634 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



not ; and in that wholesome discipline I long 

 that women as well as men should share." 



In his lecture on the Tree of Knowledge, 

 Mr. Kingsley has the following obserTations 

 on the causes of intemperance : 



" It is said by some that drunkenness is 

 on the increase in this island. I have no 

 trusty proof of it: but I can believe it possi- 

 ble ; for every cause of drunkenness seems 

 on the increase. Overwork of body and 

 mind ; circumstances which depress health ; 

 temptation to drink, and drink again, at 

 every corner of the streets ; and finally, 

 money, and ever more money, in the hands 

 of uneducated people, who have not the de- 

 sire, and too often not the means, of spend- 

 ing it in any save the lowest pleasures. 

 These, it seems to me, are the true causes 

 of drunkenness, increasing or not. And if 

 we wish to become a more temperate na- 

 tion, we must lessen them, if we cannot 

 eradicate them. 



"First, overwork. "We all live too fast, 

 and work too hard. 'All things are full of 

 labor, man cannot utter it.' In the heavy 

 struggle for existence which goes on all 

 around us, each man is tasked more and 

 more — if he be really worth buying and 

 using — to the utmost of his powers all day 

 long. The weak have to compete on equal 

 terms with the strong ; and crave, in con- 

 sequence, for artificial strength. How we 

 shall stop that I know not, while every man 

 is ' making haste to be rich, and piercing 

 himself through with many sorrows, and 

 falling into foolish and hurtful lusts, which 

 drown men in destruction and perdition.' 



" But it seems to me also, that in such a 

 state of society, when — as it was once well 

 put — ' every one has stopped running about 

 like rats:' — that those who work hard, 

 whether with mus«le or with brain, would 

 not be surrounded, as now, with every cir- 

 cumstance Avhich tempts toward drink ; by 

 every circumstance which depresses the vi- 

 tal energies, and leaves them an easy prey 

 to pestilence itself; by bad light, bad air, 

 bad food, bad water, bad smells, bad occu- 

 pations, which weaken the muscles, cramp 

 the chest, disorder the digestion. Let any 

 rational man, fresh from the country — in 

 which I presume God, having made it, meant 

 all men, more or less, to live — go through 

 the back streets of any city, or through 



whole districts of the ' black countries ' of 

 England; and then ask himself — Is it the 

 will of God that his human children should 

 live and toil in such dens, such deserts, such 

 dark places of the earth ? Let him ask 

 himself — Can they live and toil there with- 

 out contracting a probably diseased habit 

 of body ; without contracting a certainly 

 dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which 

 craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to 

 escape from its own stupidity and em].ti- 

 ness ? When I run through, by rail, certain 

 parts of the iron-producing country — streets 

 of furnaces, collieries, slag-heaps, mud, slop, 

 brick house-rows, smoke, dirt — and that is 

 all ; and when I am told, whether truly or 

 falsely, that the main thing which the well- 

 paid and well-fed men of those abominable 

 wastes care for is — good fighting-dogs : I 

 can only answer, that I am not sur- 

 prised. 



" I say — as I have said elsewhere, and 

 shall do my best to say again — that the crav- 

 ing for drink and narcotics, especially that 

 engendered in our great cities, is not a dis- 

 ease, but a symptom of disease ; of a far 

 deeper disease than any Avhich drunkenness 

 can produce ; namely, of the growing degen- 

 eracy of a population striving in vain by 

 stimulants and narcotics to fight against 

 those slow poisons with which our greedy 

 barbarism, miscalled civiUzation, has sur- 

 rounded them from the cradle to the grave. 

 I may be answered that the old German, 

 Angle, Dane, drank heavily. I know it: 

 but why did they drink, save that for the 

 same reason that the fenman drank, and his 

 wife took opium, at least till the fens were 

 drained ? why but to keep off the depressing 

 effects of the malaria of swamps and new 

 clearings, which told on them — who always 

 settled on the lowest grounds — in the shape 

 of fever and ague ? Here it may be an- 

 swered again, that stimulants have been, 

 during the memory of man, the destruction 

 of the Red Indian race in America. I reply 

 boldly, that I do not beheve it. There is 

 evidence enough in Jacques Cartier's ' Voy- 

 ages to the Rivers of Canada ; ' and evidence 

 more than enough in Strachey's 'Travi^ile 

 in Yirginia ' — to quote only two authorities 

 out of many — to prove that the Red In- 

 dians, when the white man first met with 

 them, were, in North and South alike, a dis- 



