LITERARY NOTICES, 



635 



eased, decaying, and, as all their traditions 

 confess, decreasing race. Such a race would 

 naturally crave for ' the water of life,' the 

 ' usquebaugh,' or whiskey, as we have con- 

 tracted the old name now. But I should 

 have thought that the white man, by intro- 

 ducing among these poor creatures iron, 

 fire-arms, blankets, and, above all, horses 

 wherewith to follow the buftalo-herds which 

 they could never follow on foot, must have 

 done ten times more toward keeping them 

 alive, than he has done toward destroying 

 them by giving them the chance of a week's 

 drunkenness twice a year, when they came 

 in to his forts to sell the skins which, 

 without his gifts, they would never have 

 got. 



" Such a race would, of course, if want- 

 ing vitality, crave for stimulants. But if 

 the stimulants, and not the original want of 

 vitality, combined with morals utterly de- 

 testable, and worthy only of the gallows — 

 and here I know what I say, and dare not 

 tell what I know, from eye-witnesses — have 

 been the cause of the Red Indians' ex- 

 tinction : then how is it, let me ask, that the 

 Irishman and the Scotsman have, often to 

 their great harm, been drinking as much 

 whiskey — and usually very bad whiskey — 

 not merely twice a year, but as often as they 

 could get it, during the whole ' iron age ; ' 

 and, for aught any one can tell, during the 

 ' bronze age,' and the ' stone age ' before 

 that: and yet are still the most healthy, 

 able, valiant, and prolific races in Europe ? 

 Had they drunk less whiskey they would, 

 doubtless, have been more healthy, able, 

 valiant, and perhaps even more prolific, than 

 they are now. They show no sign, how- 

 ever, as yet, of going the way of the Red 

 Indian. 



"But if the craving for stimulants and 

 narcotics is a token of deficient vitality ; 

 then the deadliest foe of that craving, and 

 all its miserable results, is surely the Sani- 

 tary Reformer; the man who preaches, and 

 — as far as ignorance and vested interests 

 will allow him — procures, for the masses, 

 pure air, pure sunlight, pure water, pure 

 dwelling-houses, pure food. Not merely 

 every fresh drinking-fountain : but every 

 fresh public bath and wash-house, every 

 fresh open space, every fresh growing tree, 

 every fresh open window, every fresh flower 



in that window — each of these is so much, 

 as the old Persians would have said, con- 

 quered for Ormuzd, the god of light and 

 life, out of the dominion of Ahriman, the 

 king of darkness and of death ; so much 

 taken from the causes of drunkenness and 

 disease, and added to the causes of sobriety 

 and health. 



"Meanwhile one thing is clear : that if 

 this present barbarism and anarchy of cov- 

 etousness, miscalled modern civilization, 

 were tamed and drilled into something more 

 like the kingdom of God on earth : then 

 we should not see the reckless and needless 

 multiplication of liquor-shops, which dis- 

 graces this country now. . . . 



" I said just now that a probable cause 

 of increasing drunkenness was the increas- 

 ing material prosperity of thousands who 

 knew no recreation beyond low animal pleas- 

 ure. If I am right — and I believe that I 

 am right — I must urge on those who wish 

 drunkenness to decrease, the necessity of 

 providing more, and more refined, recreation 

 for the people. 



" Men drink, and women too, remember, 

 not merely to supply exhaustion ; not merely 

 to drive away care; but often simply to 

 drive away dullness. They have nothing to 

 do save to think over what they have done 

 in the day, or what they expect to do to- 

 morrow ; and they escape from that dreary 

 round of business thought, in liquor or nar- 

 cotics. There are still those, by no means 

 of the hand-working class, but absorbed all 

 day by business, who drink heavily at night 

 in their own comfortable homes, simply to 

 recreate their overburdened minds. Such 

 cases, doubtless, are far less common than 

 they were fifty years ago : but why? Is not 

 the decrease of drinking among the richer 

 classes certainly due to the increased refine- 

 ment and variety of their tastes and occu- 

 pations? In cultivating the aesthetic side 

 of man's nature ; in engaging him with the 

 beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the truly 

 natural ; with painting, poetry, music, hor- 

 ticulture, physical science — in all this lies 

 recreation, in the true and literal sense of 

 that word, namely, the recreating and 

 mending of the exhausted mind and feel- 

 ings, such as no rational man will now neg- 

 lect, eitber for himself, his children, or his 

 workpeople." 



