All over this country we drink coffee and tea, morning and night; at least, the majority of us do.  They are expensive; their palpable results to the senses are fleeting; they are reported innutritious; nay, far worse, they are decried as positively unwholesome.  Yet we still use them, and no one has succeeded in leading a crusade against them at all comparable with the onslaughts on other stimulants, made in these temperance days.  The fair sex raises its voice against tobacco and other masculine sedatives, but clings pertinaciously to this delusion.

It becomes, then, an important question to decide whether the choice of civilization is justified by experience or science,—­and whether some effect on the animal economy, ulterior to a merely soothing or stimulant action, can be found to sanction the use of coffee and tea.  And this is a question in so far differing from that of other stimulants, that it is not to be discussed with the moralist, but solely with the economist and the sanitarian.

More even than us, economically, does it concern the overcrowded and limited states of Europe, where labor is cheap, and the necessaries of life absorb all the efforts, to decide whether so much of the earnings of the poor is annually thrown away in idle stimulation.

It concerns us in a sanitary point of view, more than in any other way, and more than any other people.  We are rich, spare in habit, and of untiring industry.  We can afford luxurious indulgences, we are very susceptible to nervous stimuli, and we overwork.

Our national habit is feeble.  Debility is recognized as the prevailing type of our diseases.  Nervous exhaustion is met by recourse to all kinds of stimulation.  We are apt to think coffee and tea as harmless, or rather as slow in their deleterious action, as any.  Are they nothing more?

As debility marks the degeneration of our physical constitution, so does a morbid sensitiveness at all earthly indulgence, a tendency to reform things innocent, although useless, betray the weakness of the moral health of our day.  An ascetic spirit is abroad; our amateur physiologists look rather to a mortification than an honest building-up of the flesh.  They prefer naked muscle to rounded outline, and seek rather to test than to enjoy their bodies.  Fearing to be Epicureans, they become Spartans, as far as their feebler organizations will allow them, and very successful Stoics, by the aid of Saxon will.  By a faulty logic, things which in excess are hurtful are denied a moderate use.  Habits innocent in themselves are to be cast aside, lest they induce others which are injurious.

There is but little danger that Puritan antecedents and a New England climate should tend to idle indulgence or Epicurean sloth.  We think there is a tendency to reform too far.  We confess our preference for the physique of Apollo to that of Hercules.  We acknowledge an amiable weakness for those bounties of Nature which soothe or comfort us or renew our nervous energy, and which, we think, injure us no more than our daily bread, if not immoderately used.