p. 103Stumbling-Blocks—drink

When a mother teaches her child to walk, she takes great care to remove everything that might trip it up and make it fall. She knows that its ideas of equilibrium are yet very limited, and that it has no consciousness of the danger of striking its little foot against the fender or fire-irons if they lie in the way of its first journey. Now in the moral training of a child there are stumbling-blocks to be removed corresponding to the fender and fire-irons of the nursery; and their removal is all the more important and necessary, as the fall they occasion, instead of inflicting a mere bodily wound, generally kills the soul by depriving it of its life of sanctifying grace. But they are stumbling-blocks not solely to the young members of a family. Fathers and mothers, likewise, are unfortunately only too often brought to the ground by them; and when this happens, their children will, in all likelihood, be brought down in their train.

The most ordinary and most dangerous stumbling-block in families is intoxicating drink. It is, in fact, more or less connected with every other obstacle to domestic well-being and happiness, and until it is removed from the reach and sight of children, and, in many cases, of parents also, every attempt at home-reform will be fruitless and ineffectual. I have then, dear reader, to invite your most earnest attention to this subject. There is none other of which I have treated or shall treat in this work more vitally important; and there is none other about which more mistaken—deplorably mistaken ideas prevail in every class of society.

To begin then. I say to parents: keep intoxicating drink from your children. Let them not know the taste of it; let them not see it at table as an ordinary part of your meals; let them not see you taking it or giving it to others when they call; especially, let them never see you under its influence. Then again: speak often to them of the dangers, spiritual, moral, and social, to which it exposes those who become fond of it; and tell them it is very easy, indeed, to become fond of it. Point out to them the usual ways in which young people are led into drinking habits: how, at first, they nauseate the drink, and, after tasting it once, would give it up for ever, were they not led to think foolishly that it is unmanly not to do what they see others like themselves doing so easily and so habitually. Draw for them, too, some vivid word-pictures of drunken sons, in their frenzy, striking their helpless, broken-hearted parents to the earth; of drunken daughters, become by drink such a shame to their desolate families that their names are never mentioned, and the very thought of them is put away as though it were a thought of sin. Draw for them other pictures of filthy, dilapidated homes, with half naked, starving children, crouching round fireless hearths, or searching for food in empty cupboards, or lying asleep on the bare boards through the long night, while their brutal, drunken fathers spend their wages in the public-house. Representations like these may be multiplied indefinitely, and darkened with every imaginable shade of heartless cruelty without danger of untruthfulness or exaggeration. Repeat them frequently with all the variety you can introduce into them, and your efforts will not be long without result. Your children will soon begin to manifest such a dislike for drink that it will gradually assume most of the characteristics of a natural instinct. They will thus grow up to manhood without knowing the taste of drink, and therefore without any craving to indulge in it; and because they were taught when young to shun it from conviction, not from compulsion, there will be no danger, when they go out into the world, of their giving way to that natural reaction that follows enforced restraint. In spite of all the seductions of intemperance with which they will be surrounded, the habit of abstinence in which their childhood and youth were reared, will cling to them in their after lives and shield them, like an impenetrable coat of mail, not alone from drunkenness, but from the grovelling vices, the social wretchedness, the premature physical decay to which drunkenness usually leads its victims. And, I ask you, dear fathers and mothers, from your own experience of these lamentable effects within the circle of your acquaintances, do you think that any amount of wealth or any extent of property you may, after a life of hard labour, be able to leave your children, can be at all compared in value or usefulness to this inheritance of a confirmed habit of abstention from drink. Without it, where will be the gathered fruits of your industry in a few years after your death? and where will be those to whom your riches were left?

