The Origin of Teetotalism.

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barbarians to exert themselves in order to procure them. There is no fear of this country settling down into the apathetic indolence of Eastern peoples; it is the other extreme which we have to fear and avoid.

To one great end should all conquest over the material world be applied,—the freer development of the moral, intellectual, and physical life. Let this assistance of one of nature's most powerful forces which has been so liberally bestowed, and by furnishing us with which it seems to be one of the most obvious intentions of the Deity to remit a portion of the curse of labour pronounced on Adam's head, and to give to us, the poor overburdened sons of the bleak and barren North, compensation for the want of the rich soil and genial climate of the sunny lands of the Eastern and Western hemispheres, give larger respite from grinding toil. Let this huge material force, so nicely controlled and applied, do away with the long, protracted hours of children's labour, and give them time to grow up unharassed, unbent, healthy, and educated. Let it lift up in its hard, iron, adamantine arms from off the delicate, easily-crushed body of woman, the heavy or prolonged work which enfeebles and distorts her. Let it take from the shoulders of the more stalwart workman a portion of his heavy load of toil, so that what is left may be borne easily and well. The great bulk of the industrial community is far enough advanced to appreciate and use aright every facility for moral and intellectual improvement. The longer time and greater strength which abridged hours of work must confer would not be abused. The 'half time for children,'' short time,' and early closing' movements are aiming in the right direction.

ART. III. THE ORIGIN OF TEETOTALISM.

1. A Letter on the Effects of Wine and Spirits. By a Physician. Printed for the Dublin Temperance Society: 1829. No. 1. Price 6d.

2. A Second Letter. By the Same. 1829. Ibid. No. 2. Price 6d. 3. Political Evils of Intemperance. By J. H. Ibid. No. 3. Price 3d.

4. Remarks on the Evils, Occasions, and Cure of Intemperance. By W. U. Ibid. No. 4. Price 4d.

5. The Preston Temperance Advocate. 1834-8. Edited by Joseph Livesey.

6. The Standard Temperance Library. Edited by Dr. F. R. Lees. Douglas, Isle of Man : 1841.

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S the abstinence movement is now committed to the care of a second generation of reformers, and is passing from

its first or social phase, into its second or political stage of development, the time would seem fitting for the record of a few facts and principles respecting its origin, which might else run the risk of being either forgotten or perverted. In fact, there have already found their way into the columns of some organs of literature, statements that have no ground whatever, save in the imagination of their authors; while within the circle of the reformers themselves, the exaggerations and delusions of egotism have endangered the absolute and impartial truth of history.

We propose to treat the matter in relation, first, to the significance of the name selected for the movement; second, to the doctrine developed and expounded; third, to the chief persons who constituted its early propaganda.

1. Concerning the word "Teetotal, there has been much divergent opinion. One of the best of the cheap periodicals has recently devoted a leader to this topic, which may be taken as representative of the errors into which so many of our half-informed and hasty essayists are continually falling.

'The great temperance movement, which was one in the right direction, for we English were desperately hard drinkers, has not only taken away our reproach, but it has added another word to the English language. From it arose, we believe, that extra branch of temperance men, those who would go to extremesthe teetotalers. Their name is the word of which we speak, and possibly no one knows its derivation. We have heard it explained in various ways. Webster calls it a cant word, formed in England from the first two letters of "temperance" and "total," signifying thereby total temperance. We doubt whether he is right. Trench, in his "English, Past and Present," does not mention the word. Other people have said that one who stammered invented it: "t-t-t-total abstinence," he asserted, was what he wanted; but this looks very apocryphal. One asserts, after some consideration and study of words, that it is a mis-spelt word, that it means tea-total abstainer, that is, abstainers to whom tea would be the very strongest stimulant. We do not make words by adding a repetition of a letter to strengthen them; we do not say that a man is dee-dead if he is quite defunct. But the stupid, vulgar, odious word is there; no one can understand it, every scholar must abhor it. Scholars cannot coin words, nor remove them: for fifty years or so the ungainly word will defile our language, and then die out, as hundreds of cant terms have already done. Other scholars thus explain, in their own fashion, the word teetotal. It is simply the word total written with two initial letters, ttotal, ffarranton, &c., a common practice in the counties which formed part of the old Danelagh, or where the Danes, as in Lancashire, held the land. The provincials sound the first t slightly, and hence the printers and reporters made it into a separate syllable. The word was so used before the time of Edward IV. [No example, unfortunately, is given.] It is curious that a set of common enthusiasts should have chosen so meaningless, and yet so appropriate a name; but it is characteristic of the English that they did so. Binding themselves under that one foolish but very distinctive appellation, they went to work with a will, and achieved wonders. Probably few modern movements ever did so much real good as teetotalism. Its professors, it is true, shot a great deal lower than their mark; but they reached something.'

