, but what has come down to us of wassails and merry makings shows that they did not belie their traditions. The temperate Normans made but little change in the institutions of the country, the conquerors being speedily amalgamated by the conquered, and the curse has continued to increase up to our time, broken only by the short austere rule of the Puritans.
During these long centuries of dissipation many evil social customs have arisen, which transmitted to us, form so many chains, binding us to our national vice. Most common and most pernicious is the custom of tippling upon every occasions of joy or of sorrow that occurs. A man is born into the world — his friends and relatives rush to the brandy bottle, he is christened — more alcohol, he grows up, he comes of age he is married, he has children, and every fresh occasion is hailed as the signal of a new carouse. Finally he dies, and his mourner recall his good qualities over their liquor and drink away regrets. Thus a man learns to associate alcohol with all that is of note in his life is taught to regard it, not as the all devouring fiend it is, but rather as the comforter of his sorrows, the enhancer of his joys. A modification of this is the "nipping system". What an absurdity it is that an Englishman cannot be hospitable, without offering a glass of slow poison to his friends! You will hear most temperate men say "Oh, it's only a nip, it can do no harm." The harm it does may not be at once visible, but there it is, none the less, and will show itself too, after a certain point. If your water is brought through leaden pipes, you may drink it for some time, and seem none the worse; yet the lead is accumulating in your system, and after a certain stage, the symptoms of lead poisoning will set in. It is precisely the same with alcohol, the only difference being that there is a remedy for the former, but none for the latter.
But society is to blame not only for the evil customs it perpetuates, but even more for its flippant treatment of the whole subject. Unable to check this bane, it tries to hoodwink itself, and represents it as an amiable weakness, a vice akin to a virtue. How often one hears it said "Ah, poor fellow, he drinks," "Such a nice fellow but for his one little failing," and so on. One might as say "Poor fellow, he picks pockets, it's his only fault." The drunkard inflicts far more misery on those about him, than the thief.
The fact is that the vice has grown so common that we have ceased to see the enormity of it. Let us suppose that such a thing had never been know, that we had been living in a Utopia where men never trifled with the minds that God had given them, and into which alcohol had never penetrated. At last this happy state of things is rudely broken. One of the citizens of our Utopia is observed by his friends to be afflicted with fits of temporary insanity. He seems at times to have lost command of his limbs, they totter beneath him, he is found senseless in the street. He has ever been a trustworthy man of business, now he neglects his affairs, and complacently views them drifting to rack and ruin. He has been a model family man now he spurns his children, abuses their mother, is careless of the family wants and necessities. He wanders in his mind in the evenings, and is weak and feverish in the mornings. He sinks in the social scale, all the moral qualities separating man from the animals seem blunted in him, neglect of his own interests impoverishes him, and the useful member of the community degenerates into a slovenly worthless dipsomaniac. But now the disease proves to be contagious, others are afflicted by it, and all are reduced to the same state of moral degradation. Think you that in such a state of things the authorities of our Utopia would treat the evil as an amiable failing as a thing, wrong no doubt, but rather to be smiled at than to be seriously deplored? Would they not rather class it with the plague and leprosy, with the most fearful evils that flesh is heir to, and strain every nerve to stamp it out by any measure however rigorous and severe? Would they not cast everything out of their minds, their foreign policy, their other domestic affairs, and address themselves to their one great task? And if they did this, who can doubt that they would overcome it, and come forth chastened rather than injured by their ordeal? All this seems but natural and as it should be in Utopia, yet we Englishmen, we who prate about our common sense and our clear headedness strain excitedly after such small gats as vivisection bills and burial hills, while we swallow the great camel of drunkenness, and though we can all see what ought to be done in our Utopia, we shrink from looking our own case boldly in the face.
Our literature is even more to blame than society at large for the manner in which it whitens this ghastly sepulchre. The jovial good-hearted hype of hero, who takes a drop too much at times has been so constantly paraded before the public, that it is little wonder that the uneducated have come to consider occasional dissipation a "sine quâ non" in a fine character. Putting aside the small scribblers of fiction, who pander to the tastes of the masses, and looking only at the better class of novelist, it is extraordinary the amount of drunkenness depicted, and depicted, not to be held up for reprobation, but rather as a sort of literary caviare, adding a certain specimens to the character. Such novelists as Lever and Marryat though not of first class literary excellence, are in everyone's hands and exert a powerful influence on society. But even our leviathans of fiction, Dickens and Thackeray could scarcely plead 'not guilty' to the charge. Indeed Thackeray's writings have always seemed to me to be a perfect apotheosis of drunkenness. "Be merry today for tomorrow you die" seems to be the prevailing sentiment on the strength of which all the characters become more or less dissipated, while some, as for example Captain Costigan would be simply revolting but for the misplaced skill with the master hand has linked redeeming virtues, with degrading vices.
