Concerning Temperance and Judgment to Come

I

SOME years ago, at a period when I still continued to have an immense appetite for life, I suddenly, and rather unexpectedly to myself, blossomed into a full-fledged reformer or reformeress, whichever you choose to call it.

I say unexpectedly, and yet, as I look back, I can see that for a long time previous to this apotheosis my habits had been vaguely leading up to it. As a headquarters for tramps, temperance lecturers, Young Men Christians, delegates to Sunday-School Conventions, and similar wanderers on the face of the earth, my house had always been “run wide open.” There was, undoubtedly, a special mark somewhere about the premises that indicated my husband and myself as the ideal host and hostess alike for wayside wanderers and all creatures with a mission. We took them in, fed them, clothed them, — if necessary, — talked over their special enthusiasms with them, and sent them upon their meandering way with the hope — when we stopped to think about it at all — that our hospitality had in some way furthered the kingdom of righteousness.

This complaisance did not, on my part at least, necessarily indicate any really discriminating sympathy with the respective missions of my visitors; it simply meant, in most instances, that I possessed an inordinate zest for affairs, for trying experiments and taking chances. The system of moral ethics in which I had been educated was not a complicated one. Certain things, so I had been taught, were broadly and indubitably right, and other things were just as conspicuously wrong. Between these domains of good and evil there was a clear line of demarcation whose uncompromising distinctness admitted of no shading-off whatever. This was a good working theory, and, it must be admitted, resulted in a race of strong, if rather rigid, men and women. It also threw around unformulating spirits like my own an ægis of direction as useful as Matthew Arnold believed the creed of the Established Church to be to unreasoning souls. Under its guidance we went on cheerfully and blunderingly toward the light. I am often sorry that I ever began to analyze. That code of ethics which defined right and wrong with such finality, and comprehended the whole duty of man in always shoving the good onward and stamping out the evil whenever one had the opportunity, was much less difficult to follow out than one that regulates sin by the heredity and environment of the individual, and relieves him of responsibility if his skull does not fit accurately over the gray matter beneath.

In those happy bygone days when right was right and wrong was wrong I went gayly on my predestined way of assisting everybody to educate the morals of everybody else, undeterred by any morbid questionings in regard to the tenability of my own position. There was, so far as I remember, only one occasion when I actually balked at any duty which was suggested to me. A constitutional amendment to the prohibitory law of Maine was, after a strenuous campaign, to be submitted to popular vote. I do not think I knew then, and I am very sure I do not know now, just what the amendment was about, but I know I believed in it, whatever it was, just as I believe in the law itself, and shall believe so long as I have reason to think that every rumseller in the United States would rejoice to have it repealed. When, however, it was proposed as my sacred duty on this momentous occasion to serve hot coffee at the polls, and decorate the brows of doubtful voters with propitiating garlands, my spirit rebelled. I felt sure that, right or wrong, I preferred polls where liquid refreshments were not dealt out, and voters whose brows were decorated only by common sense.

Yet all these preliminary movements were leading up to the fateful moment of the formation of the Woman’s Temperance League of Waterville. It is an unfortunate fact that the prohibitory law of Maine is sometimes violated just as the license laws of other states are violated, and some of the prominent men of the town, who were themselves otherwise occupied, suggested to some of the prominent women who always have leisure to reform things, that the hour for such reformation had struck. I was not one of those who signed the call for the meeting which was to inaugurate the new order of things, but I was of the number that promptly answered when the bugle note sounded. Had there been a call to form a society for altering the configuration of the earth, there were some of us who would, in those days, have presented ourselves with the same cheerful promptness, sustained not so much by our courage as by our ignorance.

We were women who thirsted for action; show us something to be done, and without altogether knowing what, or why, or how, we rallied at the sound of the tocsin. Would we form a league to wipe out intemperance ? Certainly. We had no hesitation in undertaking a little task like that.

