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    THE CHAUTAUQUAN.

    _A MONTHLY MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE PROMOTION OF TRUE CULTURE.
    ORGAN OF THE CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC CIRCLE._

                 VOL. V.       MARCH, 1885.       NO. 6.

Officers of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

_President_, Lewis Miller, Akron, Ohio. _Chancellor_, J. H. Vincent,
D.D., New Haven, Conn. _Counselors_, The Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D.,
the Rev. J. M. Gibson, D.D.; Bishop H. W. Warren, D.D.; Prof. W. C.
Wilkinson, D.D.; Edward Everett Hale. _Office Secretary_, Miss Kate
F. Kimball, Plainfield, N. J. _General Secretary_, Albert M. Martin,
Pittsburgh, Pa.



Contents

Transcriber’s Note: This table of contents of this periodical was created
for the HTML version to aid the reader.


    REQUIRED READING FOR MARCH.
    Temperance Teachings of Science; or, The Poison Problem
        Chapter VI.—Subjective Remedies                       311
    Sunday Readings
        [_March 1_]                                           314
        [_March 8_]                                           315
        [_March 15_]                                          315
        [_March 22_]                                          315
        [_March 29_]                                          316
    Studies in Kitchen Science and Art
        VI. Cabbages, Turnips, Carrots, Beets and Onions      316
    The Circle of the Sciences                                320
    Home Studies in Chemistry and Physics
        Fire—Physical Properties                              323
    The Mohammedan University of Cairo                        327
    As Seeing the Invisible                                   329
    National Aid to Education                                 329
    A Trip to the Land of Dreams                              333
    The Homelike House
        Chapter III.—The Dining Room                          335
    Mexico                                                    338
    Two Seas                                                  339
    New Orleans World’s Exposition                            340
    Geography of the Heavens for March                        342
    How to Win                                                343
    Notes on Popular English                                  345
    The Chautauqua School of Liberal Arts                     348
    Outline of Required Readings, March, 1885                 350
    Programs for Local Circle Work                            350
    Local Circles                                             351
    The C. L. S. C. Classes                                   356
    Questions and Answers                                     357
    The Trustees Reorganize Chautauqua                        358
    Editor’s Outlook                                          360
    Editor’s Note-Book                                        362
    C. L. S. C. Notes on Required Readings for March          365
    Notes on Required Readings in “The Chautauquan”           367
    Talk About Books                                          369
    Paragraphs from New Books                                 370
    Special Notes                                             372




REQUIRED READING FOR MARCH.




TEMPERANCE TEACHINGS OF SCIENCE;

OR, THE POISON PROBLEM.

PART VI.

BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M.D.


CHAPTER VI.—SUBJECTIVE REMEDIES.

“Deeprooted evils can not be abolished by striking at the
branches.”—_Boerhave._[1]

The history of the temperance movement has demonstrated the sad futility
of palliative remedies. We have seen that the malady of the poison vice
is not a self-limited, but a necessarily progressive evil. The half-way
measures of “restrictive” legislation have resulted only in furnishing
additional proof that prevention is better, because less impossible, than
control.[A] The regulation of the poison traffic, the redress of the
unavoidably resulting mischief, the cure and conversion of drunkards, in
order to be effectual, would impose intolerable and never ending burdens
on the resources even of the wealthiest communities, while the advocates
of prohibition would forestall the evils both of the remedy and the
disease.

But we should not overlook the truth that, in our own country at least,
the poison plant of intemperance springs from a composite root. In
southern Spain, under the dominion of the Saracens,[2] the poison vice
was almost unknown during a series of centuries.[B] The moral code and
the religion of the inhabitants discountenanced intemperance. The virtue
of dietetic purity ranked with chastity and cleanliness. An abundance
of harmless amusements diverted from vicious pastimes. Under such
circumstances the absence of direct temptations constituted a sufficient
safeguard against the vice of the poison habit; but in a country like
ours the efficacy of prohibition depends on the following supplementary
remedies:

