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.
12. The Accidental or Social Drunkard is yet on safe ground. He has not acquired the dangerous craving for liquor. It is only on special occasions that he yields to excessive indulgence; sometimes in meeting a friend, or at some political blow-out. On extreme occasions he will indulge until he becomes a helpless victim, and usually as he grows older occasions will increase, and step by step he will be lead nearer to the precipice of ruin.
13. The Periodical or Spasmodic Drunkard, with whom it is always the unexpected which occurs, and who at intervals exacts from his accumulated capital the usury of as prolonged a spree as his nerves and stomach will stand. Science is inclined to charitably label this specimen of man a sort of a physiologic puzzle, to be as much pitied as blamed. Given the benefit of every doubt, when he starts off on one of his hilarious tangents, he becomes a howling nuisance; if he has a family, keeps them continually on the ragged edge of apprehension, and is unanimously pronounced a "holy terror" by his friends. His life and future is an uncertainty. He is unreliable and cannot be long trusted. Total reformation is the only hope, but it rarely is accomplished.
14. The Sot.—A blunt term that needs no defining, for even the children comprehend the hopeless degradation it implies. Laws to restrain and punish him are framed; societies to protect and reform him are organized, and mostly in vain. He is prone in life's very gutter; bloated, reeking and polluted with the doggery's slops and filth. He can fall but a few feet lower, and not until he stumbles into an unmarked, unhonored grave, where kind mother earth and the merciful mantle of oblivion will cover and conceal the awful wreck he made of God's own image. To the casual observer, the large majority of the community, these three phases, at whose vagaries many laugh, and over whose consequences millions mourn, comprehend intoxication and its results, from the filling of the cup to its shattering fall from the nerveless hand, and this is the end of the matter. Would to God that it were! for at that it would be bad enough. But it is not, for wife, children and friends must suffer and drink the cup of trouble and sorrow to its dregs.