After all, it is by just such unreasoning courage as this that many good works have been accomplished. I wish —stay, do I wish ? — that I were young enough and hopeful enough to do it all over again.

It had been promised by the instigators of our league — the care-laden gentlemen who had not time to league themselves — that when we were duly organized they would coöperate by joining in a mass meeting whose utterances should eloquently launch us on our career. While we were assembled in solemn conclave in regard to this mass meeting these good men were seized with sudden forebodings in regard to their part in such a demonstration. Was it wise — thus inquired the delegate who hurried to confer with us —to convoke a public meeting without first ascertaining the temper of the community in regard to the object to be accomplished? Would it not be a politic plan to appoint a committee for circulating a petition among the business men of the town to ascertain whether a majority of them really desired to have the law enforced ?

This suggestion, had it only been made at an earlier period of the world’s history, would have furnished a practical precedent for Moses when he received the Ten Commandments on the Mount. “Would it not be wiser,” he would, thus warned, have suggested politely, “if I first take a stroll down the mountain and ascertain what the feeling of the Children of Israel is in regard to having so many commandments unloaded on them in one afflicting lump ?”

There is a great deal said about the emancipation of the modern woman. My own observation goes to show that there is no amount of foolishness to which she will not lend herself at the instigation of man. In this case our delegate had only to suggest, and we appointed a committee at once to go forth into the highways and byways and ascertain the number of those who had not bowed the knee to Baal. So far as I can find out, a man seldom hesitates to sign a petition because it is immoral, — it is only the moral ones which he has a conscience against endorsing hastily. The circumstance of his being fortunate enough to be a reasoning creature, too, furnishes him with a large stock of hesitancies.

The lawyers did not sign our petition because the fact that a law was on the statute books constituted in itself sufficient reason for its enforcement; the physicians, as a class, did not care to commit themselves, though one of them assured us that a two or three gallon keg of whiskey or brandy would furnish all that was medicinally necessary for the use of the community during a year; the clergymen without exception, I think, gave us their endorsement, partly because “it is their nature to” endorse such causes, and partly because they are not so constitutionally thirsty as their brethren of the other professions. Some of the storekeepers signed the petition because they thought a strict enforcement of the law would help their business, and others declined to sign lest their interests should be injured by enforcement. All sorts of politic considerations and twists and turns of argument came into the matter. One man declined to sign because he did not believe in women as reformers. A woman’s place, he said, was at home looking after her husband and her family, and if she had no husband and family it was equally fitting that she should devote herself to minding her own business whatever it might be. When asked what course a woman might legitimately pursue in regard to a drunken husband, this philosopher opined that it was perfectly allowable for her to “ shut him up.” This, he stated candidly, was his wife’s method with himself. Whenever he was observed to have vanished from public view for a season we were at liberty to suppose that he was repenting his sins in a state of incarceration.

The canvass, with all its humors, difficulties, and disagreeablenesses — which latter it did not lack — at last ended, summing up a decided, majority of influential voters who were willing the law should be enforced, provided it could be done without any undue exertion on their own part. The mass meeting was therefore held, and the tide of eloquence duly poured out. Launched on this wave of plaudits the Woman’s Temperance League was supposed to be amply strengthened and encouraged to be able to pursue what Amy March would have called its “Herculaneum labors” indefinitely and triumphantly.

That this was a woman’s campaign was sufficiently indicated by the simplicity, naïveté, and directness with which it was conducted. No man would have dared to do some of the things we did, even if he could have brought himself to believe in their efficacy, but to us there seemed but one watchword in leading a forlorn hope: “Up, boys, and at ’em!”

There were at that time three weekly newspapers in Waterville. The two Republican journals gave us a half column each of space in which to declare our sentiments and report our progress from week to week. The Democratic paper devoted itself to candid criticism. “The Waterville Woman’s Temperance League,” remarked a contemporary journal, “has rushed into print.”

