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say they can make nothing worth mention- Juan del Norte be given: From November 1, ing out of the work offered them there, which means that the Panama wastes are not to be repeated.

In the matter of labor the company can get both natives and Jamaica negroes. They have had an average of 1,000 men employed for over a year, to whom they pay $20 a month and board. We were told at Managua that the best class of native laborers, the farm hands, could not be had for less than $25, but that at that price all the men wanted could be had. It is certain that the same price will bring as many negroes from Jamaica as can be handled, while $20 brings more men than are needed just now.

If the men must die at Nicaragua as they did at Panama in spite of elaborate hospitals, is the canal worth the sacrifice? Must they die so? Is there not a difference between the two localities?

1889, to December 31, 1890, fourteen months, 1,347 medical and 322 surgical cases were treated, of whom 23 died. Of the deaths 5 were due to accidents, and 12 to climatic diseases. Since an average of 1,000 men were employed in a hazardous occupation (one liable to accidents), the death rate will compare very favorably with that of any city in the states. Of the scores of Americans employed by the company not one died of disease, and yet they lived and worked for months at a stretch in the swamp along the Caribbean coast where rain fell steadily every day—it rained at the rate of 306 inches a year—so that they never had a dry thread on them when at work.

Perhaps our own experience there, though brief, may be taken into account. Our party numbered old men and young, those used to roughing it and those who were not. We tramped for three days through the woods, along the cleared trail, up hill and down, through rain storms and in the hot sunshine. We became heated and thirsty with our walk and sat down by the streams to cool off and drink copiously of the water found there. We used neither lime nor whisky "to kill the germs," as we had been instructed to do before leaving the states. In fact, we disregarded all the advice our friends had given us. We traveled up the river and across the lake in steamers, we stopped in the cities and everywhere, walked about in the hot afternoon sun, which even the natives avoid, because time was short and the view to be had of tropical life was long. According to rule and travelers' tales we should have died. Nevertheless, a healthier, happier party of tourists than we were never saw the southern cross. The tropics are unhealthy in spots, perhaps, but Nicaragua is not in one of the spots.

During our stay in Nicaragua we visited Granada, Managua, and Leon, the three principal cities of the country. It would be a pleasing task to tell of all their characteristics, but of their apparent healthfulness there was no doubt. The streets were wide and clear of offal, the houses neat, the air everywhere sweet. Afterward we visited Panama and found the stenches everywhere, and particularly around the market, horribly offensive. Certainly there was a difference in the sanitary measures prevailing in the two localities, but there must have been more than that. There must for instance be a difference between the soils. Further than that there is a difference in the air, due to location. A look at a map of Central and South America shows that the Panama route is about two degrees further south (a small matter); it lies under or to the west of a knuckle of land or mountainous cape; it is well down behind the northern end of South America, and so hidden from the trade winds. The reader will remember that a bill passed At Nicaragua the trade wind comes booming the Senate, last session, binding the Governalong unimpeded all the way from the ment to indorse the bonds of the Nicaragua Madeira Islands to San Juan del Norte. Canal. It failed in the House, and it will Then it strikes the low-lying hills of the in- not be introduced again. It is a great pity, terior, and gathers up the malarial exhala- for had that bill become a law, the stock and tions of the forest and carries them away. bonds on which commerce using the canal Month in and month out the wind is north- would have had to pay interest would have east on the Caribbean coast and northeast on represented the cost of the canal. Now we the Pacific as well. The air stagnates at know what the canal will cost, but who can Panama; it is always moving over the entire tell how many millions of stock and bonds it Nicaragua route. will have to carry? It is proposed to issue However, let the hospital records at San securities and sell them for what they will

bring. It is supposed that $100,000,000 of stock and $150,000,000 of bonds, at the outside, will suffice. Chief Engineer H. G. Menocal estimated the cost of the canal at $65,000,000 cash; a board of engineers who reviewed his figures, but did not see the ground, raised the estimate to $90,000,000, "in order to have an outside estimate"; while President Miller tells everybody who asks that the cost will reach $100,000,000. That is to say, in order to raise the cash needed to build this canal the company expect to float $250,000,000 worth of bonds and stock. They think the bonds should bring 66 cents on the dollar if the stock is thrown in as a premium. Somebody is going to make a heap of money out of this canal.

