Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/140

116 conscience of men; from the use of liquor men grow coarser, stupider, and wickeder.

What advantage is there from the use of intoxicating drinks?

None!

The advocates of vodka, wine, beer, assure us in advance that these drinks enhance the health and strength, that they warm and cheer. But now it is indisputably proved that this is not true. Intoxicating beverages do not improve the health, because they contain a violent poison,—alcohol,—and the use of a poison cannot fail to be injurious.

That wine does not increase a man's strength has been proved many times, and by the fact that when the work of a drinking mechanic and of a mechanic who does not drink are compared, during the course of months and years, it is always proved that the non-drinking man does more work and better work than the drinker; and by the fact that in those companies of soldiers which on campaigns use vodka there are always more incapacitated and more stragglers than in those where vodka is not used.

In exactly the same way it has been proved that liquor does not warm, and that the heat felt after drinking liquor does not hold out long, and that the man, after the brief increase in temperature, soon grows colder than ever, so that a drinking man always finds it much harder to endure prolonged cold than a non-drinker. People who freeze to death every year are frozen, for the most part, because they warm themselves with liquor.

It is not necessary to prove also that the gaiety that comes from wine is not real and not a joyous gaiety. Every one knows what sort of thing this drunken gaiety is. All that it requires is to take a look at what is done in cities on holidays, at the drinking-places, and in the rural districts; at what is done on holidays or at weddings and christenings. This drunken gaiety always ends with insulting words, fights, injured members, all kinds of crimes, and the loss of human dignity.