摘要：Christian perfection, the evangelical doctrine that gave rise to abstinence as it is understood and practiced in America, originated in Britain with John Wesley and the Methodists. We examine why that doctrine floundered in its country of origin, opening the door to a more pluralistic and evidence-based approach to problems such as alcohol and drug abuse. Although social and political factors were important (the stratification of British society stood in the way of holding everyone to the same moral standard, and the drink trade was far better organized than its American counterpart), Britain’s intellectual elite also played a vital role, heaping ridicule on the temperance movement and subjecting it to a devastating critique. AMERICAN TEMPERANCE reformers were forever being disappointed by their European counterparts. It baffled them that perfectly intelligent people could read the same science and the same statistics and yet fail to see that the only possible solution was abstinence for everyone. The French, who waited until 1916 to ban distilled liquors in kindergartens and primary schools, were a lost cause. 1 But even the British, the people Americans most admired, were never fully on board. How could the Church of England Temperance Society, formerly the Church of England Total Abstinence Society, throw open its door to nonabstainers (something it did in 1872) and still say it stood for temperance? 2 How could the United Kingdom Alliance, a temperance organization committed to prohibition, take money from people who had no intention of becoming teetotalers? 3 How could Frederic William Farrar (1831–1903), the author of the bestselling Life of Christ (1874), sign a teetotal pledge and then say he had no quarrel with “those who think that a little wine is conducive to their happiness or necessary to their health”? 4 That British reformers had started from the same premise, Christian perfection as it had been handed down by Methodist minster John Wesley, merely added insult to injury. Their words were the same, and yet their goals were always subtly different. Even Josephine Butler (1828–1906) was not all she appeared to be. Her life’s work, realized in 1886, was the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (which subjected prostitutes in port and garrison towns to routine medical inspections). Her hero was William Lloyd Garrison, and she liked to call herself an abolitionist. 5 Butler’s focus was in fact exceedingly narrow, the exact opposite of the “Do Everything” philosophy of the American Frances Willard (1839–1898) and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. 6 Unlike her American counterparts, Butler had no interest in criminalizing nonmarital sex. 7 She was also chary of the temperance movement: she herself was not a teetotaler, and in 1897, after a highly publicized falling-out with Lady Isabella Somerset (1851–1921), the president of the British Women’s Temperance Association, she resigned her position in the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. 8 Somerset, in turn, ran into difficulties when she proposed to broaden her association’s mandate to include such issues as workers’ rights, opium addiction, and social purity. 9 British reformers were not only more narrowly focused than their American counterparts, they were also likelier to accept imperfect outcomes. Butler, who consistently refused to compromise with her opponents, was the great exception. Everywhere else one finds Britons taking a more roundabout path to their goals. Slavery was abolished in 1833, but the slaves themselves were not fully emancipated until 1838. England’s Vice Society was more lackadaisical than the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock’s (1844–1915) pet project. Or so one might infer from the volume of smut each organization impounded. 10 The British medical establishment was less horrified by masturbation. 11 But nowhere were the differences more apparent than in the two countries’ approaches to the age-old problem of drunkenness. The British had their own temperance movement, which for the first three decades of its existence gave every appearance of marching in lockstep with its American counterpart, going through the same phases at roughly the same time—abandoning moderation for teetotalism in the 1830s, abandoning suasion for coercion in the early 1850s. In both countries, moreover, there was the same clustering of temperance with other radical causes—most notably with abolitionism, feminism, and vegetarianism. 12 The turning point came in 1851, when Maine became the first state in America to ban all sales of liquor (the notorious Maine Law). This was followed, in 1853, by the appearance of a new temperance organization in Britain: the United Kingdom Alliance. Headquartered in Manchester, it was far better organized than its predecessors. It was also far more militant, for its stated goal, the “suppression of the traffic in all intoxicating liquors,” amounted to prohibition. 13 The legislative remedy the alliance backed, the local veto, proposed to accomplish this by drying up the nation one town at a time. The decision was left to the towns’ ratepayers, two thirds of whom had to vote against issuing any liquor licenses. Whether the local veto would eventually have resulted in nationwide prohibition is debatable. There was no guarantee that all towns would go along, and each ban, moreover, was binding for three years only. The mere threat of American-style prohibition, remote and unlikely though it was, was enough to doom the local veto each time it was floated in Parliament. When the bill was first introduced, in 1864, it was resoundingly defeated, by 282 votes to 35, and while subsequent votes were closer, the Alliance, after more than six decades of lobbying and petitioning, would have just one thing to show for its efforts: the passage, in 1913, of a bill giving Scottish towns the local veto. What went wrong? Otherwise put, why did the temperance movement encounter so little resistance in America and so much in Britain? This is an old question, and there is no shortage of good answers. 14 The most obvious, one historians keep returning to, is political: America’s governmental structure was far more decentralized, allowing temperance reformers to postpone a showdown at the federal level while steadily advancing their agenda at the local and state levels. Just as importantly, the nonconformists—religious dissenters who did not belong to the Church of England, and the group most associated with temperance in Victorian Britain—remained outside the political mainstream, and their inexperience cost them dearly each time they tried to advance their agenda through Parliament. The structural variables were also all wrong; the drink trade was more entrenched and better organized, while the rural population, the biggest supporter of prohibition in America, was in Britain its biggest enemy. These explanations, compelling though they are, skirt the larger question of why the ideal of the temperance movement, universal abstinence, sparked so little enthusiasm in Britain. For without that vital spark the movement could never quite get off the ground. What was missing, in short, was a commitment to Christian perfection in its most rigorous—and most American—form. British reformers labored under a double handicap. Although the doctrine had originated in that country, with Wesley and the Methodists, it never attracted as many adherents as it did in America. Nor did the doctrine undergo the same startling transformation that it did on the other side of the Atlantic, which is to say that it was less radical, less all-encompassing, and, by inference, less capable of inspiring people to fight for it. Nothing illustrates the point as well as tea. For a long time, American temperance reformers were dead set against this mild beverage, and it is not until well into the 19th century that one starts to find people like Frances Willard drinking it without guilt. 15 The objection, one that took its cue from the Oberlin perfectionists, was that tea was a stimulant and therefore “inconsistent with perfect temperance.” 16 Ellen G. White (1827–1915), the leading figure in the Seventh-Day Adventist movement, was emphatic on this point: “Tea, coffee, and tobacco, as well as alcoholic drinks, are different degrees in the scale of artificial stimulants.” 17 Or as William Andrus Alcott (1798–1859) put it in his self-help book for young wives, tea stimulated the “brain and nervous system, just as other intoxicating liquors do. And what difference does it make whether the excitement be produced by one drink or another?” 18 To George Gabriel Sigmond, an English doctor and author of Tea; Its Effects Medicinal and Moral (1839), it made all the difference in the world. Tea made people “sober, careful and provident.” They worked harder. Their heads were clearer, their minds sharper. In short, they were “healthier, happier, and better,” all because they had “given up a debasing habit for an innocent one.” 19 What Sigmond said British temperance reformers repeated. More than that, they acted on his advice, drinking tea in vast quantities and throwing tea parties to raise money for the cause. It may be countered that the British had a perfectly corrupt motive for promoting tea (the East India Company) and that the habit was, in any event, past extirpating (only the poorest of the households studied by Marxist writer Friedrich Engels (1880–1895) went without tea, and this with the greatest reluctance). 20 All of which is true. But it does not change the fact that the British started from a completely different premise—that there were many areas of life in which the writ of Christian perfection did not extend (an argument Wesley himself had once made) and that tea was one of them.
