ints.

10. OPIUM SMOKING.--"Opium smoking," said another representative druggist,
"is almost entirely confined to the Chinese and they seem to thrive on it.
Very few others hit the pipe that we know of."

{444}

11. MALT AND ALCOHOLIC DRUNKENNESS.--Alcoholic stimulants have a record of
woe second to nothing. Its victims are annually marching to drunkards'
graves by the thousands. Drunkards may be divided into three classes:
First, the accidental or social drunkard; second, the periodical or
spasmodic drunkard; and third, the sot.

12. THE ACCIDENTAL OR SOCIAL DRUNKARD is yet on safe ground. He has not
acquired the dangerous craving for liquor. It is only on special occasions
that he yields to excessive indulgence; sometimes in meeting a friend, or
at some political blow-out. On extreme occasions he will indulge until he
becomes a helpless victim, and usually as he grows older occasions will
increase, and step by step he will be lead nearer to the precipice of ruin.

13. THE PERIODICAL OR SPASMODIC DRUNKARD, with whom it is always the
unexpected which occurs, and who at intervals exacts from his accumulated
capital the usury of as prolonged a spree as his nerves and stomach will
stand. Science is inclined to charitably label this specimen of man a sort
of a physiologic puzzle, to be as much pitied as blamed. Given the benefit
of every doubt, when he starts off on one of his hilarious tangents, he
becomes a howling nuisance; if he has a family, keeps them continually on
the ragged edge of apprehension, and is unanimously pronounced a "holy
terror" by his friends. His life and future is an uncertainty. He is
unreliable and cannot be long trusted. Total reformation is the only hope,
but it rarely is accomplished.

14. THE SOT.--A blunt term that needs no defining, for even the children
comprehend the hopeless degradation it implies. Laws to restrain and punish
him are framed; societies to protect and reform him are organized, and
mostly in vain. He is prone in life's very gutter; bloated, reeking and
polluted with the doggery's slops and filth. He can fall but a few feet
lower, and not until he stumbles into an unmarked, unhonored grave, where
kind mother earth and the merciful mantle of oblivion will cover and
conceal the awful wreck he made of God's own image. To the casual observer,
the large majority of the community, these three phases, at whose vagaries
many laugh, and over whose consequences millions mourn, comp