Robert Macnish

“ They are talkative from the beginning, and, during confirmed intoxication, perfectly obstreperous. It is men of this class who are the heroes of all drunken companies, the patrons of masonic lodges, the presidents and getters-up of jovial meetings. With them, eating and drinking are the grand ends of human life. Look at their eyes, how they sparkle at the sight of wine, and how their lips smack and their teeth water in the neighbourhood of a good dinner: they would scent out a banquet in Siberia. ”

“ Not only will Temperance Societies cut off the resources of drunkenness, but to the reformed drunkard, they will open a refuge from the tyranny of evil customs, and they will support and encourage him in his new habits. To promote these invaluable objects, they call for the united efforts of all temperate men; they earnestly solicit the assistance of physicians, of clergymen, of the conductors of public journals, of all men possessing authority and influence; and by every thing sacred and good, they beseech drunkards to turn from the wickedness of their ways and live. ”

“ Under its influence, the mind wears no longer that blank passionless aspect which, even in gifted natures, it is apt to assume. On the contrary, it is clothed with beauty “as with a garment,” and colours every thought that passes through it with the hues of wonder and romance. Such are the feelings which the luxurious and opulent Mussulman seeks to enjoy. To stir up the languid current of his mind, satiated with excess of pleasure and rendered sluggish by indolence, he has recourse to that remedy which his own genial climate produces in greatest perfection. ”

“ Men of genius are often unfortunately addicted to drinking. Nature, as she has gifted them with greater powers than their fellows, seems also to have mingled with their cup of life more bitterness. There is a melancholy which is apt to come like a cloud over the imaginations of such characters. Their minds possess a susceptibility and a delicacy of structure which unfit them for the gross atmosphere of human nature; wherefore, high talent has ever been distinguished for sadness and gloom. ”

“ XX. Premature Old Age.—Drunkenness has a dreadful effect in anticipating the effects of age. It causes time to pace on with giant strides—chases youth from the constitution of its victims—and clothes them prematurely with the grey garniture of years. How often do we see the sunken eye, the shrivelled cheek, the feeble, tottering step, and hoary head, in men who have scarcely entered into the autumn of their existence. ”

“ The drunkard by necessity was never meant by nature to be dissipated. He is perhaps a person of amiable dispositions, whom misfortune has overtaken, and who, instead of bearing up manfully against it, endeavours to drown his sorrows in liquor. It is an excess of sensibility, a partial mental weakness, an absolute misery of the heart, which drives him on. Drunkenness, with him, is a consequence of misfortune; it is a solitary dissipation preying upon him in silence. Such a man frequently dies broken-hearted, even before his excesses have had time to destroy him by their own unassisted agency. ”

“ When intoxicated, their passions are highly excited: the energies of a hundred minds then seem concentrated into one focus. Their mirth, their anger, their love, their folly, are all equally intense [54] and unquenchable. Such men cannot conceal their feelings. In drunkenness, the veil is removed from them, and their characters stand revealed, as in a glass, to the eye of the beholder. The Roderick Random of Smollett had much of this temperament, blended, however, with more intellect than usually belongs to it. ”

“ The great mass of excellences attributed to intoxicating liquors, they believe to be fictitious; and though all the virtues attributed to them were real, they are cheerfully willing to sacrifice them, while they have the remotest hope of thus cutting off even one of the sources of drunkenness, or arresting one friend or neighbour on the road to ruin. They do not look on the use of intoxicating liquors as necessary either to their health or happiness; they do not love them, and therefore, they do not wish to represent an abstinence from them as, on their part, a great sacrifice ”

“ Swallowed in an overdose, they act almost instantaneously—extinguishing the senses and overcoming the whole body with a sudden stupor. When spirits are swallowed raw, as in the form of a dram, they excite a glow of heat in the throat and stomach, succeeded, in those who are not much accustomed to their use, by a flushing of the countenance, and a copious discharge of tears. ”

“ According to these statements, on breathing the gas the pulse is accelerated, and a feeling of heat and expansion pervades the chest. The most vivid and highly pleasurable ideas pass, at the same time, through the mind; and the imagination is exalted to a pitch of entrancing ecstasy. The hearing is rendered more acute, the face is flushed, and the body seems so light that the person conceives himself capable of rising up and mounting into the air. ”