There are many other small social causes, all tending to increase or to perpetuate the evil. Briefly however we hold the flippant tone of our literature and of society in general to be responsible for the spread of the evil, aided by the pernicious social customs handed down to us which subject men to continual temptation by bringing them face to face with alcohol. It rests with the good sense of the nation to break these degrading ties, and cut off the weight which drags us down, and especially it rests with the educated classes to give them every encouragement and helps in the attempt. Let them at least not throw a stumbling block in the way of civilization, nor by their moral support perpetuate this crying evil. We turn now to our last heading.
Hereditary Causes
It is a fact well known to medical men who have had opportunities to observe it, that drunkenness is often as hereditary a disease as cancer or gout. It has been said that there is no foundation for this, that if the children of drunkards take to drink it arises rather from the bad example of their parents than from any latent physiological cause. True that the bad example may have a very powerful effect upon the children, but we have abundant evidence of something apart from that. Cases have come under my notice where drunken parents have sent their children home from India, and never seen them again, yet those children on growing up have been seized with acute oinomania, and have followed unconsciously in the footsteps of their drunken progenitors. Such examples are by no means rare. Often, as in all hereditary ailments, a generation may escape with impunity, and the grandchild have to atone for the folly of his ancestor. yet in such cases example could have had nothing to do with it. What syphilis is to the immoral this is to the drunkard, a scourge descending upon his family, a visitation of the sins of the father upon the children. Far more is it so however in the case of the mother. Drunken mothers have been observed almost invariably to transmit their degradation to their children. This has come to be acknowledged by practical men in the north of England to such an extent, that the children of a drunken woman are not received into their factories or workshops.
We cannot hope then to abolish drunkenness by one sweeping coup — we cannot hope that some trumpet voiced reformer, gifted with the power to stir the hearts of men, may by his burning words snatch the veil from men's eyes and let them see what it is they have been doing, what it is they have been tolerating. Much, very much, could be done by such a man. But the seeds of the evil have been sown in the past and the results must be reaped in the future. We can but strive that the crop shall grow less and less, that the soil shall be kept unwatered and unproductive, that it shall ever dwindle away, until, please God, it shall disappear in these islands.
We have now enumerated the more striking causes of drunkenness, and examined into them as far as is possible in so limited a space. We shall next turn our attention to the measures to be adopted for its suppression, and we may premise that there cannot be anyone specific against it. We have seen that very different motives lead men to it, and very different remedies must be devised to keep men from it. What these measures are we will proceed to consider in the second part of this essay.
Means of Suppression
Can a man be made sober by law? Our legislators seem to have decided the question offhand in the negative, most thoughtful men however incline to the affirmative. Certain it is that the former exhibit a strange indifference to the whole subject, nor is the reason difficult to determine. It has been seen that any interference with the nights of publicans and their victims tend to make a government unpopular for a time. But does not this show the necessity for interference? Does it not show how far the evil has gone? What is difficult now will be impossible in the future; surely we will not give up our country for ever to this horrible vice while we have it in our power to avert it. Unpopularity arising from such a cause would be but temporary, a reaction would set in, and the party which initiated the movement would enjoy the goodwill and support of the rightminded part of the nation, as well as the esteem of many a coming generation. The authors of great social reforms live in the hearts of the people long after the statesmen who made wars and signed treaties are forgotten. We sympathize with Wilberforce the opponent of slavery, rather than with Castlereagh who signed the treaty of Vienna. We may honour the latter, but we love and honour the former. And even so I will venture to say that our grandchildren would put the man who knocked off these mental shackles, before the signers of the treaty of Berlin. Surely a statesman would be content to suffer temporary unpopularity, to bring about the regeneration of a nation, and to gain the esteem of posterity. What would we know now of Peter and John, and Luke obscure fishermen and tax gatherers in far Judea, had they not faced a far greater unpopularity, an unpopularity which often meant death? Our rulers should look at the matter in all its bearings, consider well the remedy, and then apply it fearlessly, trusting into the good sense of the nation to support them, and in posterity to judge them. Let them remember Luther's saying "The prosperity of a nation depends not on the abundance of its revenues, nor on the strength of its armies, nor on the beauty of its public buildings, but on the state of its citizens, on their enlightenment and character; here is to be found its true interest, here its real power."
