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Chapter I. The Keason Why

The interrogation points in men's souls steadily grow larger as the world grows older. The question why is written on the firmament of human life, sometimes in letters that blaze like the sunlight, often in those that seem bound about with bands of darkness. The why that surrounds shipwrecked lives has always rested upon two bases, one the corner stone of mystery, the other of apprehension. Theologians for centuries, philosophers for generations, have tried to throw the candle of illumination to the heart of human ruin, but have illumined only its outer edge. The heart of human misery has steadily and sadly throbbed on, in spite of the anodyne of the philosopher or the sedative of the theologian. Why are men born with their sky of life in a total eclipse that never ceases, with the echo of curses of by-gone generations ceaselessly sounding in their ears % The drunkard asks this question in the midst of his wildest debauch, the opium eater whispers its horrible suggestiveness as the bell of hopelessness sounds in his ears for ever the story of his despairing life. Go back to the beginning of authentic history, and in the drunkenness of Noah and the backward look of the wife of Lot we meet the same desire that leads the man of to-day to order his morning cocktail to try to lying the lurid gleams of dissipation into the center of his life. Could the epitaphs of all the countless millions of lives that slumber in the bosom of this planet of ours, as well as those that walk to-day upon its surface, tell their story of woe and final hopelessness, we should come face to face in every generation with the ever present desire of men to put into life what the kindly and ever generous hand of nature never thought of placing there. We look upon the drunkard, and w r e wonder why he chooses to drink. We behold the man of brains and parts putting into his mouth "the enemy that doth steal away his brains," and we wonder why he does it. We look into the eyes of the man in whose life the star of hope hath set, and, though he goes through the world almost unrecognized by bis fellow-men, yet can we stand with him soul to soul. Still the old question again: Why hath he chosen, why does he choose, to dress his soul in blackness ?

In every land, in all nations, civilized or uncivilized, of differing races, habits, modes of life, we find this one element in common: The stimulant, the narcotic, the anodyne is ever at their door. . Modern science, which questions everything, which accepts no answer that is not buttressed by proof, raises with renewed emphasis the old question, why, with the aid of the alcohol fiend, the opium demon, the cocaine siren, the chloral lullaby, do they endeavor, with ceaseless persistence, to transform their manhood into something other than was given them by the gracious hand of God? The old axiom has renewed emphasis in men's thoughts to day, that every effect must have an adequate and sufficient cause. This has been the Ariadne clue that has solved the mystery of m?ny a labyrinth and is being used to-day with wider effect than ever. Wise and learned men are investigating to-day, with ij } \ the eyes of Argus, with as many arms as Briarius, and there is not lacking in this investigation the gold of Midas to solve the problem of the drink habit, the opium habit, and all forms of bondage and slavery which transform a man into a fiend or eat the core out of his life.

In answer to this question two theories stand oat prominent and noticeable. There is, first, what may be called the physical theory. After the mere line of the social glass has beenpassed and the element of conviviality is no longer the chief factor in the case, men drink because the nerves of the tortured stomach cry out for new stimulation, because the flagging powers must have beneath them their accustomed prop. Throwing aside the element or factor of their use merely in cases of pain, to woo sleep, or wrench apart the tiger fangs of aching nerves, men use narcotics, men tie their lives to the dark mile posts of opium, cocaine and chloral because the distorted nerve cells in their all-distorted bodies clamor for the poison as the stomach hungers for food or the lungs demand air. This is the physical theory. On the basis of it and along the line of it philanthropists and physicians found their attempts to save the lives of their fellow-men.

Then there is the mental theory, not totally distinct and divorced from the physical one, but playing along beside it a much larger part in the problem than until recently men have learned to admit. It is not merely the congested stomach, it is not alone the half starved nerve cell, it is not only the anaemic brain, it is not merely the whole abnormal physical machinery together that offers adequate solution; but the laborer drinks, the workingman turns his home into a hell, because of the hard, inexorable necessities that cover all his mental firmament with dull and neutral clouds. The human soul is made to pine for light, that light that shines down into the heart, that floods his life with radiance as the sunlight gilds the mountains when it beams on them its morning: benediction. This light he cannot find; he does not meet it in the hard grind and struggle to put a loaf of bread on the table and keep the winter chill out of doors. Plodding by day, wearied at night, he instinctively looks around him for a little light to pierce these heavy clouds of care. He goes to the saloon, and in its warmth and amid its hilarity his burden for a little time drops from his shoulders to the ground beside his feet. He forgets for a few hours who and what he is. This fiery fluid that fills for a while his life with its lurid light, that is the nearest approach that he knows how to find to the elixir of life or the draught of Lethe, and so he drinks and drinks until his manhood is burned away by the baleful fire of alcohol.

