Temperance by H. Clay Trumbull

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 22, 1881

Temperance.

By H. Clay Trumbull

IS WINE SAFER THAN WATER?

IF a man were to judge of the comparative harmlessness of wine and water by what he hears said of the danger of drinking water while away from his home, and of the necessity of using wine instead, he would be tempted to think that wine is the true “gift of God,” and that water is an invention of the devil.

Some years ago I was riding in an open wagon over the plains of California, with three men who before were strangers to me. The day was hot and the road dusty. At noon-time we stopped at a wayside tavern for dinner. The dinner consisted chiefly of boiled pork, boiled potatoes and boiled beans. One of my companions, not less than sixty years of age, ate of the pork and beans as if he were laying in a week’s provisions. After dinner we were again on our tedious ride. Under the hot sun, and in the jolting wagon, my heavily-laden seat-mate was taken with cramps. As he writhed and groaned in pain, it never seemed to occur to him that that pork and those beans were proving too much for him. Oh, no! It was the water which had done the mischief. “Dear me!” he groaned out, I wish I hadn’t drank any of that water at dinner. It’s almost killing me. I declare I’ll never drink any more of the water, without a touch of brandy, as long as I am in California. It really isn’t safe.” And that man’s idea of the perils of water drinking away from home is a good illustration of the general feeling on the subject, among travelers in our own country and abroad.

While at Florence in Italy, I was remonstrated with by a kind-hearted lady, who sat next me at the dinner-table, because I ventured to drink cold water as at home. She assured me that there was no safety there except in wine-drinking—even the guide-books emphasized that fact. Moreover she told me pathetically of the serious effects of water-drinking in Florence, by one and another who had for a time dared brave its risks. I then noticed that I and my traveling companions were the only persons at that well-filled table who did not drink wine. I saw enough of my fellow-boarders in their eating, and I knew enough of them in their modes of living, to know that drinking cold water was not the only danger to which they were exposed in Florence, and that wine-drinking would not by any means prove a guard against their every bodily peril. In their minds it was not the unsettled life they were living; not the fatigue of sight-seeing, day after day; not the exposure of the night air, and the drain on their nervous force by their late hours and their unaccustomed variety of food, that was a cause of any physical disturbance they might have experienced; no, no, it was “the water”—the God-given, God-cursed water that was at the bottom of their every fear and risk. And I happened to know, moreover, that the water there at Florence was a great deal better water for steady drinking than the water on which many of those American travelers had been brought up in their American western and southern homes. And as to a substitute for the native water of the region,—if they desired to avoid that,—it didn’t seem to occur to them that any of the many standard bottled mineral waters which were available there, would be safer and more health-giving than native wine. No, it was the water that must be shunned; it was the wine that must be taken.

I have spoken of Florence because the water there is called particularly bad. But it is pretty much the same the world over, as to this dread of water, and faith in wine, by the average traveler. Why, here in Philadelphia, during the Centennial summer, when millions came in from outside, and packed themselves in close quarters, and wore themselves out with long days of walking and standing and bewildering gazing, and overtaxed their stomachs with hurriedly eaten, indigestible lunches, whatever pains and aches anybody from that throng of visitors had, in Philadelphia or on the way home, were almost without exception attributed to the water. Of course it was the water! To hear one talk about the troubles that come from water drinking away from one’s home, might fairly prompt the question, Is there anything that is really dangerous in this world except water? And yet all this talk about the necessity laid on a traveler to drink wine or brandy instead of water while away from his home is sheer, bald nonsense.

I have traveled not a little in my life-time, I have averaged nearly twenty thousand miles a year for twenty years at a time, I have been through the length and breadth of our land from Maine to California, and from Minnesota to Florida. I have journeyed also in Europe and Asia and Africa. Yet I never found the place where it was necessary for me to drink wine or brandy, nor yet where I deemed a native wine as safe as the native water, judging from the apparent effects on those who used, the one or the other.

I have found some pretty poor water in my day, lime-stone water, brackish water, muddy water, sulphurous water, water well-nigh putrid with decaying vegetation. I have drunk water through a little pocket filter, from the prints of my horse’s hoofs in the traveled road after a rain-storm, as the only mode of quenching my thirst with water. I have drunk water from the tangled swamps in the sea-islands of the South Carolina coast, when I had to hold my breath as I drank because of the water’s stench. But I was sure in all these cases, that that water was safer as a drink, than wine would be, and that if I added anything to it to render it innocuous, there was less reason for my trying whisky or brandy, than ginger or mustard. Among all the personal risks that I have been called to take, in my life of varied experiences, I really count water drinking the very least, and of all the personal risks I have had occasion to note in others, from my earliest recollection to the present hour, I put wine drinking among the greater.

