Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, November, 1878

    L.H.H.

SPIRITS IN SCANDINAVIA

Although it is generally known that there have been of late great and peculiar changes in the laws which regulate the sale of intoxicating drinks in the Scandinavian peninsula, there is not among foreigners an accurate idea of these changes. It may not therefore be uninteresting to state them a little in detail, as well as to glance at the results as gathered from personal experience and observation in different parts of Sweden and Norway. It should be premised that the peculiar "vanity" of both the Swedes and the Norwegians is spirits, and that the recent licensing laws in Scandinavia have been largely levelled against the sale of these drinks. For about a century prior to 1854, Sweden was so given to drunkenness that one who has had special opportunities of judging described it as "the most drunken country in the world." Free trade in spirits was practically in force: every small land-owner could distil on payment of a nominal license fee, and in towns every burgher had the right of sale. The whole country may be said "to have been deluged with spirits;" but, profiting by the exertions of the apostles of temperance, a public opinion was created which twenty-four years ago produced a bill on which the existing general law is based. It abolished the small stills and imposed a comparatively heavy duty on the popular drink, branvin. It established a sort of threefold control over the issue of new licenses for the sale of spirits, under which the communal committee, the commune and the governor of a province have power to restrict or lessen the number of such licenses, while each seller of spirits was required to pay to the local rates a tax on the amount of spirits sold. The licenses were issued for periods of three years, and sold by auction to the highest bidders. To such an extent has the sale of spirits been swept under this law from the rural parts of Sweden that in 1871 there were only four hundred and sixty places for the sale of spirits in the country, the towns excepted. From observation and from the report of others the writer is able to say that the effect of this has been most beneficial in the rural parts, materially contributing to the sobriety and the moral welfare of the people. The general law, it may be noticed, had some of the clauses which are commonly supposed to attach to the later local laws that have been put into operation. It contained a permissive clause which allowed of the formation of companies to control the spirit-sale in towns. One company may take the whole of the licenses allotted to any town, guaranteeing a certain income to the town from such sale of spirits. In Gothenburg, the chief port of Sweden, such a company was formed at the suggestion of a committee appointed in 1865 to inquire into the cause of the constant increase of pauperism and insanity there, which it charged largely on the sale of spirits, especially in dark, unhealthy places. This company, which was called the "Goteborg Utskankings Bolag," began operations in October, 1865, with forty licenses, and acquired by 1868 the whole of the public-house licenses for the sale of spirits, with the exception of about a dozen, the owners of which had life-licenses. The Bolag, or company, had, with these exceptions, a monopoly of the sale of spirits in the town in places for consumption on the premises, and a monopoly to that extent only. It weeded out some of the worst of these public-houses: it improved the condition of the rest, appointing salaried managers, who had in addition the profit on the sale of food and all drinks except spirits, the sale of the latter being under very stringent regulations for the profit only of the Bolag. The managers were compelled to sell food, "cooked and hot" if needed; to give no credit; to keep orderly, clean and well-ventilated houses; to allow no drunkenness; and not to sell spirits to those "overloaded." In the first ten years of its existence the Bolag met with opposition, not only from spirit-sellers who sold for non-consumption on the premises, but also from the many sellers of ale and porter, who were permitted to sell those drinks unnoticed by the law. It is claimed that in spite of this competition the working of the company materially contributed to the sobriety of the town; and it may be worth while to test this by the facts.

When the Bolag began in 1865 there were, for the police year, 2070 cases of drunkenness; in 1866 there were only 1424; and there was a decrease in the next year, and again in 1868, when the number was 1320, which has proved the minimum. From that period there has been an increase, until in 1876—the latest year for which the facts are procurable—the number of cases was 2357. But during the whole of that time the population has been increasing: it was 46,557 in 1866, and in 1876 it was over 66,000; so that the apparent increase in these years is a proportionate though very small decrease—a decrease of about one per cent. There has been also a large decrease in the more serious crimes reported to the police of the town. As to pauperism, there is a decrease in the number of persons receiving entire relief from the community, but an increase in the number of those receiving partial relief. The sales of spirits by the company's agents have materially increased, but it is urged that this is due to the fact that in its earlier years it had more opposition to encounter, while in 1875 it had acquired a full monopoly over the sale of spirits, except in the instances of the life-licenses, which had been reduced in number. Its gross profits have materially increased, rising from £7200 in English money in 1865 to £52,850 in 1876, and the amount of the net profit it paid into the town treasury had increased from £2800 to £40,100! The authorities of the town are satisfied with these results; and there is an almost universal belief that the state of Gothenburg in regard to drunkenness is incomparably better than it would have been without the operation of the Bolag: at the same time it is fair to state that some are of opinion that the benefits have not been so great as they should have been, and that the company has to some extent been worked rather with a view to money-making for the community than to the repression of drunkenness. As to the general opinion, it is indicated by the fact that every large town in Sweden has now followed in the wake of Gothenburg. In 1871 the Norwegian Storthing passed a law to enable their towns to follow suit; and about a score have adopted a similar scheme, modified by allowing the profits of the Norwegian "associations" to be paid by the members to objects of public utility.

