6.  VICTIMS RAPIDLY INCREASING.—­“From my experience,” said a leading and conservative druggist, “I infer that the number of what are termed opium, cocaine, and chloral “fiends” is rapidly increasing, and is greater by two or three hundred percent than a year ago, with twice as many women as men represented.  I should say that one person out of every fifty is a victim of this frightful habit, which claims its doomed votaries from the extremes of social life, those who have the most and the least to live for, the upper classes and the cyprian, professional men of the finest intelligence, fifty per cent. of whom are doctors and walk into the pit with eyes wide open.  And lawyers and other professional men must be added to this fated vice.”

7.  DESTROYS THE MORAL FIBER.—­“It is a habit which utterly destroys the moral fiber of its slaves, and makes unmitigated liars and thieves and forgers of them, and even murder might be added to the list of crimes, were no other road left open to the gratification of its insatiate and insane appetite.  I do not know of a single case in which it has been mastered, but I do know of many where the end has been unspeakable misery, disgrace, suffering, insanity and death.”

8.  SHAMEFUL DEATH.—­To particularize further would be profitless so far as the beginners are concerned, but would to heaven that those not within the shadow of this shameful death would take warning from those who are.  There are no social or periodical drunkards in this sort of intoxication.  The vice is not only solitary, unsocial and utterly selfish, but incessant and increasing in its demands.

9.  APPETITE STRONGER THAN FOR LIQUOR.—­This appetite is far stronger and more uncontrollable than that for liquor, and we can spot its victim as readily as though he were an ordinary bummer.  He has a pallid complexion, a shifting, shuffling manner and can’t look you in the face.  If you manage to catch his eye for an instant you will observe that its pupil is contracted to an almost invisible point.  It is no exaggeration to say that he would barter his very soul for that which indulgence has made him too poor to purchase, and where artifice fails he will grovel in abject agony of supplication for a few grains.  At the same time he resorts to all kinds of miserable and transparent shifts, to conceal his degradation.  He never buys for himself, but always for some fictitious person, and often resorts to purchasing from distant points.

10.  OPIUM SMOKING.—­“Opium smoking,” said another representative druggist, “is almost entirely confined to the Chinese and they seem to thrive on it.  Very few others hit the pipe that we know of.”

11.  MALT AND ALCOHOLIC DRUNKENNESS.—­Alcoholic stimulants have a record of woe second to nothing.  Its victims are annually marching to drunkards’ graves by the thousands.  Drunkards may be divided into three classes:  First, the accidental or social drunkard; second, the periodical or spasmodic drunkard; and third, the sot.