for contraction in
the natural state and under alcohol, that so soon as there is a distinct
indication of muscular disturbance, there is also indication of muscular
failure, and if I wished by scientific experiment to spoil for work the
most perfect specimen of a working animal, say a horse, without
inflicting mechanical injury, I could choose no better agent for the
purpose of the experiment than alcohol. But alas! the readiness with
which strong, well-built men slip into general paralysis under the
continued influence of this false support, attests how unnecessary it
would be to subject a lower animal to the experiment. The experiment is
a custom, and man is the subject.

The true place of alcohol is clear; it is an agreeable temporary shroud.
The savage, with the mansions of his soul unfurnished, buries his
restless energy under its shadow. The civilized man overburdened with
mental labor, or with engrossing care, seeks the same shade; but it is
shade, after all, in which, in exact proportion as he seeks it, the
seeker retires from perfect natural life. To search for force in alcohol
is, to my mind, equivalent to the act of seeking for the sun in
subterranean gloom until all is night.

It may be urged that men take alcohol, nevertheless, take it freely, and
yet live; that the adult Swede drinks his average cup of twenty-five
gallons of alcohol per year and remains on the face of the earth. I
admit force even in this argument, for I know under the persistent use
of alcohol there is a limited provision for the continuance of life. In
the confirmed alcoholic the alcohol is, in a certain sense, so disposed
of that it fits, as it were, the body for a long season, nay, becomes
part of it; and yet it is silently doing its fatal work. The organs of
the body may be slowly brought into a state of adaptation to receive it
and to dispose of it. But in that very preparation they are themselves
made to undergo physical changes tending to the destruction of their
function, to perversion of their structure, and to all those varied
modifications of organic parts which the dissector of the human subject
learns to recognize,--almost without concern, and certainly without
anything more than commonplace curiosity,--as the devastations incident
to alcoholic indulgence."

The statistics collected from the census of the United States for 1860,
and given by Dr. De Marmon, in the _New York Medical Journal_ for
December, 1870, must carry c