taken into the veins.

and wine.

The same is the case with beer, cider, The water which they contain, and the spirit, or strength, which is lighter than wa, are taken up by the absorbents, and the very, very small portion of lid matter which is left, is, if not too hard for such a process, subjectea digestion. I have seen the filthy matter which remained after evaporang a glass of good port wine, and sure I am, that there are few persons, however fond of drinking, but would be disgusted at the thought of having to masticate and digest what more resembled cinders or ashes than food. The extract from a pint of good homebrewed beer, was quite as uninviting. What then, we ask, is there in a pint of ale or porter to satisfy the wants of a hardworking man? In a pint of water there are sixteen ounces, in a pint of beer or porter fourteen ounces of water, nearly an ounce of alcohol, and part of an ounce of the extract of barley; the water and the alcohol go immediately into the veins, and while the alcohol poisons the water, if not needed, unnecessarily dilutes the blood, overcharges the vessels, and loads the kidneys and bladder; while there remains less than an ounce of indigestible extract of malt in the stomach to be digested. Is it any wonder that all beer drinkers feel a constant pain and sinking in their stomach and that they are always craving for more drink?

But it may be said that a man who drinks a pint of good ale finds himself immediately the stronger and the better. Of course he does, because the liquid fire that he has drunk has stimulated him; but then stimulation and nutrition are two very different things. There are a hundred things that may produce excitement, but are at the same time the very opposite to nourishment. The very excitement causes a greater degree of waste, greater absorption and exhaustion. A hungry fainting woman, who sees her child fall into the flames, will instantly feel herself strong as a lion for its rescue. Here is`excitement, here is stimulation. But dreadful is the absorption that is going on to accomplish all this, and dreadful will be the fatigue that she will feel from exhaustion when the excitement has subsided. She can tell that stimulus is not nutrition, her pallid face shows that the reverse is the fact, and that excitement is exhausting.

The case of the laborer is much the same, only, that instead

of being moved by the anxiety and fondness of a mother, he is impelled by an ounce of alcohol. But he is excited too much, and the exhaustion of such a man must be far greater than that of the tetotaler, who partakes of a nourishing meal, and subjects his body to no other fatigue than that which arises from his steady labor. He who labors hard, and drinks alcoholic drinks, has to do double work. There is the outward exercise of the anvil, saw, or pick-axe, and the inward excitement of the spirit he has drunk, and which most unnaturally moves and impels his brain, stomach, and every vessel, nerve, and muscle of his frame. Have you never noticed hay-makers and others, how anxiously, after having drunk a little, they look for the return of the bottle. It is the exhaustion which drink and labor together have produced, that compels them to long and beg for more stimulus. I have seen the orator, under the double excitement of alcohol and an impassioned theme, when he has concluded his speech, almost ready to die. I have seen the tradesman, under the double stimulus of wine or ale and business, ready to drop. I have seen the student, exhausted by alcohol and study, sink into the grave. The world that we inhabit, in its joys and sorrows-in its pains and pleasures—in its beauties, sublimities and miseries-in its bodily exercises and mental toils—and in the prospects presented to the righteous and the wicked, has excitement enough to exhaust the strongest energies, without flying to the bottle or the tankard for a double portion of fatigue. "Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof." By the food therefore that nourishes, and not by the liquor that stimulates and exhausts our bodily vigor, we must be sustained and fitted for the duties and fatigues of life.

But it is not merely by cheating us into the belief that we are nourished, when we are only stimulated, that alcoholic drinks injure us; their bad effects upon the frame generally, but especially upon the stomach, have already been seen in the ulcerated organs of St. Martin; and the following passage from Johnson's Letters, to which we just now referred, will exhibit to us the same truth in a very striking light. Speaking, p. 137, of the "pyloric valve," he says, "let us suppose that there is floating in the chyme a particle of food which had not as yet been sufficiently acted upon by the gastric juice: I will tell you what hap

pens. As soon as the pyloric valve feels the presence of the smooth and bland chyme, it instantly opens and allows it to pass, but no sooner does the particle of food that has not yet been reduced to chyme attempt to follow, than the valve instantly closes the aperture, and refuses its permission; this particle of food must therefore return to the upper part of the stomach, to be again submitted to the agency of the gastric juice, before it can be permitted to escape from the stomach into the bowels. Is not this a beautiful exemplification of the importance of the sensibility of our organs? and said I not truly, when I called its our guardian angel?' For what is the sensibility of the pyloric valve by which it is enabled to distinguish between perfect and imperfect chyme?—what is it, I say, but a watchman, a sentinel, posted at the entrance into the bowels, in order to watch over our safety; to see that nothing be allowed to enter that is likely to disturb or irritate them; to take care that nothing injurious; nothing offensive; nothing, in fact, which may be in any way hostile to their safety; nothing, which has no business there, be permitted to trespass within the sacred precincts of organs so important to the health and welfare of the whole being, of which they form so vital a part.

