But probably the instinct of self-preservation will assert itself in
time, and an antidote to the steam-engine will be found before it has
impaired the whole race beyond recovery. To have discovered the truth
with regard to the effects of alcohol upon the system was of itself no
slight triumph of the self-preserving principle. It is probable that
the truly helpful men of the next hundred years will occupy themselves
very much with the physical welfare of the race, without which no other
welfare is possible.
INEBRIATE ASYLUMS, AND A VISIT TO ONE.
There are two kinds of drunkards,--the Regular and the Occasional. Of
each of these two classes there are several varieties, and, indeed,
there are no two cases precisely alike; but every drunkard in the world
is either a person who has lost the power to refrain from drinking a
certain large quantity of alcoholic liquor every day, or he is one who
has lost the power to refrain from drinking an uncertain enormous
quantity now and then.
Few get drunk habitually who can refrain. If they could refrain, they
would; for to no creatures is drunkenness so loathsome and temperance
so engaging as to seven tenths of the drunkards. There are a few very
coarse men, of heavy, stolid, animal organization, who almost seem
formed by nature to absorb alcohol, and in whom there is not enough of
manhood to be ashamed of its degradation. These Dr. Albert Day, the
superintendent of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, sometimes calls
Natural Drunkards. They like strong drink for its own sake; they have a
kind of sulky enjoyment of its muddling effect upon such brains as they
happen to have; and when once the habit is fixed, nothing can deliver
them except stone walls and iron bars. There are also a few drunkards
of very light calibre, trifling persons, incapable of serious
reflection or of a serious purpose, their very terrors being trivial
and transitory, who do not care for the ruin in which they are
involved. Generally speaking, however, drunkards hate the servitude
into which they have had the misfortune to fall; they long to escape
from it, have often tried to escape, and if they have given up, it is
only after having so many times slidden back into the abyss, that they
feel it would be of no use to climb again. As Mrs. H. B. Stowe remarks,
with that excellent charity of hers, which is but another name for
refined justice, "Many a drunkard has expended more virtue in vain
endeavors to break his chain than suffices to carry an ordinary
Christian to heaven."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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