in us. And, as if to destroy all antidote, we deny access to libraries and places of refining influence on Sundays—the only day the unfortunate many have to recreate their toil-worn minds or bodies. Then we lower the corners of our hypocritical mouths and, with true Pecksniff snuffle, proclaim ourselves "God-fearing people!" Well, too well, we might "fear," after such misdoing, were the Infinite one-thousandth part as ferocious as such persons have represented! For all these young people will have compensation for their week's drudgery; and where have we driven them to seek it? Ah, poor human kind! Tiger, bull and goat relationship will long be discerned in us, under such fatal mistakes as are constantly being committed by the self-styled wisdom of our ignorant legislators.
Frederick is still looking at the drunken scenes degrading human kind. His mother silently reads all that is passing in his humane reflections. Veritée, to whom those models are not new, is thinking the growing general opinion—that all such sights are unnecessary in their era.
Yet they show not a hundredth of the evils resulting hourly from use of alcohol as a stimulant! When he sees one representing a man beating his wife, he returns to his chair saying: "It is sickening. Did persons really so destroy their minds until, it appears to me, their conduct was lower than that of apes?"
"Too truly, my son. Alcoholic drink was one of the most degrading drawbacks of progress that human kind ever suffered from. It was a disease. It fastened itself in the system; and, while corroding every organ, forced its miserable victim to repeat and increase the doses, until dissolution in direst torments ended a wretched life which might have been happy useful and painless. The taint was transmitted to
