[B] “The western Saracens abstained not only from wine, but from all fermented and distilled drinks whatsoever, were as innocent of coffee as of tea and tobacco, knew opium only as a soporific medicine, and were inclined to abstemiousness in the use of animal food. Yet six millions of these truest sons of temperance held their own for seven centuries against great odds of heavy-armed Giaours, excelled all christendom in astronomy, medicine, agriculture, chemistry and linguistics, as well as in the abstract sciences, and could boast of a whole galaxy of philosophers and inspired poets.”—International Review, December, 1880.
[C] “Education is the cure of ignorance,” says Judge Pitman, “but ignorance is not the cause of intemperance. Men who drink generally know better than others that the practice is foolish and hurtful.” “It is not the most earnest and intelligent workers in the sphere of public education that make their overestimate of it as a specific for intemperance. While they are fully sensible of that measure of indirect aid which intellectual culture brings to all moral reforms, they feel how weak is this agency alone to measure its strength against the powerful appetite for drink.”
[D] “In a primitive state of society field sports afford abundant pastimes, our wealthy burghers find indoor amusements, and scholars have ideal hunting grounds of their own; but the large class of our fellow-citizens, to whom reading is a task rather than a pleasure, are reduced to the hard choice between their circenses[7] and their panes[8]. Even the slaves of ancient Rome had their saturnalia, when their masters indulged them in the enjoyment of their accumulated arrears of happiness; but our laborers toil like machines, whose best recreation is a temporary respite from work. Human hearts, however, will not renounce their birthright to happiness; and if joy has departed this life they pursue its shadow in the land of dreams, and try to spice the dry bread of daily drudgery with the sweets of delirium.”—International Review, December, 1880.
[E] “But beside their excitative influence, strong stimulants induce a lethargic reaction; and it is for the sake of this after effect that many unfortunates resort to intoxication. They drink in order to get drunk; they are not tempted by the poison-fiend in the guise of a good, familiar spirit, but deliberately invoke the enemy which steals away their brains.”—International Review, December, 1880.
[F] Author of “Health in the Household.”
[G] “I can not help thinking that most of our fashionable diseases might be cured mechanically instead of chemically, by climbing a bitter-wood tree, or chopping it down, if you like, rather than swallowing a decoction of its disgusting leaves.”—Boerhave.
[H] “The ultimate issue of the struggle is certain. If any one doubts the general preponderance of good over evil in human nature, he has only to study the history of moral crusades. The enthusiastic energy and self-devotion with which a great moral cause inspires its soldiers always have prevailed, and always will prevail, over any amount of self-interest or material power arrayed on the other side.”—Goldwin Smith.[13]