1907 - MARMORA EDITOR PONTIFICATES
/As for what has been said of drunkeness in Upper Canada, it is told that ‘etiquette required it’. But the habit inevitably spawned a strong countermovement in the Victorian era . Almost two hundred years ago, in the Village of Delta, north of Kingston, a medical doctor turned his efforts to reducing the civilian drinking problem by advocating prohibition .
In delivering a fiery four hour harangue that outlined the ways that an inebriate could die, he proclaimed; ‘some die lingering; some commit suicide; some are executed; some die by violence; some are drowned, some are frozen or burned up’. The Doctor concluded that, ‘it is well authenticated, that many habitual drinkers of ardent spirits are brought to their end by what is called spontaneous combustion’.
Unremarkably the Delta lecture failed to entirely sober up the countryside. Dr. Schofield’s efforts however, are credited by Thadeus Leavitt in his early history of Leeds and Grenville, with starting the first Temperance Society in Upper Canada.
Of course, not everyone agreed that the church or government should feel compelled to intervene and enact prohibition. Certainly not everyone in a hard rock mining town like Marmora.
Marmora’s newspaper men were not convinced. To Editor Rendol Snell, prohibitionists were incapable of ‘studying the question from a broad and business standpoint’.
He was not prepared to let them get away with the claim that their laws were proposed from ‘their love of God or humanity’. Rather Snell felt the risk to his bottle came from ‘that inherent spirit of tyranny in a portion of the Anglo-Saxon Race.’
In the Marmora Herald Snell spoke up loudly;
‘The fact is that Canada has too much paternal legislation. All through the statutes are evidence of the interference of goody- goody people, so much so that, if our laws were strictly enforced, our people one and all would find them unbearable. Amendments are constantly being made to the statutes at the suggestion of, or to please, women’s societies or of men, more gifted with sentiment and aestheticism than with wisdom and statesmanship. The agitation for Prohibition is confined almost entirely to one or two churches, and in these largely to the women and to the more impractical of the men’.
Editor Snell then moved on to more totally unrelated esoteric concerns.
In his next dissertation he tackled the study of comparative religions in his little booklet, ‘Re-Incarnation or Life Returns Unceasingly’. The title pretty much gives the plot away. There was however the question of the mechanics of eternal, unending rebirth.
‘Life’, Snell explained, was ‘a mysterious special kind of molecule…….John Hope dies’, he speculated, ‘The ego of his soul, perhaps located in the brain, is buried with him. In course of time the body decays and gradually mixes with the soil.
At length the ego passes out through the soil floating in a tiny stream. The ego lodges at the root of a wheat stalk and enters the grain. The grain is ground into flour, made into bread which Mrs. Shaw, a young woman, eats and swallows with it the ego of John Hope. This ego lodges in the ovum which, being fructified, reappears as the soul of the infant born and is known as Joe or Jane Shaw’.
Well, that explains it! Watch what you eat, Mrs. Shaw!
