Don't Stimulate the Young.
If you give a healthy young man of twenty, who has never tasted either, a cup of tea or coffee, says the Boston Post, it will keep him awake all night. If you give to one who has never drank either, fermented or distilled liquors, a glass of beer, wine, or weak whisky and water, it will make him more or less dizzy, and, perhaps, give him a headache. If you persuade one who has never smoked, to try a cigar, it will probably nauseate him, and for a time make him severely sick. Now, what is the conclusion from these facts? Simply that tea, coffee, fermented and distilled liquors and tobacco are in their nature medicinal; are, in brief, drugs, and that, at least while the body is growing, while it still has a superabundance of vital force, it does not need either the preservative properties of tea or coffee, or the digestive and tonic one of wine, beer, brandy, or the soothing one of tobacco, to keep in health and well-being, but that, on the contrary, when the youthful system is in its natural state and either is offered it, disturbance, more or less pronounced, is the result. What terrible responsibility, then, do not mothers and fathers incur, who from babyhood allow their little children to drink tea and coffee—nay, before the little things would think of asking for it, tempt them to sip it out of their own teaspoon!