Goethe was a non-smoker,
but, according to Bayard Taylor, he drank fifty thousand bottles of
wine in his life-time. Niebuhr greatly disliked smoking, but took a
tremendous quantity of snuff. A great number of teetotalers "make up
for their abstinence from alcohol by excessive indulgence in tobacco,"
and abuse their more consistent brethren who venture to expostulate
with them. John Stuart Mill "believed that the giving up of wine would
be apt to be followed by taking more food than was necessary, merely
for the sake of stimulation." Sir Theodore Martin, also, thinks the
absence of alcohol likely to lead to increased eating, and to an
extent likely to cause derangement of the body. The power of alcohol
to arrest and preserve decomposition may, it is admitted by temperance
writers, retard to some extent the waste of animal tissue, and
diminish accordingly the appetite for food; but they contend that the
effete matter which has served its purpose and done for the body all
that it can do is retained in the body to its loss and damage. "The
question comes to be," says Professor Miller, "whether shall we take
alcohol, eat less, and be improperly nourished, or take no alcohol,
eat more, and be nourished well? Whether shall we thrive better on a
small quantity of new nutritive material with a great deal of what is
old and mouldy, or on a constant and fresh supply of new material? .
Pages:
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141