TEMPERANCE COLUMN. STUDY AND STIMULANTS.

Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 38, 13 August 1887, Page 1 (Supplement)

TEMPERANCE COLUMN. STUDY AND STIMULANTS.

M. Louis Blanc, whose name at one time filled so large a space in European history, wrote, not long before Ms death, "I do not know by experience what may be the effects of tobacco and alcohol upon the mind and health, not having been in the habit of taking tobacco and drinking alcohol." Mr. Ford Madox Brown, R.A., says : " I have smoked for upwards of thirty years, and have given up smoking for the last seven years. Almost all my life I hare taken alcoholic liquors in moderation, but have also been a total abstainer for a short period. My experience is that neither course, with either ingiedieufc, has anything to do with mental work as capacity for it ; unless, indeed, we are to accept the incapacity produced by excessive drinking, of which, however, I have no personal experience." M. Jules Claretie writes : "1 should have been glad to reply to your question from my personal experience, but I do not smoke, and have never in all my life drunk as much as a single glass of alcohol. This plainly shows that I require no • fillip ' or stimulant when at work." He then announces an opinion which may probably apply as well to English as to French literature : " The reason we have so many sickly productions in our literature arises probably from the fact that our writers, perhaps, add a little alcohol to their ink and view life through the fumes of nicotine." Mr. Hyde Clarke says : " I am not an adherent of the teetotal abstinence movement. I have never seen that any great thinker has found any help or benefit from the use of Btimulants, either alcohol or tobacco." The whole of Mr. Clarke's contribution is of exceptional intei-est. Professor Boyd Dawkius, the eminent geologist, finds that " I cannot drink beer when I am using my brain, and therefore do not tnke it when I have anything of importance to think about." Mr. L. P. Gueuin, revising stenographer to the French Senate, writes : "I must admit that I smoke, and, at home, use wine also ; but if their use appears useful or agreeable, I ought to add that whenever I have to undertake any long, arduous work, and, above all, the reproduction of stenographic law or Parliamenta-y repcr s, of which the copy is required without delay, I then make use of nothing but pure water." Mr. Thomas Hardy has " never found alcohol helpful to novel-writing in any degree. My experience goes to prove that the effect of wine, taken as a preliminary to imaginative work, is to blind the writer to the quality of what he produces rather than to raise its quality." Oliver Wendell Holmes " prefers an entirely undisturbed and unclouded brain for mental work, unatimulated by anything stronger than tea or coffee." The Rev. Henry Lansdell says : " I have never been a smoker. I became a total abstainer from alcoholic liquors before I had attained the age of twenty. It is a common occurrence for me to have beeu (for some years past) at mental employment from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Ido not find the least necessity for stimulants." The Rev. Dr. James Martineau writes : "My first prolonged experience of abstinence from wine and malt liquors ran through about seven years. The change was not great in itself, and I always thought it favourable in its effects — at no time in my life did I su&tain a heavier pressure of work and of anxiety." The good and learned doctor (now aged seventy-seven) concludes a most valuable note with a sentence worthy of being printed in gold and embalmed as an aphorism of truth :—": — " Few things, I believe, do more, at a minimum of cost, to lighten the spirits and sweeten the temper of families and of society, than the repudiation of artificial iudulgencies." Dr. Henry Maudsley does "not cousider alcohol or tobacco to be in the least necessary or beneficial to a person who is in good health ; and I. am of opinion that any supposed necessity of one or the other to the hardest aud best mental or bodily work by such a person is purely fanciful. He will certainly do harder aud sounder work without them." J. A. H. Murray, ex-President of the Philological Society, writes : " I use no stimulants of any kind, and should be very sorry to do so. I thought it was now generally admitted that the more work a man has to do, the less he can afford to muddle himself in that way." A new method of transporting liquor into Maine has been discovered in Saco. A small cask containing liquor is securely fastened inside a kerosene barrel, and the barrel is headed up and the intervening space inside filled with kerosene. The barrel is then labelled and shipped as kerosene to the various liquid light vendors down east. Should not our laws protect the poison, tlje character and the morals of our citizens as well as their property? Why does our Legislature enact laws to punish those who rob them of the latter, and others to protect those who injure them in the former 1 Is the loss of property a greater evil than the loss of character, of morality aud virtue, of health and life? Very near a Success. — Somebody claimed that prohibition was ineffective in Canton, lowa, because a fellow from Peoiia, 111., went through three cellars, one tunnel, aud a flight of stairs and found some liquor was for sale there that had been smuggled in a kerosene barrel. That is, however, almost prohibition. — bood Templar Record. Old Newspaper Jokes on Teetotallers. — The funny men on the,papers used to make jokes at the expense of the teetotallers some forty years ago, as follows : — " The only vegetables they ate was Water-cress, the only flower they admired was the Water-lily, the only bridge they ever crossed was Water-100 Bridge, and the only military organization they could tolerate

• was the Cold-stream Guards." — Mewman Hale.