Your heavily worked physician, your business man taxing his every energy to meet the thousand contingencies and intense and promising possibilities that are in and all around his pathway of daily existence; your author, whose book must be spiced up to the demand of modern literary taste; your woman of society, who burns the candle of life at both ends and then wonders why it burns dim or consumes so rapidly, find in the soothing hand of opium, in the enchantment of the softly whispered promises of morphine, the friend who, with enticing smile, shall spread a shimmer of brightness over their extended field of incessant care that dogs like a specter their often faltering steps. The business man, whose boat rocks on the billows in the turbulent waters of the contest for wealth and the world's honors, has but to summon to his side the familiar face of the opium Mephistopheles, who comes to him at first in angel's guise, and at the word of this familiar spirit the winds and the waves are stilled. Your devotees of pleasure, as their energies begin to flag, and the nerves of their systems, so constantly strung to concert pitch, no longer respond as a whole to the normal realities of existence, w T ould fain, if it be possible, start the wheels around with faster rotation, would put a heavier pressure upon the engines of the sensibilities of existence, and in the opium dream, the cocaine exhilaration, the chloral trance, they find what their dulled sensations crave.

The former of these theories is that of the materialist, who finds his explanation of most of life's enigmas in the potency of matter to account for the facts of life; the other is the ground of the idealist, who looks for his explanation of what he sees and hears in the dominance of that mysterious something we term mind in its power over matter. Are they both correct? or neither? As usual, the truth is more likely to be found between the extremes of the swing of the pendulum. A tortured and abnormally working physical system accounts for a very large class of the observable things that we meet in this shadow territory of life experience. In the judgment of the writer, the part played by the imagination, by the mind working in grooves which habit has made familiar and well known, must be put into the foreground of this problem to account for a large class also. The 2,000,000 lives in these United States of America that are bound in the steel chains of the drug bondage are in the fearful grasp of the tyrant that controls them because of a mind that seeks re^ lief, of a brain that cannot apply the brakes to thought, and because of a lesson they have learned too late, that these modes of relief which they have sought so eagerly have been purchased at the cost of a reconstruction and a now abnormal organic structure as well as functional working of the entire physical organism. Put these two solutions together, give each its adequate scope, and we have gone far to reach, if we have not reached, the actual end of the explanation of this problem of woe and heaviness.

We speak of the alcohol habit, of the opium habit, of the morphine habitue, of the cocaine fiend, of the chloral slave, of the hashish eater; what do we mean? Simply that when a certain hour comes around and the clock strikes 8 or 12 there must be put into their system, as much as air or food, that which will produce a result which if not attained, will throw all the machinery of life out of gear merely because of the tendency of the mind to run in a groove. A man has a habit of buttoning his coat in a certain way. Daniel Webster is reported to have once said that he could change the style and character of his spoeches easier than the habit of wearing a certain kind of collar. One man has a habit of early rising, another a habit of a walk before breakfast, another a habit of a certain kind of mode of speech. Is this what we mean and all that we mean when we say that a man is in the opium habit, merely that custom has taken control of the helm of volition and that his habit is a something that has this power over his life, and no more ? Listen to the comments of men in general, or even to the remarks of physicians, and one would suppose that such was an adequate and entire explanation of all this class of phenomena. Why does a physician, a man of intelligence, a man who sees from the beginning to the end of a case of typhoid fever or of acute rheumatism, say to or speak of the man who for twenty years has used twenty grains of morphia per day, that he can stop if he will ? What is the reason that, in this age of the nineteenth century, which has learned so fast and is so speedily still learning the lesson of tolerance, which exhausts the resources of modern civilization in the construction of insane asylums and even in the ventilation of almshouses, it still speaks in a tone of scornful pity, or of contempt without pity, of the man who is bound down by chains that are impossible to break?