I turn here to consider how this advice will be received by my readers, especially by parents for whom it is primarily intended. My experience tells me that the English-speaking public for which I write, devotedly attached as it is to its beer and wine and other strong drinks, will scout the idea of bringing up children on Total Abstinence principles. Drink is in truth a part of our social system. Without it we cannot converse ten minutes with a friend; we cannot do a day’s work; we cannot enjoy a holiday; we cannot make a journey; in a word, we cannot begin or carry on or complete the most ordinary business of our daily lives, unless drink is taken to nerve us for the task and cheer us through it. And this habit of drink is indulged with the settled conviction that it leads to no danger, and that it is not the parent of vice or crime, nor the source of poverty, degradation and wretchedness. We condemn drunkenness at the same time that we love drink; and we will not let the idea sink into our minds, that there is but a thin, and often invisible line of demarcation between moderate and excessive drinking, or, in other words, between the habit of drinking we ourselves indulge, and the habit of drunkenness which we abhor in others as something loathsome and degrading.

Such, then, being the temper of the public mind regarding drink, I expect many of my readers to come to issue with me here and to dispute the correctness of the advice to parents given above. Some will say, perhaps, that children ought to be accustomed to drink from their earliest years, in order that they may not afterwards crave for it, as an untasted novelty. I have seen this experiment tried and I can vouch for its result, in one case at least. The children indeed did not afterwards crave for drink, as a novelty—but they craved for it, as a necessity: they became confirmed drunkards. Few parents, worthy of the name, however, will, I think, entertain this opinion or act on it; for it must seem evident to the dullest understanding that to give drink habitually to very young people, is to force a liking for it on them; and a liking for drink in a child leads naturally to excessive indulgence in after years.

But most of those parents who will take exception to the advice I give them in this matter, will not advocate the habitual use of drink for children. They will admit that children do not require drink, and that in ordinary circumstances they are better without it. They will not see, however, why extraordinary precautions, such as I have recommended, should be used to keep them aloof from the sight and taste of it; and they will have a particular objection to sacrifice their own use of it, at their meals especially, in order to edify the young members of their families. Now it must be distinctly understood that I do not pretend to say there is any strict obligation, under pain of sin, to adopt the treatment of children in regard to drink, which I have pointed out. The moderate use of drink is in itself lawful, and therefore it would be not only untrue but ridiculous to assert that any law is violated by allowing children merely to taste it, or by parents themselves tasting it in their presence. But things in themselves lawful, are not always devoid of moral danger; and in proportion to the nearness and gravity of such danger, their lawfulness becomes more and more questionable, until, degenerating into scandals or occasions of sins, they come to be positively forbidden. The use of drink is something of this kind. It is harmless in itself; but on account of the craving it begets, and on account of the terrible excesses to which it leads, it is always more or less dangerous to the person habituated to it, and it is particularly so to children, whose habits are not yet formed, and who may, with nearly the same facility, acquire false and artificial tastes as they may cultivate those that are true and natural.

However, while the danger arising from the use of drink, whether to oneself or others, remains remote and unlikely, there is no obligation to give it up. But when is it remote, and when does it become proximate? How much drink may be allowed to a child, or how far may parents indulge in drink before it, until there arises an immediate danger of its being corrupted? The answer to these questions depend almost entirely on experience, and the experience of each one being different from that of his neighbour, I cannot expect that any solution of them that I might give would be acquiesced in unanimously by all my readers. Some may have lived all their lives away from town and city influences, and may know nothing whatsoever of the drunkenness and the consequent misery and degradation of our crowded courts and bye-streets; some may have the happiness to move in a home circle in which, although drink is taken at meals, still its use is so regulated and so limited that it never grows into a pressing, serious danger. Others again may have from their childhood been brought up in the settled idea that drink is nourishment, and that it is unmeaning, as well as cruel, to ask people to renounce it, either for their own or their children’s sake. Now all these persons will most probably accuse me of exaggeration when I say, that the habitual daily use of drink by children, or even their frequent, although occasional, use of it, generally exposes them to the serious, if not the immediate, danger of becoming drunkards. And yet I am fully convinced of the truth of this assertion, and of the truth of this other also, that parents, taking drink habitually and freely before children, give them such a strong bias towards it as to make it difficult for those children in after life to resist the temptation of intemperance. I do not wish to determine, if indeed it can be determined by any private authority, when grievous sin is committed in these circumstances. Conscientious parents who are seriously anxious for their children’s welfare, will take a higher view of their duties than seek to escape by hair-breadths from their serious violation. They will therefore, irrespectively of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of their manner of bringing up their children, consider whether that manner is conducive to their future welfare or not. If they deem it not conducive, or less conducive than it ought to be, then they will change it at any sacrifice, rather than run the risk of leaving them a heritage of social misery, and, perhaps, of eternal ruin.

