The Danger of Moderate Drinking.
THE following, from a Texas paper, makes out a strong case:— “The veriest drunkard on earth, in his lucid moments, will freely confess that drunkenness is brutalizing, debasing, and ruinous to both body and mind. All sots commenced as moderate and occasional drinkers, and hooted at the forebodings of their friends that they would wind up as drunkards. They would meet the warnings of sincere friends with the remark that they had resolution sufficient to control themselves and that they could stop at any moment. All feel this degree of confidence in the strength of their own resolutions at the outset. The occasional drinker may gradually become the regular drinker, the moderate may insensibly drift into the immoderate drinker. ‘The appetite,’ as Shakespeare says, ‘grows by what it feeds upon;’ the craving for stimulants increases; habit ripens into second nature; it takes an increased quantity to keep off depression, and the end of it is that the moderate drinker often becomes the absolute and helpless slave to alcoholism and neglects his business as well as brutalizes his nature and intellect. He may go so far as to lose his self-respect and feel no shame in being drunk in public. Moderate drinkers should be careful. They may, before they are aware of it, go too far. “It is said there are in the United States 200,000 incorrigible drunkards, and that 90,000 drunkards die annually, mere wrecks, bodily and mentally. Alcoholism helps fill our poor-houses, jails, penitentiaries, and asylums, as well as our grave-yards. It also transmits to posterity various diseases, physical and mental. “There is hardly a town that is without half a dozen miserable wrecks, the victims of alcoholism, who were once worthy and promising men. It is a melancholy and deplorable state of things, yet drunkenness is upon the increase. Temperance societies are palliatives. Drunkards can only be cured by medical skill, by relieving the abnormal morbidity of the stomach, superinduced by alcohol. This the best scientific skill of the world is now agreed upon.”