Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 January 1879 — FROST FABLES. [ARTICLE]

FROST FABLES.

Tho Moral Effects of a Severe Winter. [From the Cincinnati Commercial.] Popular prejudices are not always confined to the dink ages and illiterate classes of a nation, but may become fashionable in the noontime of enlightenment, and not among the morally shabby-genteel only, for the experience of our own centuiy proves that the grossest absurdities may be defended in the language of science, or, as Mons. D’Alember expressed it, “that our national academies are turning out adepts in the art of making nonsense plausible.” Throughout Northwestern Europe and English-speaking North America, people incline to think that a high latitude exercises an elevating influence on the morals and scientific capacity of the human species, and that a land of perennial summer dooms its inhabitants to a state of permanent sloth and ignorance, a view which Col. Ingersoll condenses, in his epigrammatic way, by assuring us that “civilization is a plant which can only thrive in the snow.” Now, the truth is evidently this: That civilization which flourished in open air during ihe golden age of the Mediterranean nations has become a hot-house plant in the nineteenth century. We may hunt or fight in a snow-storm; so may the Sioux and the Seljuk Tartars; but painting, fiddling, preaching, the invention of labor-saving machinery, the manufacture of shirts, steel pens, newspapers, nutmegs and liberal lectures—in short, all the occupations that distinguish the civilizt d biped from the two-legged beast are still carried on in a warm climate, only with this difference: That the inspiring warmth that once emanated from the central body of the solar system has now to be paid for in the form of Yonghiogheny coal and kindling-wood. Cold, i. e., the absence of warmth, per se, is as unfavorable to the process of life as darkness or rarefied air; though a partial explanation of our modern snow-worship may be found in the circumstance that frost, like other evils, has an indirect value as an antidote; it enables us to indulge, with comparative impunity, in certain poisons wnieh the Southlander has to avoid on pain of death. A few months ago the papers adverted to the uiscoveiy 01 a California opiumeater who was able to “ sober up ” at ♦f’n minutes’ notice by swallowing a heroic dose of arsenic; and more than 300 years ago Paracelsus found that the progress of a virulent, and till *hen incurable disease could be arrested by the internal use of mercury. These remedies may be infallible, and, on the whole, the lesser evil; but all that would hardly justify the assertion that sobriety and purity can only thrive on a basis of arsenic and quicksilver; and yet it is in a precisely analogous way that a cold climate counteracts a tendency to sloth and ignorance, and mitigates the consequences of dietetic abuses.

Au intelligent observer, traveling slowly from the equator toward the North pole, might notice chat with every degree farther north the forms of all organic life decrease in size and perfection, and he might thus arrive at a conclusion which biologists have reached by a different route, viz: That the tropics were the original home of all living things, and that only an unsuccessful struggle f_>r existence in their i ative clime forced animals and plants to a snowward emigration. On their way from India to Kamtschatka, palm trees dwindled to bullrushes, arbor vitie giants to juniper dwarfs, fern trees to ferns; tigers shrank to wild cats and boars to blindworms; and there seems an a priori improbability in the idea that man alone should improve under influences which stunt the development of all other organic beings. The paradise tradition and numberless national sagas point toward a southern origin of the human race (not to mention the Darwinian indicia in the same direction): A- former happier existence of. beings of our species who held the lease of life on more generous terms and enjoyed centuries of unbought pleasures which now only the wealthy can purchase for a few deades.

Alexander von Humboldt remarks apropos of a Brazilian fruit plantation that “the banana tree yields a 600 times greater amount of nutritious substance to the acre than any of our Northern cereals, and, by the same amount of work by which a day laborer in the North has to maintain himself, he could in the tropics provide the necessities and many luxuries of life for a village of 200 inhabitants.” Himself and a moderate family he could consequently support with a merely nominal amount of hard labor, arrd by far the greater portion of his time might be devoted to pursuits that would raise him high above the anthropoid drudge of the snow countries. Should he at the same time be a temperate and continent man, the same sun t tat raises palm trees to the height of eighty cubits would develop his mental and physical faculties -with a minimum waste of vital power, and, since the home of the Semitic races was a land of eternal summer, the statistics of patriarchal longevity may belong to the less mythical portions of the Pentateuch. In a latitude where “all meadows and all wood are ever green, and spring retires with every rising sun,” man might regain his pristine happiness in the course of five or six generations. He might—but does the history of the human race make it likely that he ever will? Has man ever failed to

