MODERATE DRINKING.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1182, 23 September 1885, Page 4

MODERATE DRINKING.

The advocates of total abstinence in England have encountered an adversary of some pretensions, though, perhaps, little force, in the person of Lord Bramwell. Tins nobleman haß issued a pamphlet in which he eulogises in glowing phrases the pleasures of moderate drinking, and condemns with much asperity what he terms the " craze " of the total abstainers. " Drink," says this aristocratic patron of the bottle, " is a good thing, which the world would act very foolishly in giving up, because it does an immense deal of good and gives a vast deal of pleasure and enjoyment to those who take it with good sense and moderation." In the presence of the appalling evidence to the contrary, which the criminal statistics of the world reveal, this seems a most astonishing assertion to make. If it be foolish to give up a habit that has caused so much crime and misery and shame and moral and physical degradation, then indeed Lord BramweU's contention is as true as it is startling. When drink ceases to beget those evils, and, in their stead, promotes public morality and social purity and happinesß, then, and not till then, will the world be acting foolishly in renouncing it. The pleasures of moderate drinking must necessarily be of a very transitory and, when we consider the cost, of a very expensive nature. If the pleasure be sustained, it invariably degenerates into drunkenness, which, of itself, without counting its attendant cursea, is a degradation which a life-time of the sensuous pleasures of moderate drinking could nob compensate for. That drink, when taken in moderation, or, as some people choose to call it, • ' medicinally," conduces to health or robustness, is a theory that has been refuted and contradicted by the most eminent, as well as the most unbiassed authorities of the day. ! Such men as Sir Henry Thompson, and Sir Win. Gall have emphatically coni demned it, even when taken in the smallest quantity, as being destructive both to the mental and bodily powers. " All alcohol, even when taken in the smallest quantity, injures the nerve tissues," said the latter of these authorities before a Committee of the House of Lords. But the most dreaded feature of moderate drinking is that, if indulged in for any length of time, it so poisons and vitiates the constitution as to make a continual increase in the strength and quantity of the stimulant imperative. Thus it is that a man may drink discreetly for years and preserve his respectability and his reputation for sobriety unsullied, while, unknown to him, the disease is making a lodgment in his system, and the corroding vice is eating away the vitals of his moral strength. Now, will all the convivial pleasures of moderate drinking compensate for the moral and social ruin of this one man ? j But, unfortunately for humanity, and for helpless innocence, the shame and the misery that it brings are not limited to its votaries alone. It makes children and frail women sharers in the punishment that by right should belong exclusively to their besotted protectors. It converts homes that might be happy and smiling and surrounded with every hmoeenh social pleasure into what Carlyle calls " Dantean hells" — abodes of anguish and sin. Around us any day may be witnessed scenes of squalor and misery, the direct results of drink, that would melt any heart not altogether ' ' brazed by damned custom." And yet the moderate drinkers, unmindful of everything save the desire to minister to a diseased and everincreasing appetite, refuse to see the end to which this habit invariably leads. "Weigh drinking in the balance," says Mr Joseph Cowen, the Radical member for a North of England constituency, "weigh it honestly — all its alleged advantages, and all its admitted ills — and pronounce whether it is not wanting. Put on one scale all the much-prized conviviality it produces, and the doubtful medical testimony that is quoted in its support. Put on the other side the material and moral, the individual and national loss that it inflicts ; the criminality, the pauperism, the woes that cannot be measured by arithmetic; the cries of perishing children, and the wrecks of noble intellects — can any man doubt which scale will ascend?" These are eloquent words— terrible in their truth and realism of the evils they portray ; and beside which all the arguments that can be adduced in favor of moderate i drinking seem shallow and contemptible. Zero.