ALCOHOL; ITS HISTORY, AND ITS EFFECTS UPON SOCIETY.
By W. H. Riley, M.D.
By W. H. Riley, M.D., Superintendent of Colorado Sanitarium, Boulder, Colo. History of the Use of Alcohol.
DURING the last century, drunkenness was the rule, not the exception, in all classes of society. In the lower classes it was actually encouraged. Did the troops win a victory, did a prince come of age, 'Go home, Jack,' would say a master to his servant, 'build a big bonfire, and tell the butler to make ye all drunk.' It was quite a compliment to call an underling an 'honest, drunken fellow.' And as for the gentlefolk—well, we can hardly conceive of the state of affairs. It was part of a gentleman's education to learn to carry his port. One, two, three quarts a night was a proper and reasonable supply. After dinner the ladies retired to another room—a practise still observed—so that the men should have no embarrassing restraints; and it was a matter of course for them to drink one another under the table as fast as was convenient. In the army and navy, in the learned professions, among the gentry and nobility, and even in the royal family, heavy drinking was the rule, and not the exception, until well on into the present century. "And they suffered for it. Their lives were shortened, their usefulness impaired, their estates squandered—and then the gout! Nowadays, with the example of Palmerston and Bismarck, Gladstone and Sherman, before our eyes, it is hard to think of a time when statesmen were incapacitated at thirty-five or forty. But it was so. A gentleman who reached middle age without being crippled was considered either unusually lucky or a milk-sop. Lord Chatham and many, nay, most of his contemporaries were horribly tortured by gout. At critical periods in the nation's history a severe onset of gout, or the illness leading up to it, was liable to cause the retirement of the most prominent statesmen. Many of them died young. Few indeed reached a healthy and vigorous old age; for heavy drinking was not confined to the idlers and spendthrifts, the courtiers and country gentlemen; it was a custom with the ablest and most brilliant men in England. "It must not be inferred, however, that drinking was much more prevalent in England than in other parts of the world at the same periods. Indeed, the records of Germany and Holland show quite as startling pictures. And in our own country we have not much to boast of. "When the Puritans landed in Massachusetts in 1620, they found, to their disgust, that beer and wine were both lacking, and we find Governor Bradford complaining bitterly of the hardships of drinking water. Nor was water a more favored beverage among the settlers of Massachusetts Bay eight or ten years later." Higginson, a minister in Massachusetts, wrote a glowing account of the country, where his health had been greatly improved. He speaks thus of his improvement: "And whereas my stomach could only digest and did require such drinke as was both strong and stale, now I can and doe oftentimes drinke New England water verie well." Another bore witness to this marvelous fact concerning New England water: "Those that drinke it be as healthful, fresh and lustie as they that drinke beere." "The first list of necessities sent back to the home company, in 1629, is headed by an appeal for 'ministers,' and for a 'patent under seale;' and only a line or two further down is a request for 'vyne planters.' They also ask for wheat, rye, barley, and other grains, and for 'hop rootes.' By 1631 it had become necessary to pass a law for putting drunkards in the stocks; other laws followed concerning adulterations, save to savages, etc. In 1634 the price of an 'ale quart of beere' was set at a penny, and brew-houses were soon in every village, and in some places attached to every farm. By 1650 every little New England town and village had its distillery—the seaport towns had scores of them—and the rum bullion, rumbooze, or, as it was universally known, 'kill divil,' was sold freely for two shillings a gallon, and was shipped largely to the African coast in exchange for slaves. "Liquor was not only used at dinner and supper parties, it was taken morning, noon, and night, as a matter of course. The laborer would not work at the harvest, the builders at their trades, without a liberal allowance of rum. It did not matter, either, what class of work they were doing. When the little town of Midfield, early in the last century, 'raised' the new meeting-house, there were required 'four barrels of beer, twenty-four gallons of West Indian rum, thirty gallons New England rum, thirty-five pounds loaf sugar, twenty-five pounds brown sugar, and four hundred sixty-five lemons.' A house could not be built without liquor being distributed at every stage of the operation; and this practise was not obsolete until well on into this century. "The clergy, while keeping a strict eye upon the excesses of their parishioners, did not disdain a drop themselves, and their conventions rivaled the dinners of the non-elect. In 1792 Governor Hancock gave a dinner to the fusileers at the Merchants' Club in Boston, and for eighty dinners there were served one hundred thirty-six bowls of punch, twenty-one bottles of sherry, and lots of cider and brandy. It would be but useless repetition to discuss the drinking habits of New York and other colonies. It is enough to say that well on into the present century drunkenness was exceedingly common, and, when people could afford it, a most pardonable and venial offense. "The world has at last found what intoxication means. Alcohol in large doses is a poison, but it is a poison that injures the family and neighbors and friends of the inebriate more than the victim himself. It shortens his life, to be sure; but think of the other lives that it shortens! And while some attack the problem with fierce and wild denunciations, and others by quieter but not less effective arguments and appeals, the world certainly owes a debt of gratitude to those who are doing so much now, and who have done so much already, to relieve mankind from the burden of inebriety." —Prof. Chas. E. Pellew, in Popular Science Monthly, July, 1897. [The next article in the series is entitled "The Composition of Alcohol."]