As to personal impressions of the working of the system, it may be first said that attention having been so fully directed to the provision made for sale of food in these public-houses, this was tested in many with satisfactory results—food cheap, plentiful and wholesome being procurable. The public-houses were found to be generally neat and orderly, but not equal in comfort or appearance to the public-houses in other lands, several of them being underground vaults merely. The company has in Gothenburg twenty-five public-houses now; it leases the right of sale of spirits to eleven eating-houses and clubs; it has seven spirit-shops and thirteen wholesale places of sale; so that it makes ample provision for the satisfying of the thirsty throats of the Swedes. Unquestionably, Gothenburg has still a larger amount of drunkenness than is known in towns of equal size elsewhere, and a few minutes' observation near one of these "model public-houses" shows that there is a very great sale of drink; but it is also evident that much of the sale on market-days is to country-people from districts where there are no public-houses. Finally, the result of some time given to observation and to the consideration of the question on the spot convinced us that the stricter regulation and supervision of the sale of spirits in this method has reduced the proportionate drunkenness so far as it is brought before police notice; that the public-houses are improved in appearance and in order; that the grosser evils are to some extent done away with, and the community pecuniarily benefited; but that the working of this "experiment" has not succeeded in lessening the exceedingly large local demand for spirits.

    J.W.S.

RUSSIAN RECRUITING

It is a common observation in the mouths of men who are estimating Russia's military strength that, although short of money, she has at least a boundless supply of men; but this idea, though plausible at first sight, is utterly erroneous. A few years ago the confidence of the Russian optimists in their "inexhaustible numbers" was rudely shaken by the discovery that in a single year, out of eighty-four thousand conscripts sent up to the various recruiting centres, no fewer than forty-four thousand were rejected as unfitted for service by disease or other physical defects, not inclusive of short stature. The government took the alarm, and gave orders for the immediate formation of a medical commission and the thorough investigation of the sanitary condition of the population at large. This was promptly done, and the result startled all Russia with the announcement that her strength was barely one-half what it had previously been supposed to be.

Nor is this by any means an over-statement of the case. In European Russia the weakness in productive ages is such that whereas in Great Britain the proportion of persons alive between the ages of fifteen and sixty is 548 in the thousand, and in Belgium 518, in Russia it barely reaches 265. It is computed that in the government of Pultava alone, by no means a populous district, not less than one hundred thousand persons are absolutely disabled by various chronic complaints. Out of the forty-nine millions of the laboring class, the "raw material" of the Russian army, fully fifty per cent. are practically unfit to serve. The statistics of the average duration of human life are even more terribly significant. In England and Northern Germany, according to the best authorities, every man lives, on an average, about 40 years; in Southern Germany, 38 years; and in France, 36. In Russia, on the other hand, the average, even in the healthiest regions (i.e. the north and west), varies from 27 to 22 years. Along the banks of the Volga and in the south-east provinces generally, where the conditions of life are less favorable, the proportion falls as low as 20 years, while in the governments of Perm, Viatka and Orenburg it is only 15.