demolish bin physical or political paradise at his earliest leisure? “For one man,” says Goethe, “ who can endure unmixed happiness, 10,000 manage to endure nnmixed misery,” and it is distressingly probable that, if we could support ourselves on forty minutes of daily labor, ninety out of a hundred would devote the rest of the twentyfour hours to sleep and vice. The why is as occult as the origin of all evil, but it really seems as if the average man had to be dragged away from the pitfalls of ruin; and our mutual efforts to that effect are generally unavailing against a large and very mischievous class of sins—the sins of omission. No legislation, for instance, can prevent the neglect of the industrial virtues, for nothing short of outright slavery can prevent a lazy man from taking to the woods and herding with his fellow-brutes if he can digest their diet, or from enjoying his dolce far niente at home if he be rich enough to bribe his overseer.

A cold cliqaate now supplies this deficiency to some degree; it compels the cultivation of industrial habits by reducing the sluggard to the alternative of death or labor—rather hard labor, where remunerative work is monopolized by non-sluggards. Cold weather, therefore, is a guarantee against laziness; but a rarely considered question is this: Who is the better for it, except those who would work anywhere, and might work to much better purpose in a less ungenerous climate ? Are the lower classes benefited by circumstances that compel them to fight the battle of life under a disadvantage ? Experience may secure them against the fear of utter defeat in that battle; their labor may enable them to survive winter after winter, and make “ both ends meet,” but does it enable them to make any progress—in the direction of happiness ? Constant drudgery prevents, indeed, the indulgence of vicious tastes, but we must not forget that it still more effectually prevents the development of the noblest faculties of the human mind. Ten hours of factory work, followed by two or three hours of domestic labor, may not leave much time for the gratification of an ugly habit, but it is certain that they leave even less time for the cultivation of a fine talent. Our ethical systems—a mixture of Puritan and mercantile principles—make us liable to forget that labor is a blessing only as a means to something better, but not as the end of existence. “Let us consider the way in which we (in Massachusetts) spend our lives,” says Henry Thoreau. “This world of business. What an infinite bustle 1 I am awakened almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing mq making a minute in the fields, took ik for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it would be regietted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for—business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to philosophy, aye, to life itself, than this incessant business.”

Those who may hope to improve their condition, or that of mankind, cannot work too incessantly, but if labor has no other purpose but prolongation of life, such life seems, indeed, not worth prolonging. It is certain that the consequences of intemperance are less fatal in a frigid climate than in the tropics; but this advantage, too, has serious drawbacks, and, if we are told that a tropicid country necessarily enervates its inhabitants, and that the North must always be tiie home of valor and worth, the arguments alleged on either side require for their digestion a good many grains of salt. In the first place, the antagonism of strength and a warm chmate is a myth. The honor of being the strongest men on earth must be conceded ei her to the Albanian Turks or the natives of Southern Abyssinia; but. even the savages of the Malay Archipelago, the Afghans, the Nubian Fellahs and the Kabyles of Algiers and Morocco are physically a match for any Northern rival. The palm of longevity, too, can be claimed by the natives of the winterless zone. The vital statistics of the French republic show that the greatest percentage of centenarians to a given number of inhabitants is found in the African colonies, especially in the province of Elgor (Southeastern Algiers), south of the Atlas mountains, where the Mohammedan element predominates ; and the average duration of life in Southern Arabia, Southern Russia (province of Azof), and Northwestern Russia is, respectively, 58, 52 and 38 years. The Arabs of Muscat and Algiers are, indeed, the most frugal and temperate men on the earth; and here is the explanation of the degenerate condition of the Southern Latin races—they are fast livers, and copy to tho extent of their ability the vices of their heroic ancestors without imitating their virtues. Sickness, like every other process of organic growth and decay, proceeds rapidly under a vertical sun, and the same climatic influences which once developed the genius of Greece and Rome develop nothing now but extraordinary diseases.