Is it because of the stunted mental growth, of the repugnant physical appearance, of the victim of drugs that enslave? But the nineteenth century has compassion for the lunatic. It finds a place, even, in its heart for the imbecile. Why, then, does it exhaust all its vocabulary of scorn and play with all its artillery of contempt upon the man who looks through hopeless eyes out into a darkened world whose stars shall never sing to him a morning psalm or an evening blessing? Is it because of a total, colossal failure to apprehend the gigantic facts of this whole problem of despair ? When it sends its torch of alleviation and searches with all the spirit of the enlightened Good Samaritan to find the sufferer by the wayside, why does it leave this blackest corner of doom and unhappiness unlightened by one single ray ? Because it fails to apprehend this one fact, the distinction between a habit and a disease; because, with all its varied enlightenment, it yet has totally failed to grasp the distinction between a moral obliquity and a physical infirmity. The distorted child who comes into this world with twisted limbs or deformed brain finds waiting for its helplessness the warmest corner of mother's heart, the softest place upon mother's breast. The distorted

SHADOWS LIFTED.

life which wakes to hear the voice of conscience begin in the brightness of the new-born morning, with added power of expression, the reproaches of the many yesterdays, why is it that distorted life is left to weep its tears of woe alone ? Because the spirit of charity of the nineteenth century knows so little and seems to care so little concerning the present unhappiness or the future destiny of these children . of despair. When, from the women of America, with their pure, white banner of Christian sympathy floating above their yet purer and whiter souls of affection, the drunkard in his delirium, the victim of alcohol in his deepest and darkest debauch, finds extended toward him these hands of love that so nearly resemble those that were extended upon the Cross, excepting only the print of the nails, why, in so many homes where this shadow of doom sinks down into the hearts of all who dwell beneath its roof, is it that the voice of love and the hands of helpfulness are never extended there ?

It was Talleyrand,I think, who once said that a blunder was worse than a crime; so may it be said that mankind has no such enemy as ignorance. The drunkard may be, or may not, the victim of his own indiscretion or the result of the combinations of generations of temperaments behind him, way back through generations of ancestors, that make up what we term heredity. In either case, the one as well as the other, he finds the same compassion the moment that one sigh for a better life falls from his lips, one gleam toward a better future shines from his eyes. The opium slave, nine times out of ten, so far as all that touches the initiatory steps of his bondage, is the victim of circumstance. Down from the bloody field of Balaklava there comes to us to-day the echo of the appalling sentence;

" Some one has blundered." That blunder sent back the ranks of the Light Brigade, "not the six hundred." The results of the blunder extended but to the heroes that fell and to the hearts that looked for their return and neither found nor met them. The blunder that writes its indelible autograph into the structure of a human soul and binds it fast with these awful fetters is as limitless in its consequences as human life itself. The greatest step forward in the path of reform of this generation was when the philanthropist was taught by the calm lips of modern science that drunkenness speedily passed from a habit to a disease. The word reform was written in gilded letters when that truth was discerned. When the scales of this colossal ignorance as to the older and remoter effects of this infinitely blacker bondage drop from the eyes of the people of America, the jubilee that will be sung by the celestial choir will be one that is equaled in rhythm or in gladness only when heaven's anthem is sung that peals over the sea of glass when one sinner repents.

Now, then, what is the distinction between a habit and a disease ? That is a habit which a man does merely from repetition, which writes no deeper imprint into his life, which makes no deeper groove in his soul than is the result merely of the accumulation of individual actions, the yesterdays and yesterdays making the path of that action easier for to-day and to-morrow. The fingers of the pianist habituate themselves to rapid and almost automatic action. That is a disease when the structure of some portion of the physical organism is changed in construction or altered in its method of action. If it is a change of structure we say the man has an organic disease. If it is a change in a mode of action, we say that man has a functional disease. A man with an intermittent heart, whose pulse beats vary in time, we say has a functional disease of the heart. The man whose heart valves do not completely close, where those heart valves have been changed in form, we say has an organic disease of the heart. The opium habit would be a habit if the effect of the dose of yesterday passed into the system and out of the system and left no change or imprint there. The opium habit is a disease, provided that in nerve cell or blood corpuscle, in secret chamber of the brain, or along the path of the spinal cord, change of structure or alteration of function has taken place, because of the effect of the poison. Place the nerve cell of the normal man under the microscope, and what do you see in this living cell into whose recesses the eye of modern science has peered in its search for the secret of life and what life really is, in this last secret chamber ?