In whatever way this glaring evil may be explained away by native apologists, it really springs from two very simple causes—insufficient wages and popular ignorance. The miserably low scale of wages among the artisans of the great towns has long since become proverbial, but in the agricultural districts matters are even worse. The ordinary wages of the Russian "field-hand" are as follows: Laborers by the day, 37½ kopecks (about 25 cents) per diem; by the month, 23 kopecks (15 cents); by the season, 17 kopecks (11 cents); in harvest, 75 kopecks (half a dollar). For this pittance the peasants toil from twelve to fifteen, and often sixteen, hours a day; and, thanks to their insufficient food, the constant strain soon begins to tell. A few seasons of such overwork and their strength breaks down altogether, while, instead of the substantial diet needed to recruit it, their scanty fare is still further diminished by the countless fasts of the Greek Church, occurring twice, or even thrice, a week. Hence, upon the first outbreak of fever or cholera the poor creatures perish helplessly, thousands upon thousands, while the St. Petersburg fashionables, yawning over the printed death-roll, languidly wonder why the lower classes are so careless of their health. Nor are the calamities entailed by superstition less deplorable than those which spring from poverty. Those who have seen, in the villages of the interior, new-born infants plunged in ice-cold water which it would be thought sacrilege to warm; children of four and five running about on a bitter day in the fall of the year with no clothing but a light linen shirt; cholera-stricken peasants refusing the medicines offered them; and women employed in hard field-labor three days after their confinement,—can easily credit the statement, frightful as it is, that at least fifty, and in some cases eighty-three, per cent. of the children born in the provinces die in their infancy, and that the population of certain districts has diminished fully one-third during the past generation.

    D.K.

SOCIETIES OF HEALTH

That an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure has passed into a proverb, and yet there is no doubt that the majority of the cases of sickness, general ill health and debility, especially with women, arise from a disregard of the simplest rules for health. But how shall the people learn these rules unless they are taught them? and who so well fitted to teach them as the doctors?

Does any one say that it is against the interest of the doctors to prevent disease? The reply would be that such a conception of the medical profession is a very low one; for doctors were men before they acquired their profession, and there is little doubt that they would find their profession a much more agreeable, and possibly a more profitable, one if, as in China, they were paid for keeping their patients well, instead of for curing, or trying to cure, them when they are sick.

At least such a conception of his office has occurred to Dr. George Dutton of Springfield, Mass., and he has been engaged for some years in attempting to have the idea practically introduced in that city. About two years ago he started a Society of Health there with a few members. The members, who have now reached about fifty, pay him two dollars each a year for advice and one dollar for the expenses of the society. Whenever they need his services they call upon him and get his advice gratis, or he calls upon them at their homes for half price. But this is the smallest part of the innovation. By the agreement Dr. Dutton binds himself to give them a free lecture once a month upon matters of hygiene and cognate subjects, either serving as lecturer himself or obtaining the services of some competent person for the same duty. When the society was first formed it was made a part of the agreement that the members should annually elect their consulting physician, but so far the society has preferred to elect Dr. Dutton to this position.

In these days of enforced combinations for economy there is no reason why such societies of health should not multiply, to the manifest benefit of all parties concerned.

    E.H.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY

The Cossacks: A Tale of the Caucasus in 1852. By Count Leo Tolstoy. Translated from the Russian by Eugene Schuyler. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Russian novels, to judge from the specimens that have been presented to English readers, are prose poems rather than novels in the English sense of the word, dealing more with poetic phases than with those details and events of ordinary life which go to make up English and American novels of the better class. With whatever elaboration of plot or the reverse, they are distinctly artistic compositions, in which every part is in unison with a dominant idea, and their effect, not being scattered or diluted, is single and more or less forcible. Their method is the reverse of analytical. Nothing, for example, could be further from the pregnant sentences, the exhaustive analysis, of George Eliot, whose books are freighted with the accumulated and ever-accumulating wisdom of a life, than the poetic suggestiveness of Tourgueneff's creations, in which a wealth of material is sacrificed to artistic perfection, and the highest thought often seems to lie between the lines. George Eliot lays bare the innermost souls of her characters—we enter fully into their lives and thoughts: with Tourgueneff's it is left to a glance of the eye, a few passionate words, to reveal the mind within. In The Cossacks this absence of analysis is still more apparent. It is a picture of a curious and simple race, painted, not from within, but from the outside or Russian point of view. But here is no refining, no affectation of pastoral simplicity. The Cossacks is distinctly a primitive poem, one which can scarcely be classed either as idyl or epic, though, in spite of its scenes being mainly rural, it perhaps approaches more nearly to the epic. There is an Homeric simplicity in its descriptions of half-drunken warriors with their superb physique, their bravado, their native dignity and singleness of character. Marianka, the beautiful heroine, passes from one picture to another in her quiet, regular toil. Whether, clad in a loose skirt of pink cotton, she drives the oxen or piles the kizyak or dung-fuel along the fence with her hoe, or in holiday attire mingles with other girls at evening, she is always a subject for the artist's brush. What thoughts occupied this stately figure, in what way ideas circulated in her kerchiefed head, we are left to divine. Her conduct is a little enigmatical. Had she any thought of marrying Olenin, or were her actions dictated by coquetry accompanied by a spice of mischief? We are inclined to the latter opinion.

