larity. Nepenthe
passed out from the consideration of the world and then came hasheesh,
which is from the Indian hemp. It is manufactured from the flowers at
the top. The workman with leathern apparel walks through the field and
the exudation of the plants adheres to the leathern garments, and then
the man comes out and scrapes off this exudation, and it is mixed with
aromatics and becomes an intoxicant that has brutalized whole nations.
Its first effect is sight, spectacle glorious and grand beyond all
description, but afterward it pulls down body, mind, and soul into
anguish.

I knew one of the most brilliant men of our time. His appearance in a
newspaper column, or a book, or a magazine was an enchantment. In the
course of a half hour he could produce more wit and more valuable
information than any man I ever heard talk. But he chewed hasheesh. He
first took it out of curiosity to see whether the power said to be
attached really existed. He took it. He got under the power of it. He
tried to break loose. He put his hand in the cockatrice's den to see
whether it would bite, and he found out to his own undoing. His
friends gathered around and tried to save him, but he could not be
saved. The father, a minister of the Gospel, prayed with him and
counseled him, and out of a comparatively small salary employed the
first medical advice of New York, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris,
London, and Berlin, for he was his only son. No help came. First his
body gave way in pangs and convulsions of suffering. Then his mind
gave way and he became a raving maniac. Then his soul went out
blaspheming God into a starless eternity. He died at thirty years of
age. Behold the work of accursed hasheesh.

But I must put my emphasis upon the use of opium. It is made from the
white poppy. It is not a new discovery. Three hundred years before
Christ we read of it; but it was not until the seventh century that it
took up its march of death, and, passing out of the curative and the
medicinal, through smoking and mastication it has become the curse of
nations. In 1861 there were imported into this country one hundred and
seven thousand pounds of opium. In 1880, nineteen years after, there
were imported five hundred and thirty thousand pounds of opium. In
1876 there were in this country two hundred and twenty-five thousand
opium-consumers. Now, it is estimated there are in the United States
to-day six hundred thousand victims of opium. It is appall