Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/27

 ONE ASPECT OF VICE 13

debt ; and it maketh every heart glad." Clement, in the Instruc- tor, bears like testimony : " It is fitting that some apply wine by way of physic, for the sake of health alone ; others for pur- poses of relaxation and enjoyment." " For first, wine makes the man who has drunk it more benignant than before, more agreeable to his boon-companions, kinder to his domestics, and more pleasant to his friends ; but when intoxicated, he becomes

violent instead It has therefore been well said: 'A joy

to the soul and heart, was wine created from the beginning, when drunk in moderate sufficiency.'"

At the thought of temperance societies one finds Renan wrathfully exclaiming: "Deprive the poor of the only joy they have on promising them a paradise which will never be theirs ! Why will you prevent these unhappy people from plunging a moment into the ideal ? These are perhaps the hours when they have a real value." An English rhymester has crystallized the same thought in a couplet more true than poetical :

Kings may be blest, but Tarn was glorious, O'er all the ills of life victorious.

But it is evident that any principle which explains the actions of a certain class of men must submit to a universal application if it be indeed a real principle and this one does. Some men drink in their grief, to force the energy of thinking on to other thoughts, just as others listen to hope-producing words. Some drink in their joy, to urge their feelings on ; and everywhere in society, emptiness of interest, lack of responsi- bility, failure to find organically related stimuli, leads to the use of stimulants. It is not alone the poor man who drinks. His richer brother, who has not given real thought-demanding hos- tages to fortune, is in the same predicament, and finds relief in the same process. No organ of the body will endure to be cast aside without protesting. If the external excitation which we call sensation is a release of tension ; if a stimulus approaching an organ of sense does this, why may not its pseudo-type, a stimulant, have the same effect and be called for by the same tension in the absence of a normal stimulus which will release it? But why is the normal stimulus absent that the false one must