Certainly no one need doubt the success of the canal once it is opened. The official reports of the United States Bureau show that in 1879 the vessels trading from our own eastern coast and from Europe to the west coast of the Americas aggregated 2,700,000 tons, while in 1885 the trade had increased to 4,250,000 tons. Lesseps said that in 1895 there would be a traffic aggregating 10,000,000 tons for his canal, but Mr. Miller says modestly not less than 6,000,000 tons can be depended on. According to a report made by Congressman Hardy, of the Committee on Commerce, the traffic "in sight" is not less

than 8,000,000 tons. At $2.50, the proposed toll per ton, the income on 6,000,000 tons will be $15,000,000, which will be very good interest indeed on even $250,000,000 cash, let alone $250,000,000, of which three-fifths may be called water. The ditch is planned for the largest ships, and it will have a capacity of between 15,000,000 and 20,000,000 tons a year. It saves over 10,000 miles of the sailing route between New York and San Francisco, and over 7,000 in the distance between Liverpool and San Francisco. The sailing distance between Liverpool and Yokohama is shortened by 3,000 miles. The ships will not only take the canal route, but because of distance and time and therefore cost saved, commerce must increase very rapidly. It will increase so rapidly that the full capacity will soon be reached.

Among our party were two engineers sent out by British capitalists who wished to investigate the scheme with a view of investing. One of them was Captain H. F. Gooch, of the British army, and the other Mr. H. F. Donaldson, of the Manchester Ship Canal. They were united in their opinions of the work done and the prospects.

"Do you think British capitalists will think well of Nicaragua bonds?" said I to Mr. Gooch. He replied, "I think they will be hungry for them."

Τ

MODERN METHODS OF TREATING INEBRIETY.
BY H. R. CHAMBERLAIN.

HE agencies for combating the evils of intemperance were never so strong, never so well organized, as now. The cause of Christianity itself has not more valiant leaders, more devoted workers, than are enlisted in the struggle against alcoholism. But is there any genuine prospect of victory in the battle royal, and if not, why not? Has the issue, after all, been made sufficiently broad? Have all the available resources on the side of right and virtue been called out? Two divisions of the same great army have borne the brunt of the fight thus far, and right nobly have they struggled, each for the same end. One division has used the persuasive force of the moral law, the other the physical interference of statutory enactment. Is it not time to admit that neither

method is alone sufficient to cope with the issue; that both allied are in fact inadequate to the tremendous emergency?

Where are the reserves? What has become of the Third Division, so long silent that those in the battle-front have ceased to rely even on its moral support? What is science doing to sweep with victory a battlefield so long fought for that the blood of wounded soldiers wets but the dust of their fallen ancestors? Science has been the laggard in the fight and that, too, when it has claimed the issue as peculiarly its own.

The physicians composing the American Association for the Study and Cure of Inebriety assumed a grave responsibility twenty years ago when at their first meeting they declared that drunkenness was a disease.

The first words of Dr. Willard Parker, of New York, the chairman of that meeting were :

This is not a temperance but a scientific gathering, made up of men having charge of the asylums and homes already established in the United States for the cure of the unfortunate victims of alcoholism. In the beginning of the present century, insanity was regarded as a visitation of God's displeasure, and not as a disease, the subject of scientific investigation and amenable to treatment. The important subject of inebriety is regarded now as was insanity some seventy years ago; the disease being considered irremediable and its victims as forever doomed. Before that meeting adjourned, the association adopted a pithy declaration of principles to which it has ever since adhered. It affirmed:

Intemperance is a disease.

It is curable in the same sense that other dis

eases are.

Its primary cause is a constitutional susceptibility to the alcoholic impression.

This constitutional tendency may be inherited or acquired.

Alcohol has its true place in the arts and sciences. It is valuable as a remedy, and like other remedies may be abused. In excessive quantity it is a poison and always acts as such when it produces inebriety.

All methods hitherto employed having proved insufficient for the cure of inebriates, the establishment of asylums for such a purpose is the great demand of the age.

Every large city should have its local or temporary home for inebriates, and every state one or more asylums for the treatment and cure of such persons.

The law should recognize intemperance as a disease and provide other means for its manage ment than fines, station houses, and jails.