The local political situation was such that we were allowed great freedom of expression in our utterances. We were voteless, irresponsible beings with a propensity for calling a spade a spade so far as it could be done consistently with dignity and self-respect, and many a Waterville citizen went around in those days with an uneasy sense that if any of the coats advertised in our temperance column fitted him, he was at perfect liberty to put it on. The critical Democratic journal said unhandsome things about us, and being but women we sometimes wept over these compliments o’ nights. In the morning, however, we dried our tears and went back to the fighting line again. With all the crudenesses and the mistakes that can be urged against it, that period of my life is not one I am going to feel meaching about when I come before the final bar of judgment.

Notwithstanding the unpopularity of our movement, — and with a certain portion of the community it was necessarily unpopular, — the membership of our league did not materially decrease, and even the most timid and naturally conservative women among us accepted astounding tasks with astounding courage. There never was an enterprise more fertile in stunts than this one of ours. We sat in the City Liquor Agency, to which source of supply the increasing dryness of the times drove many thirsty souls, and noted the number of quarts of alcohol required by town paupers, Saturday night invalids, and men whose wives had weak backs; we confronted the City Fathers to give them a reason for the faith that was in us; we raised money by subscription, by entertainments, by breakfasts, dinners, and suppers; we clothed, fed, and admonished the poor; we wept, we prayed, and, to keep our courage up, some of us laughed a good deal. We made ourselves very unwelcome, very much unappreciated, very much criticised, and it was, I think, this saving sense of humor which carried us through. I remember serving, with great inward reluctance, on various committees, the results to be expected from whose labors must, as it seems to me now, have been purely ethical, consisting, as in the modern interpretation of the virtue of prayer, principally in the beneficial effects on the mind of the performer. In one instance, which often comes back to me, one of the three leaders of a forlorn hope was influenced wholly by an unquestioning sense of the moral necessity of her mission, while the other two were hampered by a somewhat ludicrous vision of its inefficacy. In the remembrance, the humor of the scene outbalances its more serious aspect: the courteous victim firmly resolved to be mannerly though the heavens fell, yet inwardly wishing that women would be contented to attend to their own affairs; the earnest spokeswoman explaining her mission with the full conviction that only a mutual comprehension was needed to produce a delightful unity of sentiment; and the two doubters pinching each other in the background, and trying not to ruin the situation by an untimely grin.

We wished, perhaps, no less sincerely than our companion that the kingdom of heaven might come upon earth, but the belief in the immediate efficacy of moral suasion as a practical agent is largely a matter of temperament.

Whether the crusade of the Woman’s Temperance League accomplished, on the whole, any permanent good, is a question which I have often asked myself. The movement was full of pathetically humorous phases, but it was also heroically sincere. I suppose many efforts which seem futile to us as we look back upon them have an efficacy which we do not realize, because our vision takes in so small a part of the eternal scheme of things.

When I remember the many mornings of waking to consciousness with a direful sinking of the heart at the thought that it was my melancholy duty to go on crusading, — alas, how unfailingly we see the pathos of our own woes! — when, to put selfishness one side, I recall the fortitude of those other women more timid than myself, I sometimes cherish the modest hope that there is at least one unbroken arc laid up in the happy hereafter for the warrioresses of the Woman’s Temperance League of Waterville. There is no moral reason that I know why Noah should possess the only arc — spell it how you like — upon those heavenly highlands!

II

I think the psychological aspect of the question was first brought home to me during that historic campaign of the Woman’s Temperance League when I recognized the attitude of the old French Canadian women who came to the City Agency on Saturday afternoons for alcohol with which to manufacture the weekly dram of “ split” that should transform them from grubs into butterflies. To them this longed-for indulgence was neither moral nor immoral; it was simply a matter of enjoyment. The magic draught furnished for them the same element of excitement which the theatre, the popular novel, the enthusiasms of football and baseball and other fashionable expedients furnish to better educated people. It was the alleviation that made their starved lives bearable. When they threatened to come with their brooms and sweep out the meddling women who were interfering with the good cheer furnished by the Agency, they too were, in their own estimation, leading a crusade for freedom and the rights of the individual.