Legislative Measures
Under the heading of legislative means of suppressing drunkenness we will turn our attention first to "The Permissive Bill," which is the most sweeping measure yet proposed. By this no man could sell alcohol against the will of the majority of rate prayers in any distinct. Personally I believe this to be by no means too stringent a measure. A surgeon does not treat a gnawing cancer by hot fomentations and mild remedies, he extirpates it with the knife. A grave malady needs a grave and rigorous treatment, and a nation must suffer some inconvenience if it wished to shake off such a vice. However as a matter of fact the permissive bill has been tried on a larger scale in America in the form of the "Maine Liquor Law" and has been found not to answer. The great bulk of the middle classes, who use liquor and do not abuse it, find themselves cut off from their daily stimulants, and resent being punished for the vices of another part of the community. Again it was found impossible to enforce the act stringently. Drunkenness was found to increase rather than diminish in Maine. Liquor was smuggled in, illicit stills established, and an organized system of shebeening set on foot. Thus while the drunkards were still able to procure their poison, the sober were unable to procure satisfy their moderate wants; a state of things which produced so much dissatisfaction that the act had to be revoked. We may dismiss the permissive bill then as a measure, theoretically perfect, but impossible to apply practically, and pass on to the "Habitual Drunkards Restrain Act."
This we hold to be one of the keys of the problem, which if applied promptly and judiciously might go far to solve it. By it a man proved to be a habitual drunkard by the testimony of two medical men, may be treated as a temporary lunatic, and shut up in an asylum, where while receiving the kindest treatment and every comfort, he may be cut off from any alcoholic stimulus, and subjected to a rigid course of total abstinence. If a man is observed in the act of springing from London Bridge, no one would call it an infringement of the rights of the subject to arrest that man, why then should such nonsense be talked about placing in restraint men who are visibly killing themselves by inches? Great care must certainly be taken to prevent the act being prostituted to private malice or interests, and a strict government supervision must be maintained over the various establishments, but with this proves there is no reason why the act it should not answer well. It is useless however to shut up a drunkard for a few weeks and then dismiss him. I should rather propose that a drunkard be confined at first for six months, and that on his release he be subjected to a certain supervision. If found to relapse into his former state he should again be placed under restraint, this time for a year, and be deprived of some of the privileges which he had enjoyed during his former confinement. If still found incorrigible he should have another year, and so on, being subjected each time to a harsher discipline. By this means the system should work in two ways for while the fear of restraint frightened men from yielding to the vice, those who had yielded would have an opportunity to emancipate themselves from the bonds of custom and start afresh. It is my belief that when this habitual drunkard's restraint act becomes law a great change will be observed in the statistics of drunkenness, and that generations yet unborn will have reason to bless the promoters of the bill. We must not however consider the work of the legislature accomplished whenever it is passed, for if we wish to eradicate the evil we must supplement it by other measures. It is a very excellent foundation stone, but other stones must be placed upon it if we wish to rear a lasting edifice, so we will now proceed to consider what other legislative means of suppression remain to be tried.
A strict supervision of publicans and their houses has long been called for. In the first place there should be a strict limitation of these places with regard to the population, only so many licenses being granted to sell liquor in a parish containing so many thousand inhabitants. In the small village at which I am at present residing there are four public houses to supply about a thousand inhabitants. If the reformed toper manages in the evening to walk manfully past the Scylla of the "Admiral Benbow" he is generally lured into the Charybdis of the "Three Jolly Pigeons" lower down. Even the sober man is like Christian in the valley of the shadow of death, surrounded on all sides by pitfalls and quagmires.
Besides enforcing some limitation of the number of public houses, the publicans themselves should be carefully selected from among men of good character, non-commissioned officers who have left the army, and men of that stamp being preferred, and they should be given to understand that by forfeiting their character they forfeit their license. For instance, it should be at once suspended if they can be proved to have supplied a man already intoxicated with liquor, and stringent additional penalties should be exacted for the same offence.
Another excellent measure would be to give only one publican in every three or four the license to sell spirits, the others being only permitted to retail malt liquors. If this were really rigidly enforced, and coupled with the limitation of public houses, so that the publican could still make a reasonable profit, it would have a most beneficial effect, and go far to convert the English into as beer drinking a nation as the Germans. Not that that is perfection, but at least it is a change for the letter. Legislators have before now changed a weak national leverage into a more potent one; as the national leverage of Scotland was transformed from claret into whisky, why can they not reverse the process and supplant whisky in turn by some less deadly poison? These are the cases where one is tempted to regret our free constitution with its party wrangling and its statesmen who have to "win golden opinions from all sorts of men." Oh for ten years under a Caesar, a Trajan, under any irresponsible autocrat who took a real interest in his people! What a change a single clear-headed man, whose will was law, might bring about in our social state! However, wishing is a profitless employment, let us rather act. Let a temperance party be consolidated, composed of men of every shade of political opinion, let it be organized and increased, and enable any party leader who takes up the good cause to reckon confidently upon its enthusiastic support. By this means we may see not only the legislative improvements sketched here, but others far more sweeping and effectual. History has many examples of the revolutions brought about by a small but compact and resolute party, may it have to record one more in the bloodless revolution which drove King Drink from his throne and converted the most drunken country in Europe into the most sober!