Several years after our civil war, I was at the Surgeon General’s office in Washington, making a call on Dr. Otis, with whom I had been a comrade in army life, and who was now compiling and tabulating the medical records of the entire army. In the course of our conversation he asked me how it was that my health endured through all the exposures to which I had been liable in army service and in prison life. My answer was, “Well, Doctor, I suppose you will hardly agree with me on that point. I think that my keeping up so well was due to my letting whisky alone. The water we had was bad enough; but I thought it was better than the whisky, and I stuck to it all through the war. I think my total abstinence was my safety. I never borrowed to-morrow’s income to pay to-day’s expenses with, but I lived on the day’s strength every day of the war.” The Doctor’s prompt response was: “A few years ago I shouldn’t have agreed with you on that point, but now I do. Since I have compared in this office, the health-rolls of regiments where the surgeons refused to give whisky, with those of regiments where whisky was given freely, I am so impressed with the proof of gain from total abstinence, that I wonder how so many of our soldiers lived through our whisky treatment of them.” And as with whisky in America, so with wine in Europe. So distinguished a medical authority as Sir Henry Thompson has said recently in a letter to the London Times: “I can affirm . . . without hesitation, that the ordinary traveler need never run the risk of drinking poisoned water. I may also add here that it is equally unnecessary to drink alcoholic liquor of any kind. . . . During the last ten years, of which a total of more than two has been spent in Continental hotels, I have never consumed any other liquids than tea, coffee, and mineral waters.”

The evil effects of wine drinking I have seen both at home and abroad. A large proportion of all those who were my play-fellows and schoolmates have either died from intemperance or are living drunkards. Men of my acquaintance who had larger brain and stronger will than I could claim, have proved unable to resist the temptation to excess which wine drinking promotes. Even the seeming possession of a Christian character has by no means proved a safeguard against this danger to those who tampered with the evil. Ministers of the gospel by the score, within the range of my personal acquaintance, have been among the victims of intemperance. And wives and mothers, as well as young ladies, have swelled the list of those whom I have known as drunkards—through counting wine drinking safe and necessary. Indeed I have known but few families in all my life, which the curse of intemperance had not in some way blighted. I have in mind the only son of a widowed Christian mother who learned to drink while traveling with his mother, she thinking that wine was safer for him than water. He is a hopeless, worthless sot. He would better have taken the risks of native water, as I did when I was his fellow traveler. I have seen on our ocean steamers, and in European hotels, the wine-flush on the cheek of young wives and young misses and lads, day after day, and I have no more doubt that a large share of those wine drinking travelers are to die drunkards, than I am that water runs down hill. If a man drinks wine himself, he is not so likely to notice the effect of wine drinking on those who are at table with him. Yet I have been told by an intelligent Christian advocate of hotel table wine drinking in Europe, that the effect of the wine in loosening his own tongue and the tongues of his young lady table-mates was one reason of his counting it desirable. To say that the native wine of a vine-growing country is not promotive of intemperance, is to say that the Bible talks nonsense when it tells of Noah’s being stupidly drunk on wine from his own vineyard. Even if men were to deny the Bible story about Noah’s wine, I could testify that I have seen men drunk on native wine, both in Europe and America, and that I know so much of the danger of wine drinking as leading to intemperance that I am afraid to drink wine or beer, at home or abroad, lest I should become a drunkard myself, apart from any question of my example before others who are weaker than I am—if there are such.

It requires some courage not to drink wine abroad. Indeed, almost any self-denial involves a struggle—apart from the control of appetite. The fashion of this world is against self-denial. Wine drinking is the fashion in Europe, and one must have some character to be willing, anywhere, to stand as notably singular in a personal habit or a social custom. Moreover, those who do drink, will be constantly telling those who do not that there is no other safe way than theirs. If one would go and come as a total abstainer, he must be ready to abide unflinchingly by his own judgment, as to the right and safe way, in spite of the example and the entreaties and the solemn warnings of very excellent people, who think and do differently. But why should one not be an abstainer? Even though he fails to find total abstinence absolutely commanded in the Bible, he must admit that it is not forbidden there. Hence the privilege is before him to let wine alone if he wants to. And availing himself of this privilege, he avoids a terrible risk on the one hand, and he runs no risk on the other. For myself, I am afraid to venture on the moderate use of those drinks which have by their very use led so many to use them immoderately. I have seen that wine drinking anywhere is dangerous. I have found that water drinking is safer than wine drinking everywhere. That is my testimony on the wine question.—H. Clay Trumbull, in S. S. Times.