The Necessaries of Life.
By Frank Hope
MR. WM. BOOTH, of the Salvation Army, has issued a circular calling for "a week of self-denial," as a means of raising funds to carry on the work of the Army. "To this appeal," he says, "there seems likely to be a generous response. All over the land our people are promising to give up, not luxuries merely, for they have few to sacrifice, but necessaries, such as animal food, tea, sugar, and the like." He asks others to unite with him in "this self-denying plan." Taking these as the necessaries of life, we would like to ask what are the luxuries? The necessaries are "tea, sugar, and the like," how much does this include? Coffee, tobacco, and opium are similar to tea, where are we to draw the line? But is tea necessary to life? Dr. A. E. Flint, of New York, speaking, in his treatise on the "Heart and Kidneys," of the use of tea and coffee, says:— "The use of these common articles of consumption, however, is attended with dangers which, while very generally suspected, are not perfectly realized, except by the comparative few who have made them a study. . . . In fact, many obscure cases of kidney disease have been at last found to be dependent upon the use of tea and coffee without any secondary exciting cause. Their stimulating effect upon the heart, by causing it to work more vigorously, gives rise to hypertrophy, which is followed by inflammation of distant organs and by serious nervous disturbances." Any article that is absolutely injurious to the human system can hardly be called a "necessary." That animal food is not necessary to sustain life has been practically demonstrated over and over again. There are thousands of people to-day who subsist on a purely vegetable diet. The Hindoo and the Chinese coolie do their hard day's work on a diet that consists of nothing more than pure rice; the Scotch Hercules is to a great extent raised on oatmeal, and the hardy Roman soldiers fared on little more than coarse rye bread. With these facts in view, animal food cannot be consistently called a necessary. In the light of these facts the Salvation Army's self-denying fast amounts to this, that the most devoted have for a week abstained from indulging in a few injurious luxuries; but what sort of a fast those had who did not go to this extreme, it is impossible to imagine.