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The dinner being finished, the bandsmen laid down their instruments and the girls were invited to drink. Tahitian females have no thirst for alcohol. They, as most of their men, prefer fruit juices or cool water except at times of feasting. They had no intoxicants when the whites came, not in all Polynesia.
The world had not then thought so much about the misery which intoxicants cause, and had not learned that we are better off without stimulants than with them. Every day the young man worked in his brewery, and in the evening till midnight tended a small oyster house, which he had opened.
The special interest of the women as a class in this reform in men's manners for women as a rule did not drink intoxicants consisted in the calculation that if the men drank less they would be less likely to abuse them, and would provide more liberally for their maintenance; that is to say, their highest aspirations were limited to the hope that, by reforming the morals of their masters, they might secure a little better treatment for themselves.
A little less lingering at the club, an economy of hours here and there this will give you time, and to spare. Of course if you would rather "loaf" than be great, if you hunger rather after the flesh-pots than the lawyer's wreaths, this advice is not for you. Do not use intoxicants. Even beware of coffee; it is one of the most powerful nerve and brain stimulants.
Had Cranze been any other passenger, he would have stopped his drunken riotings by taking away the drink, and by giving strict orders that the man was to be supplied with no further intoxicants.
At last I received a letter from a Christian man of my flock, telling me that himself and many others were pained with the fear that I was beginning to exceed the bounds of strict temperance: he urged total abstinence at once; he was a total abstainer himself. I was startled prostrated humbled to the very dust. I reflected on the quantity of intoxicants I was now taking daily, and I shuddered.
One special form of that general self-control is that already enjoined, the suppression of the animal appetites, especially the abstinence from intoxicants.
So convinced are all Governments and peoples that drinking and crime are closely connected, that much has already been done, with good effect, to lessen the sale of intoxicants in many lands, and more is being promised. Anxious as we are to see the drink-traffic abolished everywhere, it has never appeared to us to be desirable to join in agitations of a political kind on the subject.
The modern dance in which both sexes freely mingle, irrespective of character, purely for amusement, at late hours, at which intoxicants, in some form, are generally used, is, essentially, an institution of vice. The modern dance is as different from the dancing of ancient times, and from the dancing sanctioned in the Bible, as daylight is from dark, as good is from bad.
In fact the exigencies of frontier life demanded, perhaps, the very stimulus which, when over indulged in, caused so much evil. Malaria loaded the air, and the most efficacious drugs now at command were then undiscovered or could not be had. Intoxicants were the only popular specific.
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