well-fed men of those abominable wastes
care for is--good fighting-dogs: I can only answer, that I am not
surprised.

I say--as I have said elsewhere, and shall do my best to say again--that
the craving for drink and narcotics, especially that engendered in our
great cities, is not a disease, but a symptom of disease; of a far deeper
disease than any which drunkenness can produce; namely, of the growing
degeneracy of a population striving in vain by stimulants and narcotics
to fight against those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism,
miscalled civilisation, has surrounded them from the cradle to the grave.
I may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily. I
know it: but why did they drink, save for the same reason that the fenman
drank, and his wife took opium, at least till the fens were drained? why
but to keep off the depressing effects of the malaria of swamps and new
clearings, which told on them--who always settled in the lowest
grounds--in the shape of fever and ague? Here it may be answered again,
that stimulants have been, during the memory of man, the destruction of
the Red Indian race in America. I reply boldly, that I do not believe
it. There is evidence enough in Jaques Cartier's 'Voyages to the Rivers
of Canada;' and evidence more than enough in Strachey's 'Travaile in
Virginia'--to quote only two authorities out of many--to prove that the
Red Indians, when the white man first met with them, were, in North and
South alike, a diseased, decaying, and, as all their traditions confess,
decreasing race. Such a race would naturally crave for "the water of
life," the "usque-bagh," or whisky, as we have contracted the old name
now. But I should have thought that the white man, by introducing among
these poor creatures iron, fire-arms, blankets, and above all horses
wherewith to follow the buffalo-herds which they could never follow on
foot, must have done ten times more towards keeping them alive, than he
has done towards destroying them by giving them the chance of a week's
drunkenness twice a year, when they came in to his forts to sell the
skins which, without his gifts, they would never have got.

Such a race would, of course, if wanting vitality, crave for stimulants.
But if the stimulants, and not the original want of vitality, combined
with morals utterly detestable, and worthy only of the gallows--and here
I know what I say, and dare not tell what I know, from eye-witnesses-