And now let us glance at some other means of suppression apart from the law, some measures which may counteract the social and moral tendencies of which we have spoken. Of all these education is incomparably the first. We have said that we believe the want of something to excite and interest him has much to do in driving the poor man to the brandy bottle. If we had no newspapers to amuse, no books to instruct, no intellectual conversation, if our thoughts were entirely bound down to bricks and mortar, who can say to what depths we might not fall in search of some mental stimulus? Were every man provided with and improved education, aided by the establishment of free libraries, and popular lectures on well-chosen subjects then indeed he would be to blame if he went astray.
Comfortable cocoa houses and temperance clubs should also be everywhere established, with billiard tables, newspapers, and every convenience, where men might meet and have their smoke and chat without being exposed to temptation. If these associations had a few annual fêtes or picnics, any thing which might bind the members closer together, it would, I believe, be extremely beneficial. These societies would at the same time satisfy the sociable English character, and take advantage of his fear of ridicule, as a man belonging to them would be despised by both parties were he found sinning.
It is a more difficult matter to know how to deal with the social causes of drunkenness. These, as we have shown, are the outgrowths of centuries, and are, I fear, not to be swept away in a few years. They are not to be carried by assault, but rather to be undermined, and slowly crumbled away. The temperance party must first express its opinion earnestly and loudly until it influences the tone of society, and causes it to treat the subject in a more befitting manner. Then with the aid of such legislative improvements as we have sketched we may hope to see 'nipping' and kindred customs as obsolete as bullbaiting or prize fighting. One essential for success however is that the advocates of temperance should not content themselves by merely refraining from these customs themselves; they must speak out fearlessly and endeavour to prevent others from yielding to them. A thankless task it is, and per chance we may never behold the fruit of what we do; we may sow the good seed and pass away before it sprouts, but sprout it will; it will not all fall on sandy soil, neither will the birds of the air devour it. It may be that our children's children will look back with gratitude on those who left them a legacy more precious than gold, and be proud to find their forefathers fighting in the van of civilization, promoting what their consciences told them was a righteous cause, regardless of the difficulties in the path. At least we may rest assured that in another world, to whatever creed we belong, we shall find our resistance to this crying evil registered to our credit, and receive full measure and over-flowing to atone for any inconvenience we may have suffered from it in this.
Before concluding this essay a tabulated condensed résumé of what we consider the chief causes of drunkenness and their antidotes, will not be out of place:
| Causes | Antidotes |
|---|---|
| Love of excitement Want of selfrespect. |
Education which increases one's self-respect, and gives facilities for spending spare time |
| Natural joviality Gregariousness Fear of ridicule |
Temperance clubs, cocoa houses, and other such associations. |
| Pernicious social customs and moral influences Hereditary causes |
Must be gradually ameliorated by the exertions of the temperance party, aided by the good sense of the people and such legislative measures as: The Permissive bill. The Habitual Drunkard's Restraint act. Limitation of public houses by population. Careful selection of publicans. Stringent penalties for their misbehaviour. &c. |
And now that I have come to the conclusion of this essay, and look back I ask myself "have I carried out that which I originally conceived?" Though painfully aware of its imperfections, I cannot but answer that I have. Written as it has been during the short intervals of leisure enjoyed by a medical assistant, it is necessarily somewhat disjointed; it has however been to me no task, but a labour of love. It is said that a mother ever loves best the most distorted and deformed of her offspring, but I trust the saying does not hold good as to the feelings of an essayist towards his literary child, otherwise it bodes ill for this poor foundling. I cannot conclude better than by those cheering lines:
- "Fail or succeed, the man is blessed,
- "Who, when his task is o'er,
- "Can say that he has done his best,
- "Angels can say no more." [4]
- ↑ The draft of the first page had the following title: "On the intemperance of our country, the cause of its prevalence, and the means of suppressing it."
- ↑ Quote from Character, by Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) published in 1871.
- ↑ The poem appeared anonymously as a sonnet on the page before the Index to the collection of political essays "Politics for the People" (London: John W. Parker, 1848). Some sources attribute it to Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886) or Matthew Inglett Brickdale (1817-1894).
- ↑ Arthur Conan Doyle invented these lines as he wrote in a letter (source: Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, by J. Lellenberg, D. Stashower & C. Foley (HarperPress, USA) p. 69-70).
