haeron, for daring to intrude upon their sacred rites; and since those
historic days, too, when, less than two hundred years before the
Christian era, the Bacchic rites spread from Southern Italy into Etruria,
and thence to the matrons of Rome; and under the guidance of Poenia
Annia, a Campanian lady, took at last shapes of which no man must speak,
but which had to be put down with terrible but just severity, by the
Consuls and the Senate.

But it matters little, I say, what this same tree of knowledge was. Was
every vine on earth destroyed to-morrow, and every vegetable also from
which alcohol is now distilled, man would soon discover something else
wherewith to satisfy the insatiate craving. Has he not done so already?
Has not almost every people had its tree of knowledge, often more deadly
than any distilled liquor, from the absinthe of the cultivated Frenchman,
and the opium of the cultivated Chinese, down to the bush-poisons
wherewith the tropic sorcerer initiates his dupes into the knowledge of
good and evil, and the fungus from which the Samoiede extracts in autumn
a few days of brutal happiness, before the setting in of the long six
months' night? God grant that modern science may not bring to light
fresh substitutes for alcohol, opium, and the rest; and give the white
races, in that state of effeminate and godless quasi-civilisation which I
sometimes fear is creeping upon them, fresh means of destroying
themselves delicately and pleasantly off the face of the earth.

It is said by some that drunkenness is on the increase in this island. I
have no trusty proof of it: but I can believe it possible; for every
cause of drunkenness seems on the increase. Overwork of body and mind;
circumstances which depress health; temptation to drink, and drink again,
at every corner of the streets; and finally, money, and ever more money,
in the hands of uneducated people, who have not the desire, and too often
not the means, of spending it in any save the lowest pleasures. These,
it seems to me, are the true causes of drunkenness, increasing or not.
And if we wish to become a more temperate nation, we must lessen them, if
we cannot eradicate them.

First, overwork. We all live too fast, and work too hard. "All things
are full of labour, man cannot utter it." In the heavy struggle for
existence which goes on all around us, each man is tasked more and
more--if he be really worth buying and using--to the utmost of his pow