One hundred years ago
IT is a speciality of sanitary reformers, who are among the most useful of the many intellectual nuisances in the world, to be deficient in the quality of humour. One of them, some years ago, recommended that a man's dead rela- tives should be burned at the corners of streets, to save gas-lamps; another, not two years ago, lectured on the unheal- thiness of boots in bedrooms; and on Saturday, Mr Mansergh, at the close of a most sensible address to the Sanitary Congress on water supply, brought in his views on teetotalism in the oddest way. He told his audience that `systema- tic hot-water drinking had been proved in America to be destructive of the appetite for alcohol'. We entirely be- lieve him, and if he extended the destructive effect to the appetite for mutton-chops, fruit, or wheaten bread, we should believe him also. But why limit us to hot water, when tartar emetic, ipecacuanha, unrefined cod- liver-oil, and perhaps twenty other drugs, would be at least equally potent? The old remedy of Rechab, total absti- nence, is an easier one than that, and as perfectly effective as long as it is pur- sued. The difficulty of the temperate is not to leave off alcohol, but to believe in the use of leaving it off. They do not find that the most perfect abstainers in the world, life-convicts, become better people. The Spectator, 2 October 1886
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