"What mischief, therefore, do those persons inflict upon themselves; what a wide door for the admission of all sorts of evil do those persons throw open, who, perpetually stimulating the pyloric valve by the unnatural stimuli of ardent spirit and highly-seasoned sauces, enfeeble, wear out, and eventually destroy its sensibility, so that whatever the caprice of the palate throws into the stomach, is tumbled, right or wrong, assimilated or not assimilated, good, bad, and indifferent, altogether, without let or hindrance, into the bowels! for the sentry-box is deserted-the watchman is dead."

Is it any wonder that beer-drinkers, wine and spirit drinkers, sometimes die of stoppages, inflammation of the bowels, and various other internal complaints? Sometimes we see the strong man, as he seems to be, to-day in his field, tomorrow in his coffin, and the next day he must be buried, because that flushed and bloated body of his is a mass of putrescence! An inquiry into the cholera, in connection with the ef

fects of beer and wines upon the digestive and other organs, would prove how greatly ardent stimuli predisposed us for that Scourge. I may be told that beer and porter drinkers present to us a stout and corpulent frame. We grant that some of them do, but this is not the case with all. I know more sallowfaced, pale, thin, sickly-looking drinkers of beer, than corpulent tipplers. These have their stomachs, liver, and blood poisoned with alcohol and the other trash found in malt liquor. I have seen the thin, sallow face of the moderate beer-drinker become almost instantly ruddy with health on the adoption of total abstinence. But the red-complexioned drinkers of beer and wine are not always so healthy as they appear to be. It is a common saying," that the fat of such men is not good." The beer and porter drinkers of London are the worst subjects that enter the hospital. A good medical authority has told us that they "die like rotten sheep." They cannot scratch their fingers but it is death. In hundreds of instances inflammation and speedy dissolution are the consequence of a slight bruise of the hand. From a slight cut, at which a child would have smiled, I have seen the stout athletic beer-drinker, in less than a week, laid in the grave. In Bartholomew's hospital, surgeons dread to have to cure porter-drinkers. Corpulency is not health; it is rather a disease. Fat is nothing more than a deposit of the superfluities of the system. Its increase never adds to a man's strength. He could perform his labor better without it, and would feel none of that dread which now unnerves him at the thought of a fever or any other disease being epidemical. He is of a full habit, and can neither bear much fatigue nor much disThe fact is, his corpulency has unfitted him for the present world, and therefore he is hurried out of it before his time.

ease.

Look, too, at the palsied hand and trembling steps of the young man whom alcohol has made old! Hark at his difficult breathing and sepulchral cough! Lungs that might have braved the hyperborean cold, or the scorching torrid heat, require the protection of better apparatus than nature has provided, to allow them to breathe the temperate air of Britain with impunity. "The beer-houses have been my death," gasped a young man of fivenad-twenty, who was dying the other day, and whom I visited

in his last moments.

The alcohol of the beer had, in connection with midnight damps, ulcerated his lungs, and he died of a galloping consumption. His neighbor of the same age, and often his pot-house companion, in a few weeks made the same confession, and followed him to the grave; and thousands since that have followed in the same train. Well have our vendors of strong drinks selected for their signs most of the lusus naturæ and monsters of creation. Their poisons disorganize the human frame, make monsters of men, and prey upon their vitals. Were the beasts of prey that are now chained in our menageries and zoological gardens to be let loose, they would not commit such depredations as are at this moment being perpetrated by the red, black, and white lions, bears, griffins, &c. of the publicans.

Tell us not, then, that malt liquor, or wine, or spirit is needed by the laboring man, the tradesman, or the scholar; these all want nourishment, not stimuli; their vocations are stimulating and exhausting enough, and let them be fed with bread and other nutritious aliment, but do not poison, exhaust, and deceive them with intoxicating drinks. Instead of giving the laboring man poison, give him bread; or the worth of his beer or cider in money. What a shame to make him pay so enormously for the ounce, or half-ounce of food that is in his cup; let him have the money, and he will buy food and clothing, will be a stronger man himself, and will return, in the goods he purchases, all the money he receives to the farmer and manufacturer, and incalculably promote the commercial health and prosperity of the country.

2. Intoxicating drinks are not necessary as a beverage to quench thirst. Any one who will try the experiment may, by the application of heat and a condenser, evolve the alcohol from his beer, cider, or wine, and then set fire to it; and as the flame is burning, we ask him to reflect whether so fiery a poison is likely to quench thirst or to benefit the delicate tissues of the body through which it is to circulate? The very nature of the drink is to produce heat; every person who has drunk these liquors has experienced the excitement and warmth which they occasion, but heat and excitement are both conducive to perspiration, absorption, exhaustion, and consequently thirst. It is