unprotected and unfriended orphans' cry echoed from a thousand blighted
homes and squalid tenements; you have seen the outcast family of the
inebriate wandering houseless upon the highways, or shivering on the
streets; you have shuddered at the sound of the maniac's scream upon the
burdened air; you have beheld the human form divine despoiled of every
humanizing attribute, transformed from an angel into a devil; you have seen
virtue crushed by vice; the bright eye lose its lustre, the lips their
power of articulation; you have seen what was clean become foul, what was
upright become crooked, what was high become low--man, first in the order
of created things, sunken to a level with brute beasts; and after all these
you have or may have said to yourself, "All this is the work of the
terrible demon, alcohol."

I shall not attempt to paint any of the countless scenes of degradation,
and horror, and misery, which this demon has caused to be enacted. I shall
leave without comment the endless train of crimes and vices, the beggary
and devastation following the course of this foul Titan devil of ruin and
damnation. I shall only endeavor to give a plain, truthful history of one
who has felt every pang, every sorrow, every agony, every shame, every
remorse, that the demon of drunkenness can inflict. I have nothing to thank
this demon for, beyond a few fleeting--oh, how fleeting--hours of false
delight. He has wrought only woe and loss to me. Even now, as I sit here in
the stillness of desperation, afraid of I know not what, trembling with a
strange dread of some impending doom, gazing in fright backward along the
shores of the years whereon I see the wrecks of a thousand hopes, the
destruction of every noble aspiration, the ruin of every noble resolve, I
cry aloud against the utterness of the destroyer. My life has indeed been a
sad one; so sad, so lonely, that no language in my power of utterance can
give to the reader a full conception of its moonless darkness. Would that
the magic pen of a De Quincey were mine that my miseries might stand out