drained? why but to keep off the depressing effects of the malaria of swamps and new clearings, which told on them—­who always settled in the lowest grounds—­in the shape of fever and ague?  Here it may be answered again, that stimulants have been, during the memory of man, the destruction of the Red Indian race in America.  I reply boldly, that I do not believe it.  There is evidence enough in Jaques Cartier’s ’Voyages to the Rivers of Canada;’ and evidence more than enough in Strachey’s ’Travaile in Virginia’—­to quote only two authorities out of many—­to prove that the Red Indians, when the white man first met with them, were, in North and South alike, a diseased, decaying, and, as all their traditions confess, decreasing race.  Such a race would naturally crave for “the water of life,” the “usque-bagh,” or whisky, as we have contracted the old name now.  But I should have thought that the white man, by introducing among these poor creatures iron, fire-arms, blankets, and above all horses wherewith to follow the buffalo-herds which they could never follow on foot, must have done ten times more towards keeping them alive, than he has done towards destroying them by giving them the chance of a week’s drunkenness twice a year, when they came in to his forts to sell the skins which, without his gifts, they would never have got.

Such a race would, of course, if wanting vitality, crave for stimulants.  But if the stimulants, and not the original want of vitality, combined with morals utterly detestable, and worthy only of the gallows—­and here I know what I say, and dare not tell what I know, from eye-witnesses—­have been the cause of the Red Indians’ extinction:  then how is it, let me ask, that the Irishman and the Scotsman have, often to their great harm, been drinking as much whisky—­and usually very bad whisky—­not merely twice a year, but as often as they could get it, during the whole “iron age;” and, for aught any one can tell, during the “bronze age,” and the “stone age” before that:  and yet are still the most healthy, able, valiant, and prolific races in Europe?  Had they drunk less whisky they would, doubtless, have been more healthy, able, valiant, and perhaps even more prolific, than they are now.  They show no sign, however, as yet, of going the way of the Red Indian.

But if the craving for stimulants and narcotics is a token of deficient vitality:  then the deadliest foe of that craving, and all its miserable results, is surely the Sanatory Reformer; the man who preaches, and—­as far as ignorance and vested interests will allow him, procures—­for the masses, pure air, pure sunlight, pure water, pure dwelling-houses, pure food.  Not merely every fresh drinking-fountain:  but every fresh public bath and wash-house, every fresh open space, every fresh growing tree, every fresh open window, every fresh flower in that window—­each of these is so much, as the old Persians would have said, conquered for Ormuzd, the god of light and life, out of the dominion of Ahriman, the king of darkness and of death; so much taken from the causes of drunkenness and disease, and added to the causes of sobriety and health.