Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors.

Date:
[1874?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Religious and educational aspects of temperance / by various authors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    million little centres we call the domestic shrines. (Cheers.) We must approach moderate drinking, then, and speak of it, and think of it, as something which is the cause of all the evil; and this League did never do a better thing than when, at the instance, I believe, of its indefati- gable secretary, Mr. Rae—(cheers)—it suggested that we should tackle this question from the simple point, with the knowledge that if we can suppress the evil at its source, we shall suppress it altogether. There are many pleas in favour of moderate drinking. Moderate drinking is, indeed, a very plausible position to defend, and in the future remarks I shall make I shall try to expose certain of these pleas, and show where they are wrong. And first, I notice that the moderation argument is plausible on this point, that it asserts that alcohol is a necessity—a necessity as a food for man. It never presumes to assert that it is necessary as a food for any inferior animal—(laughter)—but it says that for man it is a necessity, and that he must take it as a food. I make a very clean breast on this matter at all times. I freely confess that many men took the lead of me in showing the fallacy of this argument : that they learned the fallacy from their own experience, from their own moral sense ; while others before me also showed it up scientifically, amongst whom is Dr. Edmunds, who is with us to-night. (Cheers.) We thus enjoy the light of experiment, as well as of experience, and so we are doubly lighted towards what is the truth ; and although many of you may have read what I am about to say, yet I shall not, I hope, weary you if I some- what repeat myself, and so speak to the larger public outside. I am recording a matter of history—of personal history—on this question when I say that I for one had once no thought of alcohol except as a food. I thought it warmed us. I thought it gave additional strength. I thought it enabled us to endure mental and bodily fatigue. I thought it cheered the heart and lifted up the mind into greater activity. But it so happened that I was asked to study the action of alcohol along with a whole series of chemical bodies, and to investigate their bearing in relation to each other. And so I took alcohol from the shelf of my laboratory, as I might any other drug or chemical there, and I asked it in the course of experiments extending over a lengthened period:— “ What do you do ?” I asked it, “ Do you warm the animal body when you are taken into it ? ” The reply came invariably, “ I do not, except in a mere flush of surface excitement. There is, in fact, no warming, but, on the contrary, an effect of cooling and chilling the body.” Then I turn round to it in another direction, and ask it: “ Do you give muscular strength 1” I test it by the most rigid analysis and experi- ment I can adopt. I test muscular power under the. influence of it in various forms and degrees, and its reply is, “ I give no muscular strength.” I turn to its effect upon the organs of the body, and find that while it expedites the heart’s action it reduces tonicity, and turning to the nervous system I find the same reply ; that is to say, I find the nervous system more quickly worn out under the influence of this agent than if none of it is taken at all. I ask it, “ Can you build up any of the tissues of the body ? ” The answer again is in the negative. “ I build nothing. If I do anything, I add fatty matter to the body, but
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