“As to the treatment and the agents governing it, we recognize in every drunkard general debility and conditions of nerve and brain exhaustion, and a certain train of exciting causes which always end in drinking.  Now, if we can teach these men the ‘sources of danger,’ and pledge them and point them to a higher power for help, we combine both spiritual and physical means.  We believe that little can be expected from spiritual aids, or pledges, or resolves, unless the patient can so build up his physical as to sustain them.  Give a man a healthy body and brainpower, and you can build up his spiritual life; but all attempts to cultivate a power that is crushed by diseased forces will be practically useless.  Call it a vice or a disease, it matters not, the return to health must be along the line of natural laws and means.  Some men will not feel any longing for drink unless they get in the centre of excitement, or violate some natural law, or neglect the common means of health.  Now, teach them these exciting causes, and build up their health, and the pledge will not be difficult to keep.  This asylum is a marvel.  It is, to-day, successful.  Other asylums are the same, and we feel that we are working in the line of laws that are fixed, though obscure.”

DEEPLY INTERESTING CASES.

The records of this institution furnish cases of reform of the most deeply interesting character.  Here are a few of them: 

CASE No. 1.  A Southern planter who had become a drunkard was brought to this asylum by his faithful colored man.  In his fits of intoxication he fell into the extraordinary delusion that his devoted wife was unfaithful; and so exasperated did he become when seized by this insane delusion, that he often attempted her life.  She was at last obliged to keep out of his way whenever he came under the influence of liquor.  When sober, his memory of these hallucinations was sufficiently distinct to fill him with sorrow, shame and fear; for he sincerely loved his wife and knew her to be above reproach.  After the war, during which he held the position of a general in the Southern army, he became very much reduced in his circumstances, lost heart and gave himself up to drink.  The friends of his wife tried to prevail on her to abandon him; but she still clung to her husband, though her life was often in danger from his insane passion.  Four years of this dreadful experience, in which she three times received serious personal injuries from his hands, and then the old home was broken up, and he went drifting from place to place, a human ship without a rudder on temptation’s stormy sea; his unhappy wife following him, more or less, in secret, and often doing him service and securing his protection.  In the spring of 1874, his faithful colored man brought him to the asylum at Binghampton, a perfect wreck.  His wife came, also, and for three months boarded near the institution, and, without