Two or three stiff glasses of spirituous liquor will restore him so far that he can control his muscles, and get about without betraying his condition. In very bad cases, he will see double, and his hands will tremble so that he cannot lift to his lips the glass for which he has a desire amounting to mania. The daily life of one of the steady drunkards is like this: upon getting up in the morning, after a heavy, restless, drunkard’s sleep, he is miserable beyond expression, and almost helpless. Stowe remarks, with that excellent charity of hers, which is but another name for refined justice,” Many a drunkard has expended more virtue in vain endeavors to break his chain than suffices to carry an ordinary Christian to heaven.”
Generally speaking, however, drunkards hate the servitude into which they have had the misfortune to fall they long to escape from it, have often tried to escape, and if they have given up, it is only after having so many times slidden back into the abyss, that they feel it would be of no use to climb again. There are also a few drunkards of very light calibre, trifling persons, incapable of serious reflection or of a serious purpose, their very terrors being trivial and transitory, who do not care for the ruin in which they are involved. They like strong drink for its own sake they have a kind of sulky enjoyment of its muddling effect upon such brains as they happen to have and when once the habit is fixed, nothing can deliver them except stone walls and iron bars. Albert Day, the superintendent of the New York State Inebriate Asylum, sometimes calls Natural Drunkards. There are a few very coarse men, of heavy, stolid, animal organization, who almost seem formed by nature to absorb alcohol, and in whom there is not enough of manhood to be ashamed of its degradation. If they could refrain, they would for to no creatures is drunkenness so loathsome and temperance so engaging, as to seven tenths of the drunkards.
Of each of these two classes there are several varieties, and, indeed, there are no two cases precisely alike but every drunkard in the world is either a person who has lost the power to refrain from drinking a certain large quantity of alcoholic liquor every day, or he is one who has lost the power to refrain from drinking an uncertain enormous quantity now and then.įew get drunk habitually who can refrain. There are two kinds of drunkards, - the Regular and the Occasional.
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