Place that normal nerve cell beneath the microscope and you find a circular or oval membrane filled with a seemingly colorless fluid, with a small nucleus. Place the nerve cell of the morphia habitue beneath the microscope, and in these living cells, the last retreat of life, you find evidences of structural change. Science, which has measured the distance of one world from another, which traces the speed across the heavens of the lightning flash, has also measured with reasonable accuracy the rate that sensation travels along the path of the nerves. That rate of sensation in the man whose physical system stands as God created it, has one rate of progress; along the path of the nerves of the morphia habitue it has another. That process which we term assimilation and absorption and elimination, by means of which the human body continues to exist, in the normal man has one mode of action as to rapidity, as to completeness; in the body of the morphia habitue it has another. In the body of the opium eater every nerve cell, every atom of bodily tissue, has reconstructed itself to meet these changed and abnormal conditions. The consequence of a habit, with this restriction of significance, is virtually to leave the man as he was. Webster could have changed the shape of his collar and still been the Godlike Daniel. The man who buttons his coat upon the right side can button it upon the left and still be the same man. The man who has the habit of early rising can remain in bed two hours after his usual time and disturb nothing but his comfort.

The man who walks the earth with structural or functional disease written not only upon him but written into him and permeating him through and through, the only thing that man has to hope for is that death will drop the curtain or that science will discover relief. Until very recently, the hearts that loved him, the wife that watched over him with a care more intense than mother ever expended in looking into the cradle of her child, the children that gathered about him when he opened the threshold of his door, had but one hope, one anticipation. Much as they loved him, bound up and intertwined as their lives were with his own, only as they looked into his dead and silent face, as he looked back at them from lips that spoke no more, only over the opium eater's coffin did the hearts that loved him expect that he should know rest on earth. About seven weeks ago a leading physician in the suburbs of one of our metropolitan cities, a man of eminent Christian character, an honored member of the Congregational church, a Sir Knight who stood high in the regard of his fellow-Knights, was approached one day by a friend who said to him, ' ' Doctor, some of your friends have known for a long time of a very heavy burden that you were carrying. They have known how this morphine habit was pulling your life in twain. Now, I think, if you desire, I can point you to an easy and speedy relief." This physician came into the city, was brought into contact with a fellow- sufferer in another profession, and the first time this fellow-sufferer saw him he had that look upon his face that you sometimes see in a deer whom the hunters have pursued almost to the point of death, an intense, strained, eager longing for relief, and yet an almost hopelessness of finding it.

He went home, talked the whole matter over with his dear, loyal wife. A few days later, she, too, came in and said to the writer of this volume: "Doctor Grover, you would not deceive my husband, would you ? It would be so cruel to do it. He is trusting everything to what you have said to him, He has taken nearly thirty grains of morphia a day for the last twenty-eight years. Often and often have I waked in the night to see if he were still here with me on earth. Only a little more than a year ago, a relative of ours passed away, dying of this same disease. My hushand almost fell in convulsions at her grave, as his thoughts turned toward the future and he saw another grave opened there, and his own pulseless form its occupant. You couldn't deceive him, could you? It would be so cruel," I said to her: "Deceive your husband ? He is a fellow-Christian. He is a Sir Knight. I would go on my hands and knees by day or by night to pass the threshold of your home and bring to him relief. By all our trust and grateful love in the common Redeemer in whom we both believe, I promise you that if he will observe a few simple conditions, yonder sun shall not more certainly rise in the east and set in the west on its daily path than that your husband will be as well a man as there is in this commonwealth." Twenty-seven days passed by. Chains fell from his life forever, broken in fragments by a hand as tender and a heart as true as the hand and heart of him who broke the shackles on four millions of wrists, of dusky wrists, and they dropped to the earth with a clang that rang around the world.

By the genius of one man were those chains broken. One Sunday afternoon after those twenty-seven days had passed by, this dear woman, who could not trust herself to come before, came to see the writer of this volume again. I walked with her a few steps to another building and brought her face to face with one whose path had been for years amid a similar gloom. While it has been my privilege to speak for years to some hearts that have said that I brought them comfort and blessing in the name of Him who bade me carry it, yet I had rather see the look I saw on those two ladies' faces that Sunday afternoon than to hear the words of any man, however eloquent, or to hear brought back to me by others the echoes of my own. Can it be possible now that, in this age when colleges are becoming universities, that in these years when the heavens above and the earth beneath and the waters under the earth are probed for their secrets, are wooed for all the blessings they may contain, this ignorance which has sounded like a knell of doom in the ears of those who could only grope in the dark shall still be permitted to continue? It cannot be. While the world is learning and expressing, as it never learned or expressed before, some of the deeper meanings that come chanting to our ears like the ever grand requiem of the sea the words of Him who said, ct A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another"; when here in this menacing winter the churches, the great heart of the people, are learning that other sentence as they never have learned it before, i ' He that giveth unto these little ones that believe in Me a cup of cold water only, giveth it unto Me"; with this blessed gospel of charity sprinkling the earth with a perfume sweeter than the violet, covering it with a baptism purer than the heart of the lily, shall this one ignorance be permitted to remain?