It is a safe conclusion in regard to the average man that however logical he may be in mind, he is bound to be more or less irresistibly illogical in acts. This is because the intellectual assent is usually biased somewhat by the influence of the human qualification. Each of us recognizes the law in its application to the other fellow. Hence the reformer who really desires to get at the root of the matter should be a person of active imagination, and an adaptability which enables him to comprehend the standpoint of the individual to be reformed; above all, he should possess no theories incapable of modification. If he can add to these qualifications a sense of humor, a readiness not to take himself too seriously, and a recognition of the fact that the other man’s right and wrong may differ in conception from his right and wrong, he will have an outfit which will materially lighten a thorny path. Thus much I discovered in my own brief career as a reformeress.

The advantages of a lively imagination and an active interest in other people’s affairs I undoubtedly possess. There is in me also, I sadly fear, a suggestion of inherent wickedness which has always made it easy for sinners to confide their weaknesses to my ear with an unflattering certainty of my comprehension. During my aforementioned temperance campaign one kindly disposed gentleman, who was at that time recovering from an attack of delirium tremens, came to sit with me for an hour or two, that I might observe with my own eyes the discomforts attendant upon his malady.

“Do you suppose,” he inquired, when we had ended a breathless period of chasing rats around his hat brim, “that any man, especially a man of my age, would turn himself into a blooming menagerie if he could help it? I guess not.”

“ What makes you do it, then ? ” I asked rather vacuously.

“I do it now because I have an Appetite for drink, — and you can spell it with a large A, — but when I began the cursed business it was all for fun. Well, ” my visitor added meditatively, “I’ve had fun.”

Another appreciative individual called on me on his way to the railway station, that I might enter intelligently into his motives in taking the Keeley Cure.

“I ain’t going for the purpose of pleasing myself,” he declared. “If it was n’t for the way my wife feels about it I should n’t ever take any Keeley Cures. When people tell you that there ain’t any fun in drinking, you just mention to ’em that they don’t know. The most fun I’ve ever had in my life has been when I had just enough aboard to make me feel good; an’ when I’ve heard preachers proclaiming from the pulpit that there was n’t any enjoyment to be derived from the pleasures o’ the world, I’ve been tempted to stand right up in my tracks an’ tell ’em to talk about what they understood.”

“ The preachers usually qualify it a little. They say there is no true pleasure in these things,” I suggested.

“True fiddlesticks!” commented my friend derisively. “The fact is,” with a sudden change of tone, “my wife’s an awful good woman, and if she wants me to quit spreeing it I’d ought to be willing to please her, and I am willing. But I ’d never do it to please myself.”

It was at about this period, too, that I was interviewed by a gentleman of sprightly turn of mind, and gifted with great facility for unvarnished narrative.

“For God’s sake,” he began without preamble, “can’t you, ’mongst all the discoveries you’re makin’, find something kind o’ innocent and excitin’ to amuse a man like me?”

“What would be the nature of it?” I inquired, a good deal overwhelmed by the difficulties of the task proposed.

“That’s jest what I don’ know,”answered my interlocutor; “if I did I should n’t be askin’ you. It’s this way with me; an’ I ain’t the only one in the same case: I’m old enough, mebbe you ’ll say, to settle down, but I ain’t settled down, an’ I don’ know’s I ever shall. There’s plenty of ’em thinks I’d ought to be contented with goin’ to prayer-meetin’ once or twice a week, but if there’s any recreation about prayer-meetin’s I’ve never found it out. I like to read the Youth’s Companion, but I can’t set at home and do that every night in the week. I want something different,” — warming to his subject, —“if it wa’n’t nothing more than a toboggan slide on the other side of the river.”

