Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/474

458 transgression. There is a Spanish proverb to the effect that it is easier to keep the devil out than to turn him out, and many dupes of the Good Familiar would actually think it an ingratitude to turn him off; but they should have known better than to admit him when he presented himself with horns and claws. To a normal taste every poison is abhorrent, and with the rarest exceptions the degree of the repulsiveness is proportioned to that of the virulence. In the mouth of a healthy child, rum is a liquid fire; beer, an emetic; tea and coffee, bitter decoctions; tobacco-fumes revolt the stomach of the non-habitué Only blind deference to the example of his elders will induce a boy to accustom himself to such abominations; if he were left to the guidance of his natural instincts, intoxication would be anything but an insidious vice.

With all its ramifications, the poison-habit is a upas-tree which has polluted the well-springs and tainted the very atmosphere of our social life. The woe which the human race owes to alcohol alone is so far beyond description that I will here only record my belief that its total interdiction will form the first commandment in the decalogue of the future. The power of prejudice has its limits. No man, possessed of a vestige of common sense, can read the scientific literature that has accumulated upon the subject, and doubt that even the moderate use of distilled liquors as a beverage amply justifies the belief in the existence of unqualified evils. The effects of tea and coffee drinking are also well understood, but I must call attention to an often overlooked though most important feature of the habit—its progressiveness. The original moderate quantum soon palls, and it is this craving of the system for the same degree of stimulation which leads us to Johnsonian excesses or to the adoption of a stronger stimulant. Men generally prefer the latter alternative. Coffee, tea, and tobacco pave the way to opium in the East and to alcohol in the West. The same holds true of pungent spices. Pepper and mustard form the vanguard of the poison fiend. They inflame the liver, produce a morbid irritability of the stomach, cause numerous functional derangements by impeding the process of assimilation, and thus become auxiliary in expediting the development of the poison-habit. Whatever irritates the digestive organs or unusually exhausts the vital forces tends to the same effect. Besides, they blunt the susceptibility of the gustatory nerves, and thus diminish our enjoyment of the simple viands that should form our daily food. In trying to heighten that enjoyment, the surfeited gastronome defeats his own purpose: all sweetmeats pall; the most appetizing dishes he values only as a foil to his caustic condiments, like the Austrian peddler who trudges through the flower-leas of the Alpenland in a cloud of nicotine, and to whom the divine afflatus of the morning wind is only so much draught for his tobacco-pipe.

With a single and not quite explained exception, man is the only animal that resorts to stimulation: a few ruminant mammals—cows,