safely affirm that a blasted character, and the curses that have clung to my name, have all of them been slight misfortunes compared to this.  I have for years endeavored to sustain myself by the sense of my integrity; but the voice of no man on earth echoed to the voice of my conscience.  I called aloud, but there was none to answer; there was none that regarded.  To me the whole world has been as unhearing as the tempest, and as cold as the iceberg.  Sympathy, the magnetic virtue, the hidden essence of our life, was extinct.  Nor has this been the whole sum of my misery.  The food so essential to an intelligent existence, seemed perpetually renewing before me in its fairest colors, only the more effectually to elude my grasp and to attack my hunger.  Ten thousand times I have been prompted to unfold the affections of my soul, only to be repelled with the greatest anguish, until my reflections continually center upon and within myself, where wretchedness and sorrow dwell, undisturbed by one ray of hope and light.  It seems to me that any person but a fool would know that I had not purposely led the life of misery that has marked my steps for fifteen years.  It would have been merciful in comparison, if I had planted a dagger in my heart, for I have suffered an anguish a thousand times worse than death.  I would have had liquor that morning at Cincinnati if I had known that one single drink would have obliterated my body, soul, and spirit.  I had no power to resist; and to prove that I was powerless, let us see what effect alcohol, in its physiological aspect, exerts.

Alcohol possesses three distinct properties, and consequently produces a threefold physiological effect.

1.  It has a nervine property, by which it excites the nervous system inordinately, and exhilarates the brain.

2.  It has a stimulating property, by which it inordinately excites the muscular motions, and the actions of the heart and blood-vessels.

3.  It has a narcotic property.  The operation of this property is to suspend the nervous energies, and soothe and stupefy the subject.

Now, any article possessing either one, or but two of these properties, without the other, is a simple and harmless thing compared with alcohol.  It is only because alcohol possesses this combination of properties, by which it operates on various organs, and affects several functions in different ways at one and the same time, that its potency is so dreadful, and its influence so fascinating, when once the appetite is thoroughly depraved by its use.  It excites and calms, it stimulates and prostrates, it disturbs and soothes, it energizes and exhausts, it exhilarates and stupefies simultaneously.  Now, what rational man would ever pretend that in going through a long course of fever, when his nerves were impaired, his brain inflamed, his blood fermenting, and his strength reduced, that he would be able, through all the commotion and change of organism, to govern his tastes, control