Here then is the view I would most earnestly impress upon parents regarding the use of drink by their children. People do not want drink while they are yet children; and if they get it habitually, they will imperceptibly contract a fondness for it that will cause them in after life much trouble and difficulty to overcome. Now as parents ought to put no obstacle to the future well-being of their children, but ought, on the contrary, remove every stumbling-block in their way, it follows clearly that they ought to keep the taste, and sight, and use of drink away from them, and that they ought to do this without waiting to determine how far they are strictly bound in conscience to do it. I admit it is difficult to do it; but if they love their children with a true Christian love, I do not think they will be deterred by any difficulty from trying all they can to save them from the terrible danger of an early fondness for drink.

Perhaps it may be well to point out here some obstacles that will have to be encountered in carrying out this purpose. First of all, your neighbours are pretty sure to laugh at you, and to tell you that you are spoiling your children; that you are too severe on them; that the reaction hereafter will be much more dangerous to them than the moderate use of drink would be at present. To meet these and other objections of a similar import, it is enough to keep in view the one great reason that influences you in the course you adopt; namely, your resolve to preserve your children from the vice of intemperance, by implanting in them a dislike for the very taste of drink. Raillery and ridicule are, however, keen weapons, and most people have a sensitive dread of them. To save yourself, then, from the annoyance of having to parry them constantly, I would recommend you to give your neighbours to understand seriously and determinedly that your manner of training your children is altogether your own concern; that you owe to them no account of it; and that their interference is uncalled for and unwarranted. This may seem harsh advice to give, but I think it will be found necessary in many cases; and I am convinced that there will be no uncharitableness in adopting it.

Parents will have another difficulty in keeping drink from their children, when it is ordered by medical authority. Of course, everyone admits the medical use of stimulants in certain rare cases of illness; but passing by those cases, we find many doctors ordering their patients wine or spirits, not as medicine but as food; and not on one or two occasions, but continually and regularly during their convalescence as well as during their illness. I believe many a drunkard can trace the beginning of his wretched state to such a prescription of his doctor; and it is very natural to suppose that children so treated will acquire a fondness for drink that will abide with them in after life, and will prove a constant source of trouble and temptation to them, if indeed it will not lead to their degradation and ruin. Now some of the most eminent medical authorities of the present day deny the absolute necessity of drink in the treatment of patients; and if they do occasionally prescribe it under extraordinary circumstances, the quantity to be taken is so small, and the number of times it is to be taken is so limited, that no danger can arise from its use. Parents therefore, with this safe practice before them, need have no scruple in declining to give drink frequently and freely to their sick children, even although it be prescribed by their doctors. They should in fact ask those doctors to substitute some regimen as conducive to health as they believe alcohol to be, but free from that dangerous after-effect of alcohol taken habitually, namely, a morbid fondness and craving for it. If they say they are unable to do so, then they should be told, with due respect to their professional acquirements, that they have not fully studied all the resources of their craft.

