Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/396

382 A momentary digression may be permissible at this point; it will help to illustrate what is to be said shortly. In an elaborate paper on alcohol, read before the Medical Society of London last winter, by Dr. Lauder Brunton, F. R. S., to which was awarded the society's medal, it was stated that the first effects of alcohol are felt in the higher or controlling portions of the brain. The consequences are, that the lower or animal impulses manifest themselves, freed from the control to which they are ordinarily subject. Such are the first symptoms of intoxication, after the stage of exhilaration has been passed. Then the motor centres are implicated; and complex movements, like walking, ordinarily habitual, require a conscious effort for their execution, and even then the performance is imperfect. After this the lower portions at the base of the brain are involved, leaving nothing but the respiration and the circulation in action; while still further intoxication arrests these movements, and the organism perishes.

It is this effect upon the higher centres of the brain which induces the most disastrous social outcomes of alcoholic indulgence. The person who takes alcohol to excess becomes a lower form of being by comparison with those around him. This is seen alike in the individual and in the aggregate. There is a diminution so brought about in the power to exercise self-control, and to estimate aright the claims of the future upon the present; there is produced a state of thriftlessness and recklessness, and a lack of consideration for others. These effects are demonstrated distinctly in two out of many practices. The one is that form of improvident self-indulgence—early and premature marriage, where the rite is robbed of all sacredness, and degraded to a mere form of license for unrestrained indulgence. This is common in the pit districts of Durham, where comparative children present themselves to be married, who can scarcely have realized the gravity of the step they are taking. Another form, sadly too common, is that of living in any hovel where the rent is small, so that a larger sum weekly remains over to be spent in drink. This is especially found amid the Irish in towns. The moral effects of decent houses, with sufficient sleeping accommodation for the two sexes, are well known; the disastrous immoral effects of huddling different sexes and ages together, from want of proper sleeping-space, are equally notorious. Not only are these evil consequences of such overcrowding produced, but, when alcohol gives the rein to the passions, these consequences are aggravated and intensified. There are then blended the direct and the indirect outcomes of alcoholic excess, each of which aggravates and adds to the other.

It is unnecessary to multiply illustrations of the deterioration of character induced by alcoholic indulgence. Just one more may be adduced. When recently on a visit to the South Yorkshire Asylum, near Sheffield, Dr. Mitchell, its accomplished superintendent, informed me that even in the victims of mania and general paralysis there was a marked contrast in the degree of violence manifested betwixt the