A cold climate, on the other hand, while it stunts Southern animals, plants and arts, checks likewise the progress of Southern maladies, destroys fever germs, and enables the human body to resist the influence of various intoxicants. Cold itself is a tonic, but not a healthy mechanical one, like physical exercise; its agency is rather chemical, and exhausts the vital power very rapidly, unless its ravages are repaired by dietetic invigorants. It may be exaggeration to say that the temperature of high latitude forces us to stimulate our system, and thus to wear out life between two grindstones, but nobody can deny that the North is the land of intemperance par excellence, and there is no doubt that the antiseptic power of cold is strictly that of an antidote— i. e., a counter-poison. Like quinine, strychnine and belladonna, a heavy frost acts like a ferbrifuge; like salt and pepper, it preserves animal tissues from decay, but chemists would tell us that all these anti-zymotic efforts prove cold to be an enemy of organic life. The most virulent mineral and vegetable poisons are more friendly to our nature than frost; no man can ever learn to relish it, as millions relish opium, alcohol and arsenic; our skin may become hardened against a certain degree of it, as the driver’s cudgel hardens the hide of a canal mule, but to feel it means to detest it. In the unmistakable language of our senses, nature warns us to avoid cold as a hostile agency. By four or five weeks of steady application the President of any temperance society could become a devotee of ardent spirits; but who ever heard of a person being afflicted with a passionate desire of having the blood chilled? Take me from this icy desert Up to nice, Eternal One 1 prays Rueckert’s Circassian to the sun, after a twelve-years’ exile in Siberia, instead of having taken a fancy to the climate, as he probably did to Russian schnapps and mare’s-milk cheese. A few animals, two or threq qut of a

thousand, stay with us during the season of short days and long nights, but do they appear to like the weather? Does it seem to improve their condition ? Do foxes and crows look healthier in January than in July? The unanimous testimony of the vegetable and animal kingdoms contradicts the idea that there is anything salutary or desirable in a low temperature; and all our fellowmen who have to brave the rigor of winter in open air still echo the paeans of the ancient Druids, who celebrated the return of spring as a revival of our Mother Earth from an unnatural deathtrance.

Dr. Bock, of Leipzig, used to distinguish between self-caused and frostcaused diseases; summer complaints, which all might avoid by regulating their diet, and winter complaints, which the weak cannot always avoid, except by emigration to a warmer climate. Weak lungs are affected by cold weather as a weak stomach is by indigestible food, or inflamed eyes by a lurid light. Every one knows how often a slight wound, a sore hand or sore foot, becomes malignant under the influence of frost, and in the same way slightly damaged lungs may become hopelessly tuberculous by a ride in a snow-storm or an attempt to sleep in open air under a threadbare army blanket. Cold contracts the blood vessels and irritates the exposed nerves of wounded animal tissues, the process of reconstruction comes to a lull stop, and mortification sets in. Aeronauts know that it is time to open their valves if they are overcome by a respiratory tremor; we shudder at nauseous food, and, if cold air makes us shiver, we ought to take the hint and a speedy departure. The civilized portion of the human race might be divided into sun-worship-ers and fire-worshipers— the inhabitants of sun-warmed fields and of stovewarmed houses—and it may be said that the latter class enjoy a more regular and perhaps larger supply of caloric; but it is to this in-door climate, not to that of the open air, that Northern nations owe their boasted civilization, for the openair inhabitants of a snow-afflicted country are certainly the worst barbarians on the face of the earth. Neither the equatorial regions of Africa nor the southern coasts of India and Siam produce human beings whose savagery and brutality could be compared with that of our red skins or the nomads of Northern Tartary; and, though Canada and the New England States have been settled by the best races of the Old World, it is certain that the sciences i and arts would not outlast their store of fuel for a single generation. Nations or individuals who would regulate their mode of life by the laws of nature could be happter in the South than in the North by just as much as sunlight is superior to a stove fire or a paradise to a drawing-room—superior not in beauty only, but in healthiness, enduring qualities and cheapness. The energy of the North European nations has so far enabled them to reproduce the winter climate of Southern Greece ' (in their snow-bound homes, but their efforts have made each bald before her time, and the cause that has contributed most to swell the westward exodus of these nations is the steadily-increasing fuel famine of their lower classes. Our continent was a continuous woodland a few centuries ago, but fuel is not so cheap as it used to be, and, if the accessible coal and timber stores of North America become depleted, our frost ' worshipers will have au opportunity to become familiar with their idol, and may condescend to return to a latitude ; where warmth and comfort are the free I gilts of nature.