the same end as a hundred other vegetable products, ever since those mythic days when Dionusos brought the vine from the far East, amid troops of human Maenads and half-human Satyrs; and the Bacchae tore Pentheus in pieces on Cithaeron, for daring to intrude upon their sacred rites; and since those historic days, too, when, less than two hundred years before the Christian era, the Bacchic rites spread from Southern Italy into Etruria, and thence to the matrons of Rome; and under the guidance of Poenia Annia, a Campanian lady, took at last shapes of which no man must speak, but which had to be put down with terrible but just severity, by the Consuls and the Senate.

But it matters little, I say, what this same tree of knowledge was.  Was every vine on earth destroyed to-morrow, and every vegetable also from which alcohol is now distilled, man would soon discover something else wherewith to satisfy the insatiate craving.  Has he not done so already?  Has not almost every people had its tree of knowledge, often more deadly than any distilled liquor, from the absinthe of the cultivated Frenchman, and the opium of the cultivated Chinese, down to the bush-poisons wherewith the tropic sorcerer initiates his dupes into the knowledge of good and evil, and the fungus from which the Samoiede extracts in autumn a few days of brutal happiness, before the setting in of the long six months’ night?  God grant that modern science may not bring to light fresh substitutes for alcohol, opium, and the rest; and give the white races, in that state of effeminate and godless quasi-civilisation which I sometimes fear is creeping upon them, fresh means of destroying themselves delicately and pleasantly off the face of the earth.

It is said by some that drunkenness is on the increase in this island.  I have no trusty proof of it:  but I can believe it possible; for every cause of drunkenness seems on the increase.  Overwork of body and mind; circumstances which depress health; temptation to drink, and drink again, at every corner of the streets; and finally, money, and ever more money, in the hands of uneducated people, who have not the desire, and too often not the means, of spending it in any save the lowest pleasures.  These, it seems to me, are the true causes of drunkenness, increasing or not.  And if we wish to become a more temperate nation, we must lessen them, if we cannot eradicate them.

First, overwork.  We all live too fast, and work too hard.  “All things are full of labour, man cannot utter it.”  In the heavy struggle for existence which goes on all around us, each man is tasked more and more—­if he be really worth buying and using—­to the utmost of his powers all day long.  The weak have to compete on equal terms with the strong; and crave, in consequence, for artificial strength.  How we shall stop that I know not, while every man is “making haste to be rich, and piercing himself through with many sorrows, and falling into foolish and hurtful lusts,