“I don’t see anything in the way of your tobogganing,” I commented rather helplessly. I seemed to be wholly at a loss for original suggestions.

“I don’t want to toboggan all by myself. I want you to be there and all the rest of ’em standin’ in a row at the top o’ the hill; an’ then all git on our sleds at the same minute an’ slide—slide like the devil!”

At this flight of fancy the face of the narrator glowed with enthusiasm and poetic intensity. In fancy he saw the whole circle of his acquaintance sliding like the — ahem! and he knew that the realization of that visionary transit would satisfy a long-felt, want of his being. I confess that I understood him perfectly. I, too, had longed to toboggan. In his rude and imperfect dreaming he had unconsciously got to the bottom, or, at any rate, one of the bottoms, of the whole matter

Starved longings, unrealized desires, overflowing animal spirits without legitimate outlet, unbalanced natures destitute of training in self-control, impoverished aspirations, — these are what lie at the foundation of the social problem which the reformer has to solve, and no remedy which does not take all these into consideration will ever be permanently efficacious. The would-be reformer should be willing to disabuse himself of prejudices, and cultivate what is known as “ an open mind;” not so open, either, as to interfere with its capability for being violently closed as often as occasion demands.

When one strips the situation of phrases one is forced to acknowledge that there are a great many people who intend to do only what they find pleasure in doing, and who do not recognize any enjoyment in abstract goodness, “You say,” they tell us in effect, “that to be good is to be happy. Prove it.” We cannot prove it, at least in any concrete form, and there is no sensible reason why we should desire to prove it, but no doubt we shall go on making the statement until the end of time.

There is also an increasing number of individuals who, so far from finding recreation, or even comfort and peace in prayer - meetings, find them only irredeemably dull. If there is a steady decrease in the demand for prayer-meetings and a correspondingly steady increase in the appetite for — say, toboggan-sliding, might there not be found, gradually, naturally, and not reprehensibly, some middle ground of interest through which more prayer-meetingers can be induced to consider the merits of tobogganing, and more tobogganers drawn into prayermeetings ?

It is a tendency of mankind to go on looking at subjects from an established standpoint long after the conditions which created that standpoint have become a thing of the past; and this is especially true in regard to questions of morals. Many people feel at once that to be betrayed into any fresh theory or admission on moral subjects is an inevitable step toward immorality. “He holds liberal views,” they say, and shake their pious heads with conscious joy in their own narrowness. Yet to hold liberal views may mean nothing more than to be possessed of a willingness to search for and accept truth. If a great many people who “want to be angels,” or think they do, could have the privilege; if a good many more, who have no angelic leanings whatever, and never will have, could be removed to their appropriate destination; and if the remainder, being persons of penetrable epidermis, could read their titles clear to stripping moral questions of futilities and dealing with moral conditions as they are, what an immense amount of powder might be saved!

To say that prayer-meetings are dull is an irreverence, therefore one should never breathe the thought; to say that people demand excitement and recreation is to acknowledge the frivolity of the race, hence such a craving should never be put forward as representing a genuine need of human nature: yet many prayermeetings are dull, and a large proportion of mankind do insistently demand to be amused; and since these are self-evident facts, the practical question arises, What are we going to do about it?

Our forefathers were a church-going people, but it does not necessarily follow that they were more innately religious than our own generation. They lived in an age when the stern conditions of existence furnished a continuous undercurrent of excitement, and what was lacking in other ways was more than made up to them by the nerve-thrilling, soul-harrowing amenities of their creeds. They were believers in a tangible hell, and to go to church on Sunday and listen to a sermon which depicted each hearer as dangling over a genuine, red-hot, steam-fitted Inferno, just as a spider sways on a single filament of his web, offered an excitement outbalancing the tensest moment of a football game, or even of a crisis in the stock market.