“ Not only does the drunkard draw down upon himself many diseases, both of body and mind, but if, in his intoxication, he commit any crime or misdemeanour, he becomes, like other subjects, amenable to the pains of law. In this respect, indeed, he is worse off than sober persons, for drunkenness far from palliating, is held to aggravate every offence; the law does not regard it as any extenuation of crime. ”

“ The giddiness of intoxication is always greater in darkness than in the light. I know of no rational way in which this can be explained; but, certain it is, the drunkard never so well knows his true condition as when alone and in darkness. Possibly the noise and light distracted the mind, and made the bodily sensations be, for the time, in some measure unfelt.
There are some persons who get sick from drinking even a small quantity; and this sickness is, upon the whole, a favourable circumstance, as it proves an effectual curb upon them, however much they may be disposed to intemperance. ”

“ The countenance is pale, there are usually tremors of the limbs, anxiety, and a total disrelish for the common amusements of life. Then succeed retching, vomiting, and much oppression at the pit of the stomach, with sometimes slimy stools. When the person sleeps, which is but seldom, he frequently starts in the utmost terror, having his imagination haunted by frightful dreams. To the first coldness, glows of heat succeed, and the slightest renewed agitation of body or mind, sends out a profuse perspiration. ”

“ No bodily affection ever influences the mind but through the remote or proximate agency of this organ. It sits enthroned in the citadel of thought, and, though material itself, acts with wizard power both upon matter and spirit. No other texture has the same pervading principle. If the lungs be diseased, we have expectoration and cough; if the liver, jaundice or dropsy; if the stomach, indigestion; but when the brain is affected, we have not merely many bodily symptoms, but severe affections of the mind; nor are such affections ever produced by any organ but through the agency of the brain. ”

“ The fixed air evolved from it produces a feeling analogous to ebriety, independent of the spirit it contains, Port, Sherry, and Madeira, are heavier wines, and have a stronger tendency to excite headach and fever.
The wine-bibber has usually an ominous rotundity of face, and, not unfrequently, of corporation. His nose is well studded over with carbuncles of the Claret complexion; and the red of his cheeks resembles very closely the hue of that wine. The drunkard from ardent spirits is apt to be a poor, miserable, emaciated figure, broken in mind and in fortune ”

“ PHENOMENA OF DRUNKENNESS.
The consequences of drunkenness are dreadful, but the pleasures of getting drunk are certainly ecstatic. While the illusion lasts, happiness is complete; care and melancholy are thrown to the wind ”

“ Many men become drunkards from family broils. They find no comfort at home, and gladly seek for [207] it out of doors. In such cases, it will be almost impossible to break the habit. The domestic sympathies and affections, which oppose a barrier to dissipation, and wean away the mind from the bottle, have here no room to act. When the mother of a family becomes addicted to liquor, the case is very afflicting. Home, instead of being the seat of comfort and order, becomes a species of Pandemonium: the social circle is broken up, and all its happiness destroyed. ”

“ If by intoxication is meant a state precisely similar to that from over-indulgence in vinous or spirituous liquors, they are undoubtedly right; but drunkenness merits a wider latitude of signification. The ecstasies of opium are much more entrancing than those of wine. There is more poetry in its visions—more mental aggrandizement—more range of imagination. Wine, in common with it, invigorates the animal powers and propensities, but opium, in a more peculiar manner, strengthens those proper to man, and gives, for a period amounting to hours, a [73] higher tone to the intellectual faculties. ”

“ A person, after excessive indulgence in liquor, may be seized with delirium, and run into a state of violent outrage and madness. In this case the disease comes suddenly on: the man is fierce and intractable, and requires a strait jacket to keep him in order. Some never get drunk without being insanely outrageous; they attack, without distinction, all who come in their way, foam at the mouth, and lose all sense of danger. This fit either goes off in a few hours, or degenerates into a confirmed attack of lunacy. ”

“ Daily experience convinces us that the same quantity of alcohol, applied to the stomach under the form of natural wine, and in a state of mixture with water, will produce very different effects upon the body, and to an extent which it is difficult to comprehend: it has, for instance, been demonstrated that Port, Madeira, and Sherry contain from one-fourth to one-fifth of their bulk of alcohol, so that a person who takes a bottle of either of them, will thus take nearly half a pint of alcohol, or almost a pint of pure brandy! ”

“ Such, I confess, are my own feelings on this subject; and in stating them, I am fully aware that the advocates of the Societies will answer—that a man’s private inclinations should be sacrificed to public good, and that for the sake of a general example, he should abandon that which, though harmless to him, in the limited extent to which he indulges in it, is pernicious to the mass of mankind. ”

