y the bitterest opponents of the drug. Alcohol makes
men noisy and quarrelsome, and maddens them till they are ready to commit
any crime and perpetrate any outrage; opium lulls its votary into a dreamy
rest quite incompatible with any violent or passionate action. Our gaols
are filled with prisoners who, under the influence of drink, have
committed horrible crimes.[99] Indeed, nine-tenths of all our prisoners
owe their incarceration to their fatal propensity for drink. Everyone is
familiar with the terrible accounts of wives beaten and kicked to death by
husbands infuriated with drink. By far the largest proportion of murders
of any kind are due to the same cause. Convictions for drunkenness and
disorderly conduct number 170,000 every year. Our lunatic asylums owe at
least thirty per cent.[100] of their patients to the "stuff that steals
away men's brains." Nothing so bad as this has been, or can be, said of
opium. But opium has another incalculable advantage over alcohol, for the
disorders which it occasions are _functional_ only, whereas alcohol causes
_organic_ disease--a most important difference surely; for once get the
opium-smoker or eater to forgo his luxury, though the wrench may be severe
at first, he will shortly be restored to _complete_ health. This, we need
not say, is not the case with the confirmed drunkard. He may, indeed, give
up his fatal indulgence; but he has planted the seeds of disease in his
body, and no art can eradicate them. His very blood has assimilated the
"flowing poison," and the heart is no longer the centre of life, but of
death. The dipsomaniac, even if he escape the horrors of a death by
delirium tremens, falls a victim to paralysis or heart disease. Happy
indeed would it be if our drunkards could be converted into opium-smokers,
and the desirability of effecting this has even been pointed out by
medical men.[101]

But there is one point in which alcohol is considered very generally to
have the distinct advantage over opium. The opponents of the latter say
that it is much more seductive in its temptation than alcohol, as well as
more tenacious in its grip; in fact, they roundly assert that while the
use of alcohol _can_ be forgone, even by a confirmed dipsomaniac, opium
grows more and more necessary the longer it is indulged in, and can only
be resigned with life itself. Facts seem to have no force with these
champions of a theory, or we might remind them that the Emperor Taou Kwang
wa