Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/569

Rh which it has been impossible to bring about by the most vigorous, prolonged, and comprehensive moral movement of modern times, can still be brought about through the passage of enactments by political majorities.

How far this change went may be further illustrated. In the first stage of the temperance movement the wrong to be righted was on the part of the individual who indulged in drinking-habits. The practice was denounced because held to be intrinsically immoral, self-destructive, and vicious in all its influences. The turpitude and wickedness of the case consisted in the act of indulgence. But, with the change of tactics on the part of the reformers, the point of assault was shifted: the pressure was virtually taken off the party that committed the wrong act, and applied to the commercial transaction that preceded it. The liquor-trade was denounced as the real root of the evil of intemperance, and the men who sold alcoholic spirits were held to be the culpable offenders and the criminals who deserved to be dealt with by punishment like other criminals. Yet the sale of liquors, like the sale of anything else, is a compound transaction—a seller implies a buyer—and they are both voluntary parties to the proceeding. If that proceeding is wrong, both are to be condemned—certainly the one who makes the demand as much as he who supplies it; and, if the partnership transaction is criminal, it is difficult to see why both should not be punished alike. But, in the new aspect of the case, he who drinks is virtually relieved from condemnation, while those who sell him the beverage become the objects of concentrated reprobation, to be punished with the full severity of the law. This fundamental change in the policy of the temperance movement, involving as it does the virtual abandonment of those agencies which are most proper to influence conduct, and which were clearly vindicated in their beneficent working can hardly be regarded as a step forward in the legitimate development of the temperance movement.

It is in the light of such experiences that we are to consider the measure now brought forward for the further promotion of abstinence from intoxicating liquors.

This measure is a partial reversion to the older method, and may be characterized as politico-educational, with special relation to the scientific aspect of the subject. It is proposed to give instruction in relation to the physiological effects of alcohol, and thus, as has been said, "to play the school-house against the saloon." It may be well to do this, but it will be wise not to expect too much from it. It is a very crude measure, and has been born of temperance zeal rather than any intelligent appreciation of the subject.

In the first place, the action of alcohol and the narcotics upon the human system opens one of the obscurest, and we may add, the most unsettled, of all questions. But little, in fact, is known of the modus operandi of these agents upon the nervous system, where they take such special and disastrous effect. School-teachers can not explain it—doctors can not explain it; no two will agree about it. The theories of the behavior of alcohol in the human system have undergone change after change within a generation, and we are probably but little nearer the final solution of the problem than when the first experiments were made upon cats and dogs to solve it.

In the next place, the amount of physiology that is or that can be taught in common schools, and by all the teachers under State control, is grossly insufficient to make intelligible what is known of the physiological effects of alcohol. The crude smattering of physiology got in such schools under ordinary teaching is absolutely worthless as a preparation for understanding the subtile influence of narcotic agents upon