Here then is the acknowledgment made by science two decades ago, that the solution of the most difficult feature of the great problem lies exclusively within its domain. Such a declaration logically limits the scope of general temperance agencies to the work of prevention. The task of reclamation and cure is assigned to the physician. But consider for a moment what would have been the effect if society had yielded to the medical profession the self-imposed burden. Suppose that temperance societies and individual workers had confined their influence and efforts to those still untempted or not yet fallen, and had dealt with the drunkard only with doctors'

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When it comes to a study of the progress made in the treatment of inebriety-dipsomania is the medical term-it should be remembered that the subject is comparatively a new one. Intemperance as a social evil is as old as the race. In its aspect as a recognized disease, it hardly antedates the present generation. Indeed, it can by no means be said that it is universally so regarded to-day. Medical men, most of them, recognize it as such, but many experienced men and women who have studied the evil for years believe it should be fought in all its stages as a vice and sin. The unequivocal declaration of the Association for the Cure of Inebriates twenty years ago caused a great deal of controversy. It was considered a dangerous doctrine. Many there were, and still are, reluctant to admit that inebriety is a disease, lest such admission should seem to palliate the offense and relieve the inebriate of responsibility. But the association of experts in response to the cry raised, reaffirmed its declaration and further declared that "the effect of poison on the blood and nervous system and the reflex action of this morbific agent upon the whole physical structure is the same in the virtuous as in the vicious and that antecedent or subsequent moral conditions are incidental to the main fact of disease"; and further, that, 'any average percentage of public crime being accounted for by the fact of the confirmed inebriety of the criminal does not in our opinion increase the responsibility nor should it add to the punishment of such offenders.”

The stand taken by the association attracted even more attention in England than in America and at the request of a committee of Parliament in 1872 two delegates from the association went to London to give their views upon the subject of the control of habitual drunkards. A special committee of the House of Commons made an exhaustive investigation, embracing every topic within the range of inquiry, from the pathology of inebriety to the practical usefulness of prohibitory laws. The result was an indorsement of the American affirmation that inebriety was a disease. There followed a more extensive and thorough

test of the asylum idea than has been given in this country, and, it is said, with somewhat better success. Prominent members of the American Association for the Study and Cure of Inebriates have admitted to me that greater progress is now being made in the hospital treatment of inebriety in Europe than in this country.

Twenty years' study and experiment in the treatment of inebriety has brought little change in the methods of even the best practitioners. It is declared to be a specific disease, but the regular schools of physicians have no specific remedy for it. It may be said in general terms that they do not even attempt to cure it by medication. But ine briety is not one of the small and diminishing number of incurable diseases in the estimation of physicians. The records of wellmanaged inebriate asylums show a good percentage of what are asserted to be radical cures. But the whole method of treatment can be described in a sentence. Inebriety, the physicians tell us, rarely exists without complications, most of them, of course, sequelæ of intemperance. The manager of an inebriate home aims first to cure the incidental diseases. Then he relies almost solely upon time and enforced total abstinence to cure the inebriety. No medicine is used except harmless palliatives to make less intolerable the extreme cravings of appetite. The remedies are simple anodynes, such as are employed in cases of extreme pain or nervous excitement from any cause, and they are not curative. An honest practitioner will admit that the only advantage which an inebriate home as now conducted, has over a jail in the treatment of drunkenness, is that at the former institution greater attention is paid to an inmate's general physical condition and that, therefore, a cure can be effected more quickly, and probably in a greater proportion of cases. Some account should be made of the superior moral influences of an asylum, but the physicians make little account of this feature of treatment.

Most specialists in the treatment of dipsomania affirm that persuasion, reasoning, and other methods depending upon a patient's will power for success are of no greater avail in combating the disease than they would be in the treatment of insanity. Their explanation of cases of sudden reformation, such as often occur, is that the victims never suffered from true dipsomania. Some drunk

ards then are not dipsomaniacs. The prob lem of diagnosis is not a clear one to the nonprofessional mind. Dr. L. D. Mason, of Brooklyn, Vice-president of the American Association for the Study and Cure of Inebriety, and consulting physician of the inebriate's home at Fort Hamilton, Long Island, which is the only institution of the kind near New York City, illustrates the difference between true and false dipsomania by two typical cases within his knowledge:

A convict suffering the tortures of an ungratified appetite for liquor seized an ax in the prison workshop and chopped off his left hand. He shouted for whisky to check the hemorrhage. A dipper half filled with the liquor was brought. The man plunged the bleeding limb into it for an instant, then snatched up the basin with his remaining hand and before he could be interfered with he drank it all.

A business man of good family had been in the habit of drinking to excess for years. On Sunday especially he almost invariably drank to the point of intoxication at his club or among his friends. One Sunday, his wife, just before she went to church, produced a bottle and poured out a glass of whisky.

"John," she said, "if you will drink, I wish you would drink at home. Here is whisky, and if you must have it, drink it here and don't expose its effects in public.”