The story of The Cossacks exhibits a close similarity to that of a recent English (or rather Irish) novel, The Hon. Miss Ferrard. Both books transport a man of culture to the midst of a rude and more or less primitive people: in each, the hero, smitten with the beauty of a native girl (and in Olenin's case with the wild freshness of the life), is seized with a desire to throw off his old life, with its polish, its intellectual disappointments and its limitations, and become a primitive man among primitive men. In both, the moral and end are substantially the same. The girl's affections are bestowed naturally in her own class, and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes. The relations of the romantic and dreamy Olenin to his barbaric neighbors are finely portrayed. Nothing could be more natural than his presenting the young Cossack Lukashka with a horse in a fit of generous enthusiasm, and the latter's astonished and suspicious reception of the gift. Being utterly unable to divine its motive, he suspects some lurking design of evil, and regards the generosity as a deceit practised upon him.

But any comparison with an English book would but faintly illustrate The Cossacks. In the novelty of its scenes and characters, in its poetic simplicity of form and its unconscious picturesqueness, it is widely different from anything in our literature. It has a certain coldness, the coldness of an epic; for passion, though not lacking, is kept in abeyance in its pages, which are indeed chiefly filled with pictures, a set of literary chef d'œuvres, drawn with great power and vividness and full, of color and poetic feeling. That the book should produce such an impression in a translation so uncouth and blundering as Mr. Schuyler has given us is a strong testimony to its merit. It is usually thought that a translator ought to be tolerably familiar with two languages, but readers of The Cossacks will be forced to doubt if Mr. Schuyler is acquainted with one.

Molly Bawn: A Novel. By the author of "Phyllis." Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

Molly Bawn disarms criticism by its exuberant gayety, its lusciousness of description, its imperturbable good-humor and self-satisfaction, and its utter absence of responsibility. What can an auld critic do wi' a young book? And such a very young book!—so full of sweets and prettinesses, of audacious coquetries, and of jokes delivered with such a simple and fatuous joy that the meed of our laughter cannot be denied them! If we were to suggest that there is rather a surfeit of these good things, our objection would be liable to be set aside as the acrid cavilling of one whose taste for sweetmeats has been vitiated by dyspeptic tendencies. We can only recommend the book with hearty good-will to those whose sweet tooth still preserves its enamel, congratulating them upon the acquisition of a novel which may be read without any of those harassing perplexities or dismal ideas in which petulant authors embroil our tender susceptibilities—a novel in which the utmost pathos is in the little poutings of true lovers; in which kissing goes by favor, and favor is lavishly distributed; in which ugliness is the only crime, and virtue, or rather beauty (which is the same thing), is unfailingly triumphant. The stock scenery and properties, together with the usual characters of a society novel appear in Molly Bawn; and the personages are invested, if not with the divine gift of life, with a certain wire-strung movement which does not lack vivacity, and in some cases novelty; the villain, for example, having but little employment in his original capacity, and being utilized as a laughing-stock for the amusement of his victims. Even the grammar of the book can hardly be taken au sérieux. It exhibits a serene carelessness of rules, with a tendency to bulls which suggests that the heroine's nationality is also that of the author. A sentence in which we are told of a house that it is "larger, at first sight, than it in reality is," strikes a blow at the very essence of things, and those much-abused words will and would usurp the place of their relatives, shall and should, with a uniformity that proves the absence of negligence.

Samuel Johnson. By Leslie Stephen. (English Men of Letters, edited by John Morley.) New York: Harper & Brothers.

