of supply.  Famines become infrequent.  That of 1847 in Ireland, bad as it was, would have been worse a hundred years earlier.  A given population is more regularly and better fed than one-fifth of its number would at that time have been.  A city of four millions would then have been an impossibility.  Dress and lodging are better, and relatively cheaper.  Hygiene is more understood, imperfect as is its application.  Some diseases due to its disregard have disappeared or been localized.  As a result, men have gained in weight and size and in length of life.

In the character of their recreations—­a thing largely governed by national idiosyncrasy—­the masses have advanced.  And this we may say without losing sight of the devastations of intemperance since the distillation of grain was introduced, about a century and a half ago.  With an enhanced demand upon man’s faculties civilization brings an increased use of stimulants.  There are many of these unknown to former generations.  In noting those which attack the health by storm we are apt to overlook others which proceed more stealthily by sap.  Of these are coffee, tea, chocolate, the rich spices and more substantial accessions to the modern table, all stimulating and inviting to excess, but all, as truly, nutritious and apt to take the place of other aliment, thus adapting the measure of their use, as a rule, to the demands of the system.  The consumption of opium, the one dissipation of the Chinese till now unadded to the three or four of the Caucasian, is said to be extending.  If so, a Counter-blast to it from king or commonwealth will be as ineffectual as against its allied narcotic.  Prohibitory laws will be even more unavailing than in the case of ardent spirits.  It will run its course—­a short one, we trust—­and be followed or joined by new drugs contributed by conscienceless trade.

Intemperance—­we use the word in its special but most common signification—­is debasing.  Compensation, so far as it goes, is found in the abandonment by those communities among whom it is most rife of certain gross amusements, such as cock-fighting and the prize-ring.  Bull-and bear-baiting, too, so prominent among the deliciae of England’s maiden queen, have died out.  Isolated Spain, fenced off by the Pyrenees from the breeze of benevolence wafted from the virtuous and bibulous North, still utilizes the Manchegan or Estremaduran bull as a means of conferring “happy despatch” on her superannuated horses and absorbing the surplus belligerence of her “roughs.”  She seems, however, disposed to tire of this feast of equine and taurine blood, and the last relic of the arena will before many years follow its cognate brutalities.  For obvious reasons, bull-fighting can be the sport, habitually, of but an infinitesimal fraction of the people.  They share with the other races of the Continent the simple pleasures of dance and song.  These enjoyments, as we go north and are driven within doors from the