ween-meal lunches to incite nervousness, irritability, a feeling
of unrest that nothing seems to satisfy.

This goes on year after year until the time comes when that first drink
has power to soothe many discordant voices, and the die is cast. Other
drinks follow, with each to lessen the power of the dynamo and to
disable the machine. At first, drink is indulged not without a sense of
wrongdoing, but with that feeling of power in reserve to keep within the
limits of safety.

The gradual corrosion of the stomach adding to the labors of the brain
in the matter of food mass decomposition as well as digestion marks the
decline of power to abstain and the degradation of every sense that
makes life worth living. Now add to the corrosion of the membrane and
the paralysis of the brain-centres from alcoholics the other inciting
causes in the culture of disease, and you have the evolution of the
drunkard.

How is he to be cured? Only through a fast that shall let that diseased
stomach become new from regeneration, that will let the brain accumulate
rest in reserve. For a time you will need to have him under bonds, for
his will power is abolished. Put him where there will be deaf ears to
the cries of morbid nature, for there is to be a conflict at first; but
long before hunger will come the storm will subside; and finally, when
food will be really desired, there will be a new stomach and a new brain
to which an alcoholic will be no temptation.

This is no figure of speech, because there is such a continual change of
life and death going on in the soft tissues of the body that in a month
or more of fasting it may be assumed that much of the tissues which is
left has undergone reconstruction, and both brain and stomach act as if
they are new when the time comes to restore the lost pounds.

The ways of the kitchen and dining-room are the ways of disease and
death, ways whose ends are prisons, asylums, scaffolds, to a far larger
extent than is dreamed of by the fathers and mothers of the land. A new
crusade against intemperance, the intemperance of the dining-room, is
the only one that will ever settle this so-called liquor question. The
rum-seller will only pull down his sign through the starvation of his
business.

With brains and stomachs kept in the highest order, the alcoholic has
only the least power of the beguiling kind; it is rather a dose whose
effects do not invite repetition. But for all who have the drink disease
s