ore substantial
accessions to the modern table, all stimulating and inviting to
excess, but all, as truly, nutritious and apt to take the place of
other aliment, thus adapting the measure of their use, as a rule,
to the demands of the system. The consumption of opium, the one
dissipation of the Chinese till now unadded to the three or four of
the Caucasian, is said to be extending. If so, a _Counter-blast_ to it
from king or commonwealth will be as ineffectual as against its allied
narcotic. Prohibitory laws will be even more unavailing than in
the case of ardent spirits. It will run its course--a short one,
we trust--and be followed or joined by new drugs contributed by
conscienceless trade.

Intemperance--we use the word in its special but most common
signification--is debasing. Compensation, so far as it goes, is found
in the abandonment by those communities among whom it is most rife of
certain gross amusements, such as cock-fighting and the prize-ring.
Bull-and bear-baiting, too, so prominent among the _deliciae_ of
England's maiden queen, have died out. Isolated Spain, fenced off by
the Pyrenees from the breeze of benevolence wafted from the virtuous
and bibulous North, still utilizes the Manchegan or Estremaduran bull
as a means of conferring "happy despatch" on her superannuated horses
and absorbing the surplus belligerence of her "roughs." She seems,
however, disposed to tire of this feast of equine and taurine blood,
and the last relic of the arena will before many years follow its
cognate brutalities. For obvious reasons, bull-fighting can be the
sport, habitually, of but an infinitesimal fraction of the people.
They share with the other races of the Continent the simple pleasures
of dance and song. These enjoyments, as we go north and are driven
within doors from the pure and temperate air by a more unfriendly
climate, form an increasingly intimate alliance with strong drink,
until in the so-called gardens of Germany Calliope and Gambrinus are
inseparable friends. Farther still toward the Pole the voice of the
Muse gradually dies away upon the sodden atmosphere; and she, having
outlasted her successive Southern associates, wine and beer, in turn
gives place to brandy pure and simple--a beverage itself frost-proof
and only suited to frost-proof men.

The long nights and indoor days of the North are favorable to another
and more desirable trait of modern social progress--education. The
potency of such a met