ART. IV. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND TEMPERANCE SOCIETY. 1. Report of the Church of England Temperance Society for 1878. (London, 1879.) 2. Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords, appointed for the purpose of inquiring into the Prevalence of Habits of Intemperance. (London, 1878.) 3. Health Primers. Alcohol: Its Use and Abuse. (London, 1879.) 4. Alcoholic Drinks. The Oration delivered before the Medical Society of London for the year 1878. By ALFRED CARPENTER, M.D. (London, 1878.) 'Our religion does not lie in doing what God has not enjoined, or abstaining from what He hath not forbidden. It does not lie in the form of our apparel, in the posture of our body, or the covering of our heads; nor yet in abstaining from marriage, nor from meats and drinks, which are all food if received with thanksgiving.' THESE sentences occur in a tract by John Wesley, printed and published at Bristol in 1747, and sold for one penny. The tract was designed to sketch the 'Character of a Methodist,' and was a good pennyworth of practical wisdom. But we may grudge to any 'Methodist' the exclusive possession and practice of social virtues, or the exclusive application of that happy mean (auream mediocritatem) which consists in using rightly what God hath not forbidden.' Herein lies a large part of the moral discipline of life. The principle waylays us at every turn, underlying the commonest duties, animating all our pleasures, and affording a practical standard for the direction of the conscience. Emphatically does this test operate in the exercise of the human appetites. So imperiously do these govern a vast number of mankind, that no apparent curb is put upon them by thoughts of physical consequences, or by restraints borrowed from the higher sphere of morals. Such is the problem presented to the statesman and philanthropist by that difficult substance called Alcohol. A French cynic assumes, in harmony with Byron's view, that 'man, being reasonable, must get drunk ;' because all nations have sought refuge from the dull monotony of life in excitants of some kind. But that same poet, Byron, when he makes his hero Sardanapalus sing, 'The goblet I reserve for hours of love,' makes him also say, 'But war on water.' Milton was sorrowful over the 'poison of misused wine;' and thus the ground which we propose to travel over now is a well-trodden one, and is none other than the use and misuse of an appetite, the lawful handling of a potent medicine, and the determining whether a given thing shall be an obedient servant or a tyrannical master. The battle which is being fought on this subject covers two distinct regions of ground. There is the moral and social battle, arising from the fact that common drinks, easily made and cheaply bought, are often consumed to excess, and then become deadly poisons. This poisonous effect is manifested in various ways; and one way is that the poisoned person acts (perhaps unconsciously) in a manner inconsistent with public order and decency, and therefore becomes liable to legal coercion and penalties. Secondly, there is the scientific battle: not a 'battle of the books,' but a seeking after truth by honest searchers, observing keenly and experimenting patiently, and having an impassioned zeal to find out what is true in this matter. Their reports and their deductions widely differ; but one thing ought never to be forgotten, that Nature must be explored without reference to any supposed consequences. If we start with a moral hope or bias one way or the other, we may miss the very point and pith of what we are trying to discover. We want to know the dry naked truth, without a thought that there can be any harm or ill in knowing it. All scientific truth is the truth of God; and the truth of God can never be out of harmony with the moral welfare of man. We propose to discuss our subject, then, from the standpoint of the current science of Alcohol, considered as a diet and as a medicine. Let this be delineated with a precise and firm hand, and the moral and social arguments follow almost as a matter of pure logic. The question cannot be profitably approached in any other way. Our confusion and our difficulties arise very much from ignorance or forgetfulness of the nature of the substance with which we have to deal. Chemically or inorganically, our knowledge of Alcohol is tolerably complete; but its effects on vital processes and morbid conditions are as yet very imperfectly understood. Several times have we seemed to be near an important discovery, and the threads which we hold as guides to that discovery are already many and valuable. Naturally we interrogate the medical profession; and though there is even among experts a great divergence of opinion, there is a large and influential consensus of authority on the positive side-the side of moderation, temperance in its truest sense. The path of statesmen and jurists through a complex social labyrinth is always beset with thorns, and needs every consideration and help which can be rendered by thoughtful Christian men, such men as we believe the great body of the Church Temperance Society to be. We desire the policy of this growing society to be as wide and as tolerant as the Church herself; to be far-reaching in its aims and judicious in its methods; to be, in short, loyal to the best traditions of the Anglican Communion, since we believe those traditions fairly to represent the spirit of practical Christianity. Pure anhydrous alcohol is not found in commerce, nor used as a medicine; although for general descriptive purposes men speak of alcohol, or ethylic alcohol. Physiologically it is a deadly poison, even in small quantities. As a dietetic beverage alcohol is consumed under the threefold denomination of spirits, wines, and malt liquors; all these being so many dilutions of alcohol with water, and differentiated by the presence of various organic and inorganic ingredients. As medicines, the same forms are used by the physician; in general terms it may be said that the stronger preparations are remedial in acute disease, and the weaker in more chronic diseases and maladies. A brief chemical and physical summary of the subject is as follows. Some bodies called ethers, also formed in fermentation, are combined with alcohol in wines and spirits. Starch and sugar are contained in some wines, but chiefly in ale and porter. Saline