ral excitement. By habitual use it
renders the living fibre less and less susceptible to the healthy
operation of unstimulating food and drink, its exciting influences soon
become incorporated with all the living actions of the body, and the
diurnal sensations of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, are strongly
associated with the recollection of its exhilarating effects, and thus
bring along with them the resistless desire for its repetition." More
than fifty per cent. of common spirits are alcohol, this deadly
substance, holding rank with henbane, hemlock, prussic acid, foxglove,
poison sumach. Nausea, vertigo, vomiting, exhilaration of spirits for a
time, and subsequent stupor, and even total insensibility and death, are
their accompaniments. Broussais remarks, "A single portion of ardent
spirit taken into the stomach produces a temporary phlogosis." Now, I
submit it to every considerate man, whether there can be any prudent use
of a poison, a single portion of which produces the same disease of
which the drunkard dies, and a disease which brings along with it a
resistless desire for a repetition of the draught.

Thoughtless, self-sufficient men say, they can control this desire, can
govern their appetite, can enjoy the exhilaration of strong drink, and
yet be temperate. Let them look at the poor inebriate wallowing in his
pollution. He once stood just where they stand; boasted just as they
boast; had as fair character, and as kind friends, and as precious a
soul and bright hopes of heaven as they have. Let them tell why he does
not control his appetite. Perhaps they say, he is a fool. Ah, what made
him a fool? Or, his reason is gone. And what took away his reason? Or,
he has lost his character. And what took away his character? Or, his
sense of shame is departed. And what took away his sense of shame? Ah,
here is the dreadful secret, which it may be well for all, boasting of
their power of self-control, to know. At the very moment when the man
thinks he stands firm, and reason can control appetite, his moral sense
departs, his shame is gone, and he turns, through the power of his
morning bitters and oft-repeated drams, into the brute and the maniac.
With the moral sensibilities laid waste, reason here has only the power
of the helmsman before the whirlwind. "Twenty years ago," says Nott, "a
respectable householder came in the morning with a glass of bitters in
his hand, and offered it to his guest, saying, 'Take it; it w