I do not intend or wish to say anything derogatory to a body of men so rightly trusted, as our physicians are, with the most important human interests of society; but I fear there is much truth in the charge brought against many of them, that for one reason or another they are too facile in allowing drink to their patients. If physicians held out with firmness and unanimously against the use of drink, except as a medicinal poison, which it has been proved to be, and if they ordered it only as they order any other poisons, then we might look for a speedy revolution in the drinking habits of our day, and the victims of those habits would be much fewer than they are. But it may be alleged, that a physician of extreme temperance views would be looked on by the public with suspicion and distrust, and would never rise to eminence in his profession. I do not think that this excuse has much weight. Where there is a question of life or death, or of speedy recovery from severe illness, people look out for the most skilful advice and assistance, no matter from whom it has to be obtained. I know indeed that those suffering from the effects of drink often call in doctors whom they expect to cure them without interfering materially with their social habits. But if those doctors be true to the convictions that their reading and experience must have forced upon them, they will not merely limit their intemperate patients to a certain quantity of drink, but they will insist, at least in the majority of cases, on their becoming total abstainers. If they act thus, and act in concert, no fee will be forfeited, and no one branch of the profession will have any exceptional advantage in this respect over another. Let it be granted, however, that advocates of total abstinence are not popular as medical advisers. Does it then follow that they are justified in waiving their principles and prescribing against their conscience for the sake of an increased income and a wider popularity? The temptation, I admit, would be considerable, but I think no medical gentleman worthy of a fee, would be swayed by it.

In many cases of indisposition in families, no doctor is called in; but there is a kind of traditional pharmacopœia resorted to in his stead and believed in much more by the masses than its legitimate sister of the faculty. It consists chiefly of alcohol in one or other of its numerous forms. If a child have a pain, it is given a little brandy; and if a grown-up person has got a severe wetting, or has been working very hard, or has got into a great heat, or feels a cold chill all over him—in each of these cases, and in most others of trivial illness that occur daily—“something hot” is supposed to effect a certain cure, and it is taken accordingly. It is stated too, although I cannot say whether truly or falsely, that some ladies, when they go out shopping, and when they pay each other formal visits, and when they are supposed to have a quiet tea, think it absolutely necessary to take “a little something” to relieve the fatigue and ennui of their daily lives. It is said that they think this something is absolutely necessary for their health; and that in consequence they take it habitually, and sometimes in excess. However this may be, it is certain the belief prevails generally that drink is a panacea for most of the ills of humanity. Now, I venture to say, that parents will never be able to train their children in habits of temperance, until they are disabused of this belief and entirely discard it in practice. Total abstainers are at least as long-lived as any other class of people, and yet they never use drink in sickness. It follows therefore (and parents ought to be full of the conviction), that there is no necessity, either in sickness or in health, for the use of alcohol either as food or as medicine.

I have now to point out another danger to which children are exposed under this head of drink. In most families there are, from time to time, social gatherings of friends at which the children of the house are permitted to attend. Wine and spirits are, unfortunately as a matter of course, set on the table. The guests partake freely of them, if they please, and they often assume the liberty of plying the little ones with them, while the parents are too weak-minded to prevent the practice, or even to protest against it. The use of drink begins from that time to be associated in the minds of those young people with bright, beaming looks, and abundance of good cheer, and gay laughter, and jovial table-talk. It is surrounded in their imaginations by a false glamour that makes it more and more attractive, until it comes to be loved for itself and for the excited, unregulated feelings it produces. A boy thus indoctrinated will soon begin to seek, among his companions, in stolen reunions, and perhaps with ill-got money, the reputed pleasures of an over-heated brain, that may not be supplied to him at home as often as he would wish. I need not trace the after-career of such a one, as it will unhappily be known to most of my readers. The roué in the higher classes of society, and the corner-boy and jail-bird in the lowest, represent the condition to which he will naturally fall; and the broken-hearted parents will have to reproach themselves bitterly in their old age for the training that led to such a miserable result.

