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 contracted the old name now. But I should have thought that the white man, by introducing among these poor creatures iron, fire-arms, blankets, and, above all, horses wherewith to follow the buffalo-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 wanting vitality, crave for stimulants. But if the stimulants, and not the original want of vitality, combined with morals utterly detestable, 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' extinction: 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, bowever, 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 Sanitary 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, conquered 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 covetousness, 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 disgraces this country now....
"I said just now that a probable cause of increasing drunkenness was the increasing material prosperity of thousands who knew no recreation beyond low animal pleasure. 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 narcotics. 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 refinement and variety of their tastes and occupations? 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, horticulture, 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 feelings, such as no rational man will now neglect, either for himself, his children, or his workpeople."