The constant increase of books is not, we are inclined to think, so great a curse or so wholly to be ascribed to malevolent intentions as many despondent people suppose. A very considerable, if not the greater, number of new works have for their aim not to add to, but to diminish, the literature of the world, and so to lighten the burden imposed on each successive generation of readers. The great bulk of the writers of our day are employed not in producing anything new, but in summarizing, epitomizing, and, as far as possible, suppressing, what their predecessors produced. Criticisms are offered to us as substitutes for the works criticised; volumes are tapped that their sap and pith may be extracted; the analyst takes our labor upon himself and generously presents us with the fruits. Up to a certain point the process is unobjectionable, and we have reason to be grateful to those who are skilful in it. It used, however, to be thought that there were limitations to the practice of it—that while it was lawful and right to treat as a caput mortuum any work containing merely a certain amount of useful information or of original thought, a sacredness attached to the masterpieces of literature and to books which, having survived the accidents of time and changes of fashion, were ranked as classics and κτἡματα ἐς ἀεἱ. These were held entitled to a place in every library, and, far from being subjected to condensation or abridgment, were too often supplemented by commentaries and illustrative matter exceeding in bulk the original text. It is less than half a century since the publication of Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson, "with numerous additions and notes," excited a prolonged tumult, and the editor was arrayed at the bar of criticism and solemnly condemned, not for having contributed elucidations to the text, but for having mutilated it by insertions which should have been relegated to an appendix. But now, while one literary craftsman announces an edition from which all that is "obsolete" or "unimportant" is to be expurgated, another offers us in lieu of the five venerated tomes a rifacimiento in a single volume of less than two hundred pages. It is, of course, not to be denied that Boswell's Life includes a large amount of matter wholly unimportant in itself, relating to persons and events that have no independent claim on the interest of readers of the present day. But it does not follow that such details are superfluous and may properly be weeded out. They give us the milieu, to use M. Taine's word, in which Johnson's character and intellect were developed and displayed, the perspective in which his career is to be viewed, the background from which his figure stands out in bold relief. The impression they make upon us is an essential part of the effect which is produced by the book, deepening the sense of reality and the charm of intimate familiarity which have so much to do with its abiding fascination. And the style and manner of the narration are no less an integral part of it. The book is not only a biography, but an autobiography. Johnson without Boswell is Don Quixote without Sancho, Lear without the Fool, Orestes without Pylades. It is safe to say, not only that a thousand incidents of Johnson's life and conversation would never have been preserved but for Boswell, but that some of the most amusing and remarkable of them would never have occurred. The tour to Scotland and the Hebrides, which may be said to have been the one romantic episode of Johnson's life, bringing him into scenes and among characters widely contrasted with his habitual surroundings, is one instance, and the memorable midnight "frisk" in the neighborhood of the Temple is another, among many that might be cited. To separate these two men, to reduce Boswell to the status of a mere "reporter" or "authority," to repeat his stories and records of conversation in any language but his own, to interlard them with the comments and reflections of a superior wisdom, seems to us a sort of moral offence as well as an impertinence. Mr. Leslie Stephen is, without doubt, a very skilful workman, and has brought to his task all the knowledge, taste and judgment, if not the perfectly sympathetic tone, which the most exacting reader could demand. It may, too, be urged on his behalf that he has written for those who have not the leisure to make themselves acquainted with the work which he has condensed. We can only reply that his talents would have found ample scope in a more fitting field, and that people who cannot spare the time to read Boswell can well afford to be ignorant of Johnson.

Books Received

A Concise History of Music from the Commencement of the Christian Era to the Present Time. By H.G. Bonavia Hunt. New Edition. Revised. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Savéli's Expiation: A Russian Story. Translated from the French of Henri Gréville. By Mary N. Sherwood. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers.

International Exhibitions. Paris—Philadelphia—Vienna. By Charles Gindriez and Prof. James Morgan Hart. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co.

Geographical Surveying: Its Uses, Methods and Results. By Frank de Yeaux Carpenter, C.E. New York: D. Van Nostrand.

Goethe's Faust. Edited by James Morgan Hart. German Classics for American Students. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Catholicity in its Relationship to Protestantism and Romanism. By Rev. F.C. Ewer, S.T.D. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

The Former and Present Number of our Indians. By Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Garrick Mallery. Philadelphia: Collins.

Gaddings with a Primitive People. By W.A. Baillie-Grohman. (Leisure-Hour Series.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.

How to be Plump; or, Talks of Physiological Feeding. By T.C. Duncan, M.D. Chicago: Duncan Brothers.

Nobody's Business. By Jeannette Hadermann. (Satchel Series.) New York: The Authors' Publishing Co.

Railroads: Their Origin and Problems. By Charles Francis Adams, Jr. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Annual Report of the Chief Signal-Officer for the Year 1877. Washington: Government Printing-office.

How to Parse. By Rev. Edwin A. Abbott, D.D. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Lines in the Sand. By Richard E. Day. Syracuse: John T. Roberts.

Roxy. By Edward Eggleston. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

notes

1

I use the term "soldier" for the sake of definiteness. The soldier approaches the queen in size, and in many of the specimens the head is larger than that of the queen.

2

Hymenoptera of the British Museum: Formicidæa, p. 170.

3

A lofty bed is the Caucasian mountaineer's highest conception of luxury.

4