But what are parents to do under the circumstances described above? Is the time-honoured custom of introducing the young people towards the end of dinner to be done away with, or is the host to be rude to his guests in forbidding them to offer a little wine to his children with their fruit or sweet meats? I answer that both inconveniences may be avoided by tact, blended with moral courage. The children may, by all means, be allowed to come, as they are supposed to gain much in refinement by this social custom; but then it should be announced, as a domestic arrangement, with which surely no one will think of interfering, that the children are not allowed to take drink on those occasions. There is no rudeness in this announcement, and provided the other safeguards mentioned in the beginning of this chapter be adopted, there will little or no danger arise from the mere sight of the grown-up members of the party taking their wine in moderation. Where, however, there would be a likelihood of excess in drink among the guests, or where, contrary to the express will of the parents, drink might be pressed on the children, a stricter rule is necessary; and on no account, and for no social advantage, should young people be permitted to be present at such a party.

But drunkenness in the present day prevails much more among the labouring and artizan classes than among the higher social grades; and accordingly the children of the former are exposed to many dangers of intemperance from which those of the latter are almost wholly free. The poor have their cellar in the public-house, and their children are the drawers. Now imagine a little boy having to go two or three times daily to fetch his father’s beer—to how many temptations is he not exposed? He is inclined first of all to conclude that there must be something manly in being a beer-drinker. Then he sees so much excitement and fun in the bar which he visits so often; everyone seems to enjoy himself so thoroughly; there is such laughing and joking and singing all round; it naturally occurs to him, seeing but one side of the picture, that beer-drinking must be a source of very great pleasure indeed. Again, in carrying home his purchased measure, his curiosity is excited and he tastes it stealthily. At first it seems bitter and he does not like it; but in the after trials that are sure to follow, the very bitterness becomes attractive to him, and he soon turns out an embryo drunkard.

This, however, is only a slight danger compared to that arising from the bad example of drunken parents. I have already written so much on the subject of the disedification of children, that the further reference to it here may seem tedious and out of place. Yet it is of such vital importance, that I must be excused for recurring to it in connexion with the stumbling-block of which I am treating. I have generally found the children of drunkards possessed of a strong bias towards intemperance. In many cases, thank God, they overcome this bias; but most of them follow in their parents’ footsteps, and become in their turn a source of scandal to their children. In this way the tradition of drink is perpetuated among us, notwithstanding the efforts that are being made to destroy it. There are, indeed, most cheering, hopeful signs that we are getting at the root of the evil. A vigorous, firmly-knitted organisation is leagued under the banner of the Cross and pledged to eradicate it, and right nobly is it doing its work. Yet one obstacle rises up like a wall of adamant to bar all progress in the work of reform, and that obstacle is the example of drunken parents. To understand the difficulty of surmounting it, imagine a child with a drunken father. It took the pledge, let us suppose, some time ago, and it honestly meant to keep it; but it has to go for beer every day, and every night it has to witness its effects on him whose example for good or evil it is inclined by an instinct of its nature to follow. In all likelihood, it is disgusted at first and has no temptation to break its pledge. We all know, however, that habit wears out disgust; and even the unsightly spectacle of a drunken parent will in progress of time be viewed without repugnance or aversion. When that time comes, the hour of trial for the child is at hand; and an hour of terrible danger it is. The pledge will begin to weigh on that child like a heavy chain; the sight of drink will begin to fascinate it; and the drunken excitement it will have to witness will seem like glimpses of an Elysium from which it feels itself cruelly debarred. And there is a special circumstance that increases the child’s danger when it loses its disgust for drink. It is the hereditary character of the inclination to drunkenness. I am thoroughly convinced that this inclination is transmitted by generation, and that it remains in the child even when the formerly drunken parent has in course of time become reformed. In itself it is the root of abiding temptation that must be carefully watched to prevent its growth; and surely it is a sufficiently evil inheritance already, and should not be made worse by the addition of that other inheritance of the example of drink. Yet there are parents who leave both to their children, and who go, without fear of the consequences, before the judgment seat of their Creator, to answer, among other things, for this manner of training their family.