“ I am inclined to think that though such absorption is not necessary to produce drunkenness, it generally takes place to a greater or lesser degree; nor can I conceive any reason why alcohol may not be taken into the circulation as well as any other fluid. My reasons for supposing that it is absorbed are the following:—1. The blood, breath, and perspiration of a confirmed drunkard differ from those of a sober man; the former being darker, and the two latter strongly impregnated with a spirituous odour. 2. The perspiration of the wine-drinker is often of the hue of his favourite liquor ”

“ To use the words of Addison, “Not only does this vice betray the hidden faults of a man, and show them in the most odious colours, but often occasions faults to which he is not naturally subject. Wine throws a man out of himself, and infuses qualities into the mind which she is a stranger to in her sober moments.” ”

“ A debauch fevers the system, and no man can stand a perpetual succession of fevers without injuring himself, and at last destroying life.
Drunkenness, in the long run, changes its character. The sensations of the confirmed tippler, when intoxicated, are nothing, in point of pleasure, to those of the habitually temperate man, in the same condition. We drink at first for the serenity which is diffused over the mind, and not from any positive love we bear to the liquor. ”

“ Now, drunkenness in the long run, is one of those diseased actions. The system no longer acts with its original purity: it is operated upon by a fictitious excitement, and, in the course of time, assumes a state quite foreign to its original constitution—an action which, however unhealthy, becomes, ultimately, in some measure, natural. When we use opium for a long time, we cannot immediately get rid of it, because it has given rise to a false action in the system—which would suffer a sudden disorder if deprived of its accustomed stimulus. ”

“ There are particular situations and circumstances in which a man can stand liquor better than in others. In the close atmosphere of a large town, he is soon overpowered; and it is here that the genuine drunkard is to be met with in the greatest perfection. In the country, especially in a mountainous district, or on the sea-shore, where the air is cold and piercing, a great quantity may be taken with impunity. The highlanders drink largely of ardent spirits, and they are often intoxicated, yet, among them, there are comparatively few who can be called habitual drunkards. ”

“ Paris alone consumes more than three times the quantity of wine consumed in the British Isles. It is true that much of the wine drunk in the French capital is of a weak quality, being used as a substitute for small beer. But after every allowance is made, enough remains to show clearly, if other proofs were wanting, how much the use of wine here is restricted by our exorbitant duties. It would be well for the morals of this country if the people abandoned the use of ardent spirits, and were enabled to resort to such wines as the French are in the habit of drinking. ”

“ Here the stomach and system in general lose their irritability, in the same way as in confirmed topers, but this is more from torpor than from weakness. The springs of life become less delicate; the pivots on which they move get, as it were, clogged, and, though existence goes on with vigour, it is not the bounding and elastic vigour of perfect health. This proceeds, not from debility, but from torpor; the muscular fibre becoming, like the hands of a labouring man, hardened and blunted in its sensibilities. ”

“ The brain, through the medium of its nervous branches, is the source of all this excitement. These branches receive the impressions and convey them to their fountain-head, whence they are showered like sparkling rain-drops over the mind, in a thousand fantastic varieties. ”

“ In a word, the gas produced precisely a temporary paroxysm of drunkenness, and such a determination of blood upwards as rendered the complexion livid, and left behind some degree of headach. Such are the effects upon myself, but with most people, there is a total unconsciousness of the part they are acting. They perform the most extravagant pranks, and on recovering their self-possession are totally ignorant of the circumstance. Sometimes the gas has an opposite effect, and the person instantly drops down insensible, as if struck by lightning: he recovers, however, immediately. ”

“ If they have so little self-command, the sooner they connect themselves with Temperance Societies the better. I believe that by a moderate indulgence in spirits no man can be injured, and that many will often be benefited. It is their abuse which renders them a curse rather than a blessing to mankind; and it is with this abuse alone I find fault, in the same way as I would object to excess in eating, or any other excess. People, therefore, would do well to draw a distinction between the proper use and the abuse of these stimulants, and regulate themselves accordingly. ”

“ A milk or vegetable diet will commonly be preferable to every other. But there are cases in which food of a richer quality is requisite, as when there is much emaciation and debility. Here it may even be necessary to give a moderate quantity of wine. In gout, likewise, too great a change of living is not always salutary, more especially in advanced years, where there is weakness of the digestive organs, brought on by the disease. In old age, wine is often useful to sustain the system, more especially when sinking by the process of natural decay. ”