tage that might be set forth as an exchange of some good for, some harm. The conclusion I have been forced to arrive at is in brief to this effect: that if chloral hydrate can not be kept for use within its legitimate sphere as a medicine, to be prescribed by the physician according to his judgment, and by him as rarely as is possible, it were better for mankind not to have it at any price.
I expressed an opinion in 1876 that the use of opium, as a toxical agent to which persons habituate themselves, is dying out in this country. I see no reason to modify that view now. I am quite sure that among the better classes the practice of taking opium is less common than it was formerly, and I believe that chloral hydrate has more than usurped its place. The idea, gathered from one or two local practices, which, like a fashion, come and go, that opium-eating is on the increase among the poorer members of society, is, I believe, equally fallacious. I can discover no warranty for any such a general and sweeping assumption. As to the assertion that those who are by their pledge removed from the use of alcoholic drinks, who are professed abstainers, are more addicted to opium-eating than alcoholic drinkers, the idea is too absurd, and can only have been suggested for the sake of the mischief that might follow a promulgation of the notion that, because one devil is cast out of a man, another must enter that is worse than the first. The facts really tell all the other way. The facts in the main are that those men and women who from principle abstain from one form of intoxicant most resolutely abjure all forms; and that those who indulge in one form are more apt than the rest to indulge in more than one. In the course of my career I have met with some persons of English society who have indulged in the use of opium; but I have never met one such who did not also take wine or some other kind of alcoholic drink. Putting the matter in another way, I can solemnly say that in the whole of my intercourse with the abstaining community—and few men indeed have been thrown more into contact with that community—I have never met with an instance that afforded so much as a suspicion of the practice of indulging in narcotism from opium, or any other similar drug. I have never yet met with an abstainer who was even habituated to the use of chloral hydrate. A few abstainers smoke tobacco, but, as the habit seriously taxes their physical health, most of them in due time forego even the luxury of the weed so soon as they discover its injuriousness.
The actual opium-eaters of modern society, who form a natural part of the nation as English people, are extremely limited in number, so limited that the mortality returns give no clew to them as a class suffering from the indulgence. I know not either of any physician or pathologist who has made a study of the organic changes induced in the bodies of natives of these islands who have died from the effects of opium. Still there are a few who indulge; and I fear that among the children of the poor, the infant children, the use of narcotics con-
