A careful transatlantic observer, Dr PAINE, wrote thus long ago of alcoholic stimulants :— "We have often seen no benefit from their liberal use, and it is even doubtful whether they contribute much in any quantities. It requires the conviction of experience, however, to enable us to abstain from their use, and to resist the impulse to apply them to the dying spark." *

§ 13. It was found in the battle-fields of America, that the wounded soldiers left to nature recovered the quickest and most perfectly; simply because they were saved from the doctor's stimulant treatment. The truth is making its way into our hospitals in England. Dr J. GREY Glover, for example, says that "the administration of large quantities of stimulant and of all sorts of nourishment in cases of Carbuncle, is now only part of a general fashion that is already going out. I am satisfied that, of all forms of bloodpoisoning, that by alcohol is not the least common."

In July, 1883, we find C. R. FRANCIS, M.B., declaring that "no popular delusion has been so ruthlessly exposed, no theory so completely overthrown by the evidence of unexpected facts, as the once almost universal belief in alcoholic liquors, both as drink and medicine."

§ 14. There is no question that stimulants, prescribed for trifling ailments, have introduced intemperance into many families, and spread social and personal ruin all around. "I have seen," said Dr S. Wilks, physician to Guy's Hospital, "so many cases of persons, especially ladies, who have entirely given themselves up to the pleasures of brandy-drinking, become paraplegic [half paralyzed]. From what we hear of our continental neighbours, it would seem that that diabolical compound styled absinthe, is productive of exhaustion of nervous power in even a much more

* Letters on Cholera Asphyxia as it appeared in New York, p. 42. 1832. In the Medical Times for Aug. 25th, 1853, Dr B. W. RICHARDSON says: "Nor can I, either from the practical or physiological side, see a place for alcohol in the treatment."

Alcohol Demoralizes Women.

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marked degree. It would seem that the volatile oils, dissolved in the alcohol, give additional force to its poisonous effects."

§ 15. The late Dr ANSTIE, in the Practitioner for February, 1871, well said:" Another way in which medical men often fail to do their duty is, that they do not ascertain, with sufficient accuracy, whether a daily dosage of alcohol, ordered for a particular temporary purpose, has or has not been relinquished when the occasion for it ceased. . . A comparatively short course of this conduct, is sufficient to implant, in the unstable nervous systems of women, a firmly fixed drink-craving. Many girls of the wealthy middle, and of the upper classes, especially the former, are of late years taking to consume all kinds of wine, and particularly champagne, to an extent which used never to be permitted. Many girls are in the habit of taking, in the shape of wine, two or three ounces of absolute alcohol, a quantity which, if expressed in cheap beer, would be equal to six or seven pints. AN UNFAVORABLE STIMULUS IS OFTEN GIVEN TO THE ANIMAL NATURE OF YOUNG WOMEN. There is a subtle change, perceptible enough to those who study character with any care, telling of the gradual decline of the intellectual, and the increased prominence of the sensual tendencies."

Let us hope, however, that the members of a noble profession will speedily awake to a full sense of the great responsibility under which they labour in prescribing alcoholics, recollecting the fact, of which their daily practice gives them a perpetual proof,—the fact, as stated by Professor LAYCOCK, M.D.,-that "indigestion, being temporarily relieved by alcoholic stimulants, it lays the foundation for an ever-growing habit of taking them in women, and excites a more and more urgent desire in the drunkard," so that "it is in this way that many persons of

* Medical Times, Oct. 24th, 1868.

position and education become irrecoverable sots.”*

Forgetting this law, and pandering to fashion or appetite, the physician will fail in his true and holy mission, and, under pretence of healing physical disorder, will leave behind him, in many households, a demon more rampant and remorseless than ever tore the flesh of the possessed ones in olden time.

Dr JAMES Ross, of Waterfoot, in the British Medical Journal for Oct. 4, 1873, asks:-"What of the stimulant effect of alcohol? Partly delusive, partly real. In so far as it is real, it must depend upon a certain amount of nervous energy being set free. It is this diffused effect which goes by the name of the stimulant-action of the drug. The degree of diffusibility also explains why alcohol primarily affects the higher brain centres. The delicate structure of these centres is soon permeated by the drug, and hence the intellect and moral nature suffer first."

How important these truths are to literary men, to students, to clergymen, and to lawyers—yet they will hardly bear them naming. Shakespere spoke with a prophetic insight of the havoc which alcohol creates amongst men of genius, when he said-" Oh, that man should put into his mouth an enemy to steal away his brain," which in truth not only lays the foundation of many insidious and painful disorders of the body, but induces too often a sad and premature eclipse of the brightest intellectual powers.

* See the article in the Saturday Review, Jan. 21, 1871, on 'Drawing-room Alcoholism.' This is the wicked work of legislators in supplying light wines and brandy to confectioners and grocers.

THE HISTORICAL QUESTION.

§ I. THE subject of intemperance, as it interweaves itself, not with the multiplied and minute circumstances of personal, social, and domestic life, but with the more public and memorable events of National History, if treated in detail, would swell into one of the largest volumes ever written. Here we can only record some of the leading facts of history and social life bearing upon the problem to be solved, namely, (1) those that point to the nature and spread of the evil; (2) those that illustrate the failure of certain panaceas; and (3) those which indicate a partial alleviation, or a perfect cure.

No idea can be further from the truth than that which makes intemperance a matter of either race or climate. It is one of those hasty generalizations which shallow intellects grasp at, and interested persons propagate. Pretending to be a philosophical induction, it is in reality contradicted by the most varied and massive facts of history,-facts which clearly show that the very same races, at different periods, have been the alternate subjects of drunkenness and of sobriety, and that the vice of intemperance has prevailed equally in the torrid, the temperate, and the frigid zones. The facts of which we shall now give specimens, -selected from regions, epochs, and conditions most widely severed,-also show, that (apart from abstinence) no

variations of social life, no diversities of civilization, no forms or development of religious faith, have ever secured an exemption from the wide-spread curse of drinking,—a malady and a vice which has penetrated equally the hut, the mansion, and the palace, the wigwam of the Western savage, the tent of the Tartar, and the home of the European, -desecrated and defiled equally the pagodas of Paganism, the tabernacles of Israel, and the shrines of Christendom.

§ 2. It is a curious and instructive fact, that we are indebted to our knowledge of the earliest intemperance of the world, not so much to records of the vice itself (beyond passing allusions) as to the literary and ecclesiastical memorials of the barriers set up against its inroads and inflictions. Amongst the few fragments of historical books and antique literature relating to the 'world's gray fathers,' several striking notices of intemperance and its remedy have been preserved to us.

A page of MEGASTHENES'S History of India, cited by Strabo, shows that the highest, most religious, and cultured castes of Hindostan were then, and from time immemorial had been, abstainers :-"The Brachmans, the Germanas, and the Hylobious (or physicians), all abstained from wine."

The fifth and last of the 'Pentalogue of Buddha' (B.C. 560) runs thus: "Obey the law, and walk steadily in the path of purity, and [to do this] drink not liquors that intoxicate and disturb the reason."

A celebrated work by Porphyry contains a page of a lost work by CHÆREMON, librarian in one of the sacred temples in Egypt, which has a very instructive passage, enouncing a doctrine both substantially and verbally identical with that of the book of Proverbs (xxxiii. 30, 31). He says of the priests," Some of them [the higher] did not drink wine at all, and others [inferior] drank very little of it, on account of its being injurious to the nerves, oppressive to the head, an impediment to invention, and an incentive to lust."-PLUTARCH