The man who drove his plough over a hillside never so remote, meditating as he toiled on the doctrine that doomed a large proportion of the race to everlasting punishment, and made the election of those who should be saved an arbitrary one, dependent upon the whim of a Deity whose caprices must never be criticised, — such a man carried in his lonely bosom a whole volume of intensities. The sombre atmosphere of a creed like that was lurid enough to color the most commonplace days and nights, and lend a fearful joy to the barrenest existence.

When the old-fashioned belief in a concrete Sheol was taken out of our theology, religion, whatever it may have gained, was shorn of its most fascinating risk. “Man,” says Sabatier, “is incurably religious;” he is also incurably opposed to monotony, and the faith that gets any permanent hold alike upon his intellect and his emotions must be a broad and sane Christianity which, taking into account every rooted instinct of his nature, makes the tendencies of both body and soul enter into vigorous and sensible character-building.

I do not believe that man’s amusements will ever drive out. his spiritual longings; I do not believe his spiritual longings will ever wholly root out the earthy ones. The mistake lies in the assumption that the two are necessarily inimical.

When we can succeed in developing a race of sane, sound, clean-natured, highminded men and women their amusements will take care of themselves, but until that millennial breed really appears to inherit the earth the demand of my buoyant friend for “something kind o’ innocent and excitin’ ” to amuse men like him is a matter for serious consideration.

There is a certain sectarian college whose fostering church sends every year an envoy to inquire into the welfare of the institution, and to keep a jealous watch over its interests and those of the denomination. One might imagine such a messenger inquiring earnestly: Is this college educating men and women in the broadest sense of the word ? Is it qualifying them to become good citizens, wise heads of families? Are they clean, trustworthy, trained to high thoughts ? Have they gained spiritual common sense as well as the learning of the schools? Above all, do you teach the youth in your charge that most significant truth that “loyalty to God means liberty for man”?

This is what one might erroneously suppose the scope of such a mission to comprehend. What the messenger really did demand to be told on a recent visit was this: Has President - yet succeeded in stamping out dancing ?

Yet if it is easy to be narrow, it is also easy to grant too much latitude. He needs must be a wise man, and a philosopher into the bargain, who knows just when to be wide as the universe, and when to stand like a wall. In a world made up of wheels within wheels and ramifications within ramifications, where everything depends on some other thing and the other thing depends on everything else, the difficulty of maintaining a just balance must be acknowledged; yet in this struggle for a just balance lies the salvation of the earth.

We live — to sum up the situation — in a generation that has gone recreation-mad. Outdoor sports and indoor sports fill up our leisure moments, or, in some cases, all our moments. Athletics, golf, tennis, games of all manners and lacking manners, rise, flourish, and decay. The race horse, the bicycle, and the automobile pursue one another across the stage of action. We play at being intellectual, we play at being religious, we play at being “tough,” and all three are merged and included in being men and women “of the world.”

Our best educated classes, — and we flatter ourselves that we have the last word in the matter of education, — our wisest classes are not necessarily very wise in the matter of their recreations; our half-educated brethren and sisters ape the manners of their betters, and a degree lower down in the scale the struggling masses take what they can get in the way of amusement, and take it where they can get it. In all classes, high and low, veneered and unveneered, it is almost universally true that the foundations of appetite are too often laid in the struggle to “have a good time.” The instrument of an occasional hilarity has an unfortunate tendency to develop into the minister to a quenchless thirst.

I am always willing to ask questions which I cannot answer, therefore I frankly confess that I do not know just how the balance between the prayer-meeting and the toboggan slide is to be reached; probably the chasm between the two would seem to me much less abysmal than to some of my stricter brethren. It is a chasm that will never be bridged by prohibitions alone, by persuasions alone, by sacrifice alone. Since in the last resort every thinking creature must work out his own salvation with fear and trembling, to harden him for the contest, to teach him how to grow to the full stature of a man, is the burden of the human problem. It is a problem that will never be solved by demanding unnecessary sacrifices, by ignoring vital instincts, by allowing prejudice to usurp the functions of common sense.