It is quite true that the word 'Teetotal' was applied by 'Dicky Turner'-one of the first reformed drunkards of

Preston

Derivation of 'Teetotal.'

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Preston-to express total abstinence-that is, abstinence complete and without compromise; but it is a 'vulgar error' to suppose that he either invented the word, or stuttered it forth. The term has been in common use in Ireland and in Lancashire these hundred years, and was familiar to the writer when a lad in that county nearly forty years back. It can be found in the literature of England, long prior to the Preston movement, in application to various things. Banim, the Irish novelist, employs it; Maginn, in 'Maga,' uses it; and De Quincey also, a master of English, who probably acquired it in Lancashire, amidst the idioms of which county he spent his early years. Richard Turner used the word because it had an established meaning. It was one of those designations to which children and uneducated persons sometimes give spontaneous expression; and because it fell in with popular usage and feeling, Mr. Livesey, wisely or unwisely, adopted it as the name of the new society.

2. For the purpose of considering the doctrine which the word 'Temperance' symbolises, and the manner in which its definition is evolved out of the facts of the case, we cite another representative paragraph, from the same journal :--

'The teetotalers, in their endeavours to reform the world, needed a considerable amount of moral courage, nay more, of enthusiasm; and they possessed both in an extraordinary degree. When they began their work of reformation, the world looked upon drunkenness as a manly indulgence, rather indeed as an accomplishment than as a vice.

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When the society first formed itself, it took, as is not unfrequently the case, a wrong name. It was afraid to call itself a sober society, or the sobriety association; but that is what it meant. It talked about temperance; but as that word applies as much to eating as to drinking, to bad language, dress, hot temper, and a dozen other things, our reformers had to spoil a word by restricting it to one sense. What we want is, to see the whole of the sense restored. We do not want people only temperate, but as the catechism teaches us, sober, temperate, and chaste. But this was not the only mistake which the teetotalers made; by their exaggerations, and almost inexhaustible vehemence, they stirred up a sufficient number of opposers to make the movement very popular; for it must be observed that he who has no opponents will have few friends, and that a good opposition will whip up the populace into something like activity of thought.

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"The real good and evil of drink,—strong drink, or alcohol,-seems now to be better understood. We do not now class alcohol as food; but we know that it is an agent which generates heat, and that as man continually gives off heat to his hat, coat, the room he is in, the chair he sits upon, or the clothes he wears, he must have, in our climate at least, chilly and changeable as it is, some heat-generating agent, either in alcohol, or food which contains carbon. This, we presume, even the most intense of teetotalers will allow. On the other hand, society has had all its social vices put so prominently under its nose by the teetotalers, that it sees their enormity and determines to reform; so that the true balance seems to have

*Heat' is an essential condition of life in all climates, and the blood of man is as hot in one country as another. It is amusing to read-'in our climate at least!' and equally so to hear the confident assertion that we know alcohol generates heat, years after that hypothesis has been utterly exploded amongst scientific minds.

been

been arrived at, with this advantage on the side of total abstinence, that the abstinent man may be a philosopher whilst he indulges in his hobby, but the drunkard who indulges in his must be a fool. Satisfactorily as we have arrived at this virtue of liquid temperance, and excellently as we are progressing, it would be very much better if, by any means, we could compass a general temperance,--that temperance in all things which has been laid before us as the perfection of life.'

