The Table, and Moral Character.
By Mrs. M. M. Jones
THE table! how vast an influence it exerts on human life and character; how much of the weal or woe of humanity clusters around it! In determining our physical, mental, and moral conditions, no other one thing in all the material universe has so vast a power as that which we take daily in the shape of food and drink. Much, very much, of the sickness, suffering, and premature death in the world; much of its vice, immorality, and crime, can, if traced to its starting-point, be found to originate here. Anxious days and sleepless nights are spent by parents in their earnest endeavors to devise some means to subdue the peevishness and fretfulness, the obstinacy or the immorality, of their children, only to find, alas! their admonitions unheeded, their agonizing prayers of no avail; they little dreaming that the causes of this perverseness lie, in a great measure, within their own control; that these unhappy mental and moral manifestations are caused by a disordered condition of the bodily functions, produced by the improper kinds and quantities of food which they have allowed them to eat. That abnormal conditions of the body never exist without more or less influencing the mind, no arguments are needed to prove. Take, for instance, the drunkard while under the dominion of alcohol. Of what avail are his own resolutions, or the prayers, the tears, the earnest entreaties of friends, to stay the fierce, ungovernable passions which rage within him, or to rouse him from the dull, leaden stupor into which the demon of drink often plunges its victims? What are moral influences then? So many "wisps of straw" to bind the Samson of evil. But remove the cause, then your appeals to his better nature may be of some avail; while it remains, never. It is but speaking the simple truth to say that fully one-half the evil and misery that exist in the world have their origin in improper dietetic habits. The starting-point of intemperance, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is in the stimulating or gross food and drink received at a fond mother's table in infancy and boyhood, producing, in time, a craving for stronger stimulus, found at last in the intoxicating cup. And to that table, too, may be traced the origin of a majority of the countless diseases which people our cemeteries, and make this bright world of ours really a "vale of tears." All over the land are scattered, by hundreds and thousands, wretched invalids—poor, miserable dyspeptics, to whom life is a burden, and existence a bane—consumptives, lingering with one foot in the grave, who to-day might have been doing the work of strong and earnest men and women, had they and their parents but realized the truth of this. And to too many of them, years and years, yea, a life-time of earnest effort in the "better way," are barely sufficient to undo the wrong which need never have existed. Health reform does not seek to curtail the gustatory pleasures of the table, but rather to enhance them. No drunkard can enjoy his glass of brandy as the teetotaler does his cup of clear, cold, sparkling water. So, those who live upon rich and stimulating food are really losers, instead of gainers, in the pleasures of the table. The spices, condiments, and seasonings, universally employed, so far destroy the natural flavor of food that the taste of persons habitually accustomed to their use, becomes so perverted that they can no more detect the real delicate flavor of the food itself than the drunkard can appreciate the excellence of pure water; and their enjoyment is not to be compared in steady, lasting endurance to that of those who live upon a truly hygienic diet, as all who have tried it thoroughly can testify.—Mrs. M. M. Jones.