French and British Budgets.
M. Thiers has been censured by some of our contemporaries for his fiscal policy of seeking to impose heavy duties on raw materials. At any rate, however, France will not be saddled (like an ass) with an Income-tax; so the taxation to which that country will be subjected, will be comparatively light, even if it should have the effect of making butchers' meat as frightfully dear there as it is in England.
A TEMPERANCE HOSPITAL.
o to! The anti-alcoholic manifesto lately put forth by the two hundred and fifty first-class Doctors is already producing the effect which a demonstration, fortified with names some having handles to them, seldom fails to produce on a portion of the generally intelligent British Public. It has caused "a movement." The Daily News announces that:—
"A movement has been started to establish a hospital in London 'for the treatment of diseases apart from the ordinary administration of alcoholic liquors.'"
The object of the movement does not appear from the words in which it is stated quite so clearly as the thinking persons who may attach importance to it must desire. Do not, in fact, most Doctors, as it is, treat diseases "apart from the ordinary administration of alcoholic liquors?" Are not all patients but those labouring under diseases of debility, as a rule, enjoined by their medical attendant to abstain, totally or comparatively, from wine, beer, and spirits? In hospitals, where this abstinence can always be enforced, the treatment of diseases apart from the ordinary administration of alcoholic liquors is especially usual. Do the enlightened promoters of a movement for the establishment of a hospital, whereat diseases shall be so treated still more especially, mean to say that, in that new institution alcohol, in diseases in which it has hitherto been wont to be ordinarily administered as a tonic or stimulant requisite for their cure, shall not be given—and if so, why? Because alcohol is a poison? Then why stop at alcohol? Why not also proscribe, instead of prescribing, opium, henbane, hemlock, deadly nightshade, arsenic, and prussic acid; and indeed—for what active medicine is not a poison in an over-dose?—nearly every article in the Materia Medica?