1. INSTRUCTION.—In the struggle against the powers of darkness light
often proves a more effective weapon than might or right. Even the
limited light of human reason might help us to avoid mistakes that have
undoubtedly retarded the triumph of our cause. We must enlighten, as
well as admonish our children, if we would save them from the snares of
the tempter; among the victims of intemperance, even among those who can
speak from experience and can not deny that their poison has proved the
curse of their lives, only a small portion is at all able to comprehend
the necessary connection of cause and result. They ascribe their ruin to
the spite of fortune, to the machinations of an uncharitable world, to
abnormally untoward circumstances, rather than to the normal effects of
the insidious poison. Intoxication they admit to be an evil, but defend
the moderate use of a liquor as infallibly injurious in the smallest
as in the largest dose; they underrate the progressive tendency of
their vice and overrate their power of resistance; they cling to the
tradition that alcohol, discreetly enjoyed, may prove a blessing instead
of a curse. We must banish that fatal delusion. We must reveal the true
significance of the poison habit before we can hope to suppress it as
a life blighting vice. Our text-books should be found in every college
and every village school from Florida to Oregon. Every normal school
should graduate teachers of temperance. The law of the State of New York
providing for the introduction of primers on the effects of alcoholic
beverages was attacked by one of our leading scientific periodicals,
with more learning than insight, on the ground that the physiological
action of alcohol is as yet obscure even to our ablest pathologists,
and therefore not a fit subject for a common school text-book. The same
objection might be urged against every other branch of physiology and
the natural history of the organic creation. “Every vital process is a
miracle,” says Lorenz Oken,[3] “that is, in all essential respects an
unexplained phenomenon.” A last question will always remain unanswered
wherever the marvelous process of life is concerned, but our ignorance,
as well as our knowledge, of that phenomenon has its limits, and in
regard to the effects of alcoholic beverages it is precisely the most
knowable and most fully demonstrated part of the truth which it behooves
every child to know, but of which at present nine tenths of the adults,
even in the most civilized countries, remain as ignorant as the natives
of Kamtschatka who worship a divinity in the form of a poisonous
toadstool. A boy may be brought to comprehend the folly of gambling
even before he has mastered the abstruse methods of combination and
permutation employed in the calculus of probable loss and gain. We need
not study Bentham[4] to demonstrate that honesty is an essential basis
of commerce and social intercourse. By the standard of usefulness, too,
temperance primers might well take precedence of many other text-books.
Our school boys hear all sorts of things about the perils encountered by
the explorers of African deserts and Arctic seas, but next to nothing
about the pitfalls in their own path—no room for the discussion of
such subjects in a curriculum that devotes years to the study of dead
languages. Is the difference between the archaic and pliocene form of a
Greek verb so much more important than the difference between food and
poison?

With such a text as the monster curse of intemperance and its impressive
practical lessons, a slight commentary would suffice to turn thousands of
young observers into zealous champions of our cause, just as in Germany a
few years of gymnastic training have turned nearly every young man into
an advocate of physical education. The work begun in the school room
should be continued on the lecture platform, but we should not dissemble
the truth that in a crowded hall ninety per cent. of the visitors have
generally come to hear an _orator_ rather than a teacher, and enjoy
an eloquence that stirs up their barrenest emotions as much as if it
had fertilized the soil of their intelligence, just as the unrepentant
gamesters of a Swiss watering place used to applaud the sensational
passages of a drama written expressly to set forth the evils of the
gambling hell. Enthusiasm and impressiveness are valuable qualifications
of a public speaker, but he should possess the talent of making those
agencies the vehicles of instruction. The great mediæval reformers, as
well as certain political agitators of a later age, owe their success to
their natural or acquired skill in the act of stirring their hearers into
an intellectual ferment that proved the leaven of a whole community—for
that skill is a talent that can be developed on a basis of pure common
sense and should be more assiduously cultivated for the purposes of our
reform. A modern philanthropist could hardly confer a greater benefit on
his fellow-citizens than by founding a professorship of temperance, or
endowing a college with the special condition of a proviso for a weekly
lecture on such topics as “The Stimulant Delusion,” “Alcoholism,” “The
History of the Temperance Movement.”

Pamphlets, too, may subserve an important didactic purpose, and in the
methods of their distribution we might learn a useful lesson from our
adversaries, the manufacturers of alcoholic nostrums