I often try to look into the mind and soul of a drunken parent, and to understand the motives that influence him in his conduct towards his children. It is a sad, repulsive study; and yet some good may be drawn from it: let us see what it reveals. His conscience, I find, is, in the beginning of his downward career, bitter and stinging in its reproaches. “Has God blessed you with children,” it seems to say, “that you should hand them over to Satan? You know you are doing so by the example you give them. Would it not be better that they were in their graves, and their sinless souls among the angels, than that they should live to grow up in the blighting shadow of your drunken life? What will your daughter be when she will have come to womanhood? Do you wish to rear her for the streets? Look at her now as she sits shrinking from you in a distant corner. She is still innocent, and pure, and home-loving; but what will she be in twenty years’ time? Your son too; what is to become of him? Is he to turn out a drunkard and to vie with you and surpass you in the vicious excesses to which drunkenness leads? If these be the views you have formed for him, then indeed you may continue in your present course, for it is the very best you can adopt to realise them.”

What answer does the drunkard make to these reproaches? They trouble him at first, and he has no answer ready. Perhaps he gives up drink on account of them for a month or two. But the answer comes at last. His children will never turn out drunkards. He is giving them a good education. Their mother sees that they attend to their religious duties. In fact, his example will be a warning to them rather than a scandal; and so all this croaking is but an attack of the blues, for which drink is the only remedy. This reasoning gradually produces a state of false conscience in which he lives on for years; his children grow to manhood and womanhood; some of them become a curse to the community in which they live; others bring disgrace on the name they have inherited; and all have faithfully followed in the footsteps of their drunken father.

But what about the influence of Religion on that father’s career? Are the Sacraments, prayer, Mass, spiritual reading, all given up when he has once set his foot on the inclined plane of drunkenness? No; I do not find that they are, at least in the beginning. Satan seldom tempts us to leap down all at once into a yawning precipice: he rather leads us downwards by easy stages, until our eyes become used to the darkness, and, on looking upwards, all hope of returning sickens and dies in us. Night prayer is omitted or said irregularly; and the Tempter is satisfied with this for a beginning. Morning prayer is next left off. Then the confusion and disorder in daily habits, always caused by drink, prevents spiritual reading and the other exercises of piety to which good Catholics are accustomed. In a short time, or perhaps from the very outset, Confession becomes irksome; a great effort is required to make it; and sooner or later the effort becomes too much for the besotted will of the drunkard. Holy Communion, of course, is out of the question when Confession has been once given up; and thus the miserable soul is left to itself, or rather has withdrawn itself from all the spiritual means divinely appointed to strengthen it against temptation, and to confirm it in its good resolutions, and to light its path to Heaven.

There are some drunkards, indeed, who do not give up Confession, and who continue, nevertheless, to lead drunken lives. They deceive themselves into believing that they are committing no grievous sin of intemperance, because they do not bring themselves to a condition of insensibility by the quantity of drink they take. They set their brains on fire, they shake off every restraint on their passions, they speak wild, unreasoned words, they ruin their nervous system and their bodily health, they neglect their business, they squander their money, they scandalise their children; and yet they imagine that they are guilty of no grievous sin, because they do not fall off their chairs and have not to be carried to their beds after their nightly carousals. Those men bring on themselves a terrible hardening of conscience by their abuse of Sacraments; and even at the hour of death I have found it extremely difficult to awaken in them a consciousness of their self-inflicted blindness.

I would urge then upon parents, with all possible earnestness, to remove the temptation of drink from themselves and from their children. Of all stumbling-blocks in our homes this is the greatest and worst, as well as the most prevalent. The Church has always some hope of bringing back under her saving influence, those who still enjoy the use of reason; but for the drunkard who has his reason habitually swamped and steeped in drink, she can have but little hope indeed; and she is forced to class him with the idiotic and insane in our lunatic asylums; and to watch anxiously for some lucid interval, when she can direct his look to the dark abyss down whose steep side he is every day sinking faster and faster.