But it matters little, I say, what this same tree of knowledge
was. Was every vine on earth destroyed to-morrow, and every
vegetable also from which alcohol is now distilled, man would soon
discover something else wherewith to satisfy the insatiate
craving. Has he not done so already? Has not almost every people
had its tree of knowledge, often more deadly than any distilled
liquor, from the absinthe of the cultivated Frenchman, and the
opium of the cultivated Chinese, down to the bush-poisons
wherewith the tropic sorcerer initiates his dupes into the
knowledge of good and evil, and the fungus from which the Samoiede
extracts in autumn a few days of brutal happiness, before the
setting in of the long six months' night? God grant that modern
science may not bring to light fresh substitutes for alcohol,
opium, and the rest; and give the white races, in that state of
effeminate and godless quasi-civilisation which I sometimes fear
is creeping upon them, fresh means of destroying themselves
delicately and pleasantly off the face of the earth.

It is said by some that drunkenness is on the increase in this
island. I have no trusty proof of it: but I can believe it
possible; for every cause of drunkenness seems on the increase.
Overwork of body and mind; circumstances which depress health;
temptation to drink, and drink again, at every corner of the
streets; and finally, money, and ever more money, in the hands of
uneducated people, who have not the desire, and too often not the
means, of spending it in any save the lowest pleasures. These, it
seems to me, are the true causes of drunkenness, increasing or
not. And if we wish to become a more temperate nation, we must
lessen them, if we cannot eradicate them.