When the wife came home, the whisky was untouched, and John never after touched liquor.

The man who cut off his hand for a drink of whisky, Dr. Mason says, had true dipsomania against which any and all means of moral suasion would be powerless. The man who voluntarily abandoned his cups, the doctor declares, never had dipsomania. In other words, it is only the intemperate man who has lost the power of voluntary reformation who is a dipsomaniac. How large a proportion of so-called drunkards are embraced within this class the doctors themselves do not pretend to say.

This question has recently been much debated among medical men: How long a time is required with the best known means of treatment for the cure of true dipsomania? The appalling answer is: Between one and two years. And even then there is no certainty of results. The proportion of cures at the Fort Hamilton home is about 44 per cent and that is a representative institution in

that regard. "But," say the doctors, "it is unreasonable to expect speedy or more numerous cures. The patients do not come into our charge until they have been ten years diseased, on the average. And in most cases they have in complication other troubles even more serious than the dipsomania. It is an open question, whether the health of the drunkard does not suffer more from the exposures and neglect of sanitary laws to which his habits subject him than it does from the whisky he drinks. So if we cure in one year or two years what he has been ten or twenty years in contracting, we are accomplishing a great deal."

In states which authorize the commitment of habitual drunkards to homes for inebriates on application of their families or friends, the term to which confinement is limited is, the doctors say, much too short. Three months is the usual period, whereas a year should be the minimum, with power vested in a medical board to extend the time.

There have been heralded before the public, scores of "cures for drunkenness," nostrums of every name and nature which the makers put forth as antidotes of alcoholic poisoning. Most of them have been worse than humbugs. The American Association for the Study and Cure of Inebriety has had some forty of the mixtures analyzed with the result that they all proved to be either inert, useless liquids or compounds of alcohol itself. It is not surprising, therefore, that the members of the association have become tired of making such investigations and that they are inclined to condemn indiscriminately every "cure" that is publicly offered.

This is probably why an experiment in the West looking to the cure of drunkenness by a specific remedy has attracted more attention from the general public than from the medical profession. The people of Illinois and Iowa have become more or less familiar within a year or two with the testing by an Illinois physician of bi-chloride of gold as a specific in the treatment of dipsomania. The experiment has met with such apparent success in the treatment of five thousand cases that some influential secular papers have demanded the adoption of the remedy by public institutions which admit inebriates. There was held at Des Moines, Iowa, a few weeks ago, one of the most remarkable reunions ever assembled. It was in fact a reunion of ex-drunkards, about one hundred in

number. They formed a state league and arranged to hold yearly meetings to celebrate their release from the bonds of appetite. They gave a banquet at which the mayor and other prominent citizens were guests and the manner in which the temperance problem was discussed in the after-dinner speeches was interesting, to say the least. A few sentences from the president of the association, Editor Robert Harris of the Missouri Valley Times, spoken with characteristic Western freedom are worth quoting :

The intelligent, big-hearted, whole-souled, genial men are the ones who succumb to the insidious influence of liquor. They are the kind who have the love of mankind in their hearts-they are the ones that fall by the wayside. The man who is so stingy that he won't say his prayers for fear that he will have institute. He goes down to the grave a sober to give thanks to the Lord, don't come to the

man, but it is not because he is better than his brother who has fallen. Missouri Valley, Iowa, the city in which I live, is not a very bad city in the drinking line—just an average prohibition city; but since I made my pilgrimage to Dwight I have sent thirty-two of the boys to that place or to Des Moines to be cured, and I am proud to say that they are all sticking to the faith, and are to-day as sober men as can be found in Iowa. I am not egotistical, but I believe that my cure has done more good to the temperance cause in the city in which I live and in western Iowa than all the temperance lectures ever delivered there. I was known as a drinking man. I am known as one who was thoroughly cured, and hundreds of my friends have gone and done

likewise.

Now

The state should take this treatment in hand. The liquor habitué is afflicted with a disease worse than insanity. He has a chance for his life in this cure, and why should not the state

furnish the institute? If the state owned the

institution for the cure of drunkards, there would be no need of prohibition laws, for when a man has gone through the treatment he ceases buying liquor, and if all drinkers will quit buying, the saloons will soon close.

The new treatment consists in the administration of bi-chloride of gold in solution hypodermically and through the stomach for a period of about three weeks. Its effect in destroying the appetite for narcotics is said to be immediate. In fact, it is the practice of the physician to allow the patients to drink all the pure whisky they want while

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