ith due details of all manner of
poppies, their indigenous habitats, botanical characters, ratios of
increase, and the like; its human history, discovery as a drug; how,
when, where, and by whom cultivated; dissertations as to the possibility
of Chaldean, Pharaonic, Grecian, or Roman opium eating, with most
erudite extracts out of all sorts of scribes, from Sanchoniathon down to
Juvenal, on these topics; its medicinal uses, properties, accidents, and
abuses; as to whether it might not be used homoeopathically or in
infinitesimal doses, to infuse a love of the pleasures of imagination
into clodpoles, lawyers' clerks, and country cousins; its intellectual
possibilities of usefulness, stimulating the brain; its moral ditto,
allaying irritability; together with a dreadful detail of its evils in
excess, idiotizing, immoralizing, ruining soul and body. Plenty of stout
unquestionable statistics, from all crannies of the globe, to
corroborate all the above to the extreme satisfaction of practical men,
with causes and consequences of its insane local popularity. All this,
moreover, at present, with especial reference to China and the East;
added to the moral bearings of the Opium-war, and our national
responsibilities relative to that unlucky traffic. The metaphysical
question stated and answered, whether or not prohibition of any thing
does not lead to its desire; showing the increasing appetency of those
sottish Serics for the forbidden vice, and illustrating Gay's fable of
the foolish young cock, who ne'er had been in that condition, but for
his mother's prohibition: moreover, how is it, that so captivating a
form of intoxication is so little rife among our drunken journeymen?
queries, however, as to this; and whether or not the humbug of
teetotalism (a modern speculation, got up by and for the benefit of
grocers and sugar-planters on the one side, schismatics and conspiring
demagogues on the other,) has already substituted opium-eating,
drinking, or smoking, for the wholesomer toddies, among factory folk and
the finest pisantry. Millions of anecdotes regarding Eastern Rajahs,
Western Locofocos, Southern Moors, and North-country Muscovites, as to
the drug in its abuses: strange cures (if any) of strange ailments of
mind or body by its prudent use: how to wean men and nations from those
deleterious chewings and smokings; with true and particular accounts of
such splendid self-conquests as Coleridge and De Quincey, and--shall I