Upon a web so mixed of sense and nescience, of good design and bad dialectic, of philosophic feeling and foolish philosophy, it is an ungracious task to be critical. Let us suggest, however, that people endowed with such 'moral courage' and 'enthusiasm' could hardly be 'afraid' of calling their association by its proper name; and that a policy which makes a movement very popular' and compels to 'activity of thought,' can scarcely be intelligently denominated a mistake. May it not be fairly suspected, indeed, that the people who have overcome such enormous difficulties, overthrown such monstrous and mischievous fashions, and achieved a position so prominent and commanding, knew better what they meant, and how to designate their doctrines and designs, than mere literary critics? If the word 'Temperance' is of wider comprehension than the term 'Abstinence,' as we concede it is,-and if the express purpose of the reformers was, not to remould humanity but simply to stop drunkenness by stopping drinking-then the word Teetotal' was at least an unambiguous symbol of their association. In this case, the thing needed was a distinctive, and therefore specific designation, which 'sober' is not, since that term applies equally to body, feeling, and judgment. On the other hand, we do not see on what grounds the general term 'Temperance' may not be claimed as the name of their society, if they choose; just as we may say, at will, 'my servant John,' or 'my servant man.' The major includes the minor, and neither is exclusive of the other. A man may be 'John,' and John is of course a man. Thus Hobbes actually employs both words in his famous definition:-Temperance is the habit of abstaining from things which tend to our destruction.' We do not, besides, see how the use of the generic term can be spoiled' by its application to the specific things which it is expressly made to cover. Surely chop' may be rightly used to denote the specific thing we are enjoying, without spoiling the excellence of our mutton?—or involving us in the conclusion that chop is one thing, and mutton another?

It uniformly happens with great movements in philosophy, morals, religion, politics, and even physical discoveries, that a common thought-the outgrowth of a common tendency, the ripening, as it were, of the human mind-arises and seeks

expression

Ideas have many Centres.

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expression in many places or persons at the same time. Professor Renan has noted this singular fact in an eloquent passage, which we will here transcribe :

There is no one so shut in as not to receive some influence from without. The history of the human mind is full of strange coincidences, which cause very remote portions of the human species, without communication with each other, to arrive at the same time at almost identical ideas and imaginations. In the thirteenth century, the Latins, the Greeks, the Syrians, the Jews, and the Mussulmans, adopted scholasticism, from York to Samarcand; in the fourteenth century, every one in Italy, Persia, and India, yielded to the taste for mystical allegory; in the sixteenth century, art was developed in a very similar manner in Italy, at Mount Athos, and at the Court of the Great Moguls, without St. Thomas, Barhebræus, and the Rabbas of Narbonne, or the Motecallémin of Bagdad having known each other; without Dante and Petrarch having seen any Sofi; without any pupils of the schools of Perouse or of Florence having been at Delhi. We should say there are great moral influences running through the world like epidemics, without distinction of frontier and of race. The interchange of ideas in the human species does not take place only by book, or by direct instruction.'

It thus happens that Cavendish and Priestley, Bell and Fulton, Stephenson and Hackworth, were contemporaneous, independent discoverers and inventors, not rivals or plagiarists, because they produced the outbirths of a common impulse. So it was with the development of the doctrine, and the actual establishment, of temperance societies. In the first quarter of this century, several societies were founded at various independent points in the United States of North America; and about the year 1826, the conviction and feeling thus indicated became organized at Boston into the American Temperance Society, with a pledge of entire abstinence from spirits. The actual results may be estimated from the following statement, which appeared in one of the highest literary organs of America, the Christian Examiner,' of Boston:

The greatest enterprize and the most hopeful omen of the age, perhaps, is the temperance reform. Here is a moral miracle. A nation, a world, fast sinking into the gulf of sensual perdition. How stupendous, almost hopeless, must have seemed to the first reformers, who stretched out their hands to stay that downward course, the work they had undertaken! But they entered upon it; they went forward; and what is the result? Within five years the entire conscience of the world, of the Anglo-Saxon world at least, is penetrated; a new senti

* Vide History of Maine Law in Alliance Prize Argument. Chap. vii. Vol. 7.-No. 26.

I

ment,