We speak, but we do not know of what we speak, when we say that a man's life is dark that does not hope any more. There are two million of the brightest men and women in America who do know what that sentence means, and what it means to look all through the great blue vault above and see no star that has not been covered with gloom. We take up our morning paper and we say that it seems as though the world was becoming full of tragedy. When the hands of the lightning bring to us the account of this dark deed and that, we stand aghast and appalled before a seeming increase of crime. But here are two million lives in this fair land of ours. Their sighs are heard by the Atlantic, their moan of woe goes out upon the blue Pacific beyond the golden gate, and every one of those lives carries a tragedy in its heart — a silent tragedy. The papers will very seldom find it out or speak of it; those that live in closest contact know not its full significance; but their prayers for relief, we may be very certain, are not far from the foot of the great white throne. Those tragedies are mostly silent tragedies. The grave closes over them, and their accents are hushed forever on earth. To tell the story of each one of these two million lives, to point them to the one star that shall have healing in its beams for them, will be the purpose of the following pages of this book.

THE OPIUM HABIT— ITS CAUSE, ITS MANIFES- TATIONS, ITS CURE.

"Thou dost, in thy passages of life, make me believe that thou art only marked for the hot vengeance and the rod of heaven to punish my mistreadings." — Henry TV.

"That keep the word of promise to our ear, and break it to our hope."— Macbeth.

Chapter II. The Opium Habit Its Cause, Its Manifestations

ITS CURE.

To write descriptively upon this most terrible of all forms of bondage of which the human organism is capable, would seem to be the most absolute kind of supererogation after the golden pen of De Quincey has depicted its results in letters that seem to burn like flame. I wonder how many poor, sick-hearted men, who felt that life's doors were closed against them forever and life's opportunities lost, have laid down De Quincey's book and felt that they were laying down every hope that life contained, together with the volume. The purpose of this chapter, however, is of a very different nature from that of the volume of the king of British essayists. He has painted a panorama that blazes before a man's vision as a meteor in the sky; my purpose is to raise, not drop, a curtain before the anticipations of life and to show how the light of the baleful meteor may be transfigured into the beams of a serene and calmly burning star.

in The physiology and pathology of the opium habit. What does opium do to this human system of ours ? In what way and along what line does it work its fearful results ? Into what waters does it carry the ship of life in order to wreck it and break it into fragments upon the reefs which grind it to pieces and from whose terrible embrace there seems no escape ? Physiology deals with the phenomena presented by living organisms. It endeavors to solve and read the secrets of the normally working human constitution. Pathology deals with those diseased conditions of human life and of the physical organism when structural, organic changes have been produced, that lead to abnormal working of physical forces. The physiology of the opium habit: Taken into the human system for the first time, in its earlier stages what are the results produced ? That depends upon the constitution itself, and is largely a matter of temperament. As there are born drunkards, so there are born opium eaters. There are men whose systems drink up alcohol as the fields in August drink up a summer shower. They are born with what is termed the alcohol diathesis, and the moment that in early years alcohol passes their lips they instantly cross the threshold of the danger line of drunkenness. So, in like manner, there are born opium eaters. The man whose first dose of opium make him sick at the stomach, produces nausea and vomiting and all the unpleasant symptoms that follow in the wake of this drug when taken into such an organization, may fall upon his knees and thank the God who made him that He thus placed a gate whose bars are very strong against the most subtle and insidious form of temptation of which human life is capable. The man whose first dose of opium quiets pain and does nothing else, may also sing his psalm of gratitude. Men do not live, or they should not, under the thraldom of constant pain. The resources of modern medicine can guard almost any system against a pain which is as constant and as persistent as the days. The man whose first dose of opium starts into action the full activity of the imaginative faculty, that puts his fancy into fullest play, that brings about that equable calm and exquisite sense of repose, that gives him a self-possession as serene as the stars upon