"There is a great feeling in society that strong wine and other
strong drinks give strength. A large number of people have
fallen into that error, and fall into it every day."

Any unprejudiced person can readily see that experience and experiment
unite in testifying that alcohol does not give strength, hence differs
radically from most substances commonly classed as foods. Yet millions
of dollars are spent annually by deluded people upon supposedly
strength-giving drinks, and thousands of the sick are ignorantly, or
carelessly, advised to take beer or wine to make them strong and to
_support_ them when solid food cannot be assimilated. Truly, "My people
is destroyed for lack of knowledge."

_Foods give force to the body._

Dr. Richardson says:--

"We learn in respect to alcohol that the temporary excitement is
produced at the expense of the animal matter and animal force,
and that the ideas of the necessity of resorting to it as a
food, to build up the body or to lift up the forces of the body,
are ideas as solemnly false as they are widely disseminated."

Dr. Benjamin Brodie says in _Physiological Inquiries_:--

"Stimulants do not create nerve power: they merely enable you,
as it were, to use up that which is left."

Dr. E. Smith:--

"There is no evidence that it increases nervous influence, while
there is much evidence that it lessens nervous power."

Dr. Wm. Hargreaves, of Philadelphia:--

"It is sometimes said by the advocates and defenders of alcohol,
that by its use force is generated more abundantly. This it
certainly cannot do, as it does not furnish anything to feed the
blood or to store up nourishment to replenish the expenditure.
For by their own theory, the increase of action must cause an
increase of wear and tear; hence alcohol instead of sustaining
life or vitality, must cause a direct waste or expenditure of
_vital force_."

Dr. Auguste Forel, of Switzerland:--

"All alcoholic liquors are poisons, and especially
brain-poisons, and their use shortens life. They cannot
therefore be regarded as sources of nourishment or force. They
should be resisted as much as opium, morphia, cocaine, hashish
and the like."

Dr. W. F. Pechuman, of Detroit, in his valuable little treatise,
_Alcohol--Is it a Medicine?_ says clearly:--

"When alcohol or any other irritant poison is put into the
syst