substances, such as common salt and compounds of malic and tartaric acids, exist largely in some wines; and the special aromas and odours of wines are due partly to the presence of essential oils. The amount of alcohol in various liquors is an important practical point, but we have not room for any detail. In the beverages called 'spirits' the quantity of alcohol varies from 49 to 77 per cent.; in wines from 25 to 8 or 9 per cent.; in malt liquors, from 9 to a little more than I per cent. Lastly, we must not omit the chemical changes that wine undergoes by keeping, by which some of the sugar is decomposed, and forms ethers with the alcohol; part also of the alcohol is lost by evaporation. It is obvious that these changes may materially alter the medicinal and dietetic value of an alcoholic fluid. It is notorious, moreover, that the vital action of alcohol in the form of spirits is quite different from alcohol when taken in other forms, apart altogether from mere quantitative excess, Every one is, or may be, familiar with the effects on the human body of common alcoholic drinks, from the most moderate dietetic doses to the measure of full intoxication. Those who wish to know the present scientific alphabet of this subject (how hard it is to learn a new alphabet of an old subject!) should consult the latest Health Primer, or a similar elementary book.1 Our object at this moment is to exhibit (as clearly and as compendiously as we can) some of the results of the most trustworthy research and experiment on the subtle action of alcohol in health and in disease; that action which is 'underground work,' so to speak, and carries with it no coarse material index; but which is distinctly responsive to the tests of the physiological chemist and the clinical physician. The ordinary reader or inquirer is beset with snares on every side. He hardly knows whether to believe Addison's story of the amateur self-doctor, who says that he commits an excess on the first Monday in every month for the good of his health; or the legend of the Wiltshire farmer, who gets drunk every night, and yet at the age of eighty seems comparatively shrewd and strong; or the apparently authentic fact of a Greek priest near Athens, ninety years of age, who from early manhood had consumed a dozen bottles of Greek wine a day, partly at meals, and partly at odd times. On the other hand, if the diligent student of these matters should go for his philosophy to 'total abstinence' orators, he will learn that not only is every drop of fluid containing alcohol unnecessary to the human body under any circumstances, but that it is sooner or later a lethal poison. Where is, then, the vital science of alcohol to be found? Here, as elsewhere, there is a nucleus of absolute truth, easily acquired by the honest seeker, and hidden only to those who choose to let the clouds of prejudice obscure the eye and warp the mind. Truth cannot be hoarded now by select magicians or at secret shrines. It has been contended by Dr. Pavy and by the late Dr. Anstie that physiological probabilities are on the whole in favour of the belief that alcohol is utilized as a force-producing food. If this be the fact, alcohol is probably of great value in that capacity, on account of the rapidity with which its transformations take place. Being a most highly oxydizable substance, it would be strange indeed, said Dr. Anstie, if oxydation did not prove to be the mode by which alcohol disappears within the organism. But if alcohol be indeed 1 We can recommend Alcohol, its Use and Abuse, one of the shilling Health Primers; also the interesting chapter on Alcohol in Dr. T. K. Chambers' Manual of Diet in Health and Disease; and the papers on 'Alcohol' in recent numbers of the Contemporary Review. oxydized, and yet does not beget force which can be used in the organism, this would be a strange and most unusual thing. Such is the result, expressed in the fewest words, of fourteen years of almost intermittent work, which challenges and directly contradicts those statements of Lallemand, Duroy, and Perrin, which so long misled the medical profession and the lay public upon the subject of the elimination of alcohol. Hence the old Hebrew ideal of corn, wine, and oil' as a plentiful and nourishing diet comes tolerably near the present scientific standard. Now comes the other side of the question. In the organism of a healthy adult person alcohol is innocuous, or not perceptibly injurious, only up to a certain point: and this point varies within a large range according to sex, age, and nerve tendencies; and immediately beyond this it begins to act as a poison, more or less dangerous and deadly, and owing part of its danger to the fact that it cannot be eliminated to any large extent, though a part is always excreted unchanged. The toxical power of alcohol is shown first by paralysing the nervous system-the brain, the spinal cord, and lastly the centre of respiration. The effects of the habitually excessive use of alcohol are exemplified in the deterioration of the working function of most of the important organs in the body, followed by destructive morbid changes. We have got, then, thus far :—a substance in common use as a diet satisfies an almost universal instinct, is consumed daily by a great number of persons in all parts of the world, and within a certain welldefined limit causes no proveable hurt to the human constitution. That limit, however, is easily transgressed; and at that point alcohol becomes a poison, the consequences of which are disastrous to body and mind, and are often an offence against public morality. The case is absolutely unique. It is an attribute of nothing else to be a food, or a medicine, or a poison, according to the dosage and plan in which it is administered. It cannot be forbidden altogether as a poison, or reserved for the exclusive use of physicians, because some of its diluted forms are common refreshing beverages. If it be alleged that it is unlikely, if not impossible, for the same substance to be able to do so much good and so much harm, we reply that this phenomenal contrariety' is an ordinary thing in medical therapeutics; and that there are several medicines (opium, for example) small doses of which stimulate (and therefore they are called stimulants), and large doses depress and even narcotize. Moreover, there is one treachery common to both alcohol and opium: that an |