never seen that any great thinker has found any help or benefit from
the use of stimulants-either alcohol or tobacco. My observations and
experiences are unfavourable to both classes of stimulants. In my own
case, I gave up smoking before my scientific work began. Alcoholic
drinks I used moderately, but I was a water drinker chiefly. Of late
years, from illness, I have given up alcoholic drinks; but were I in
full health, I should use them moderately. In the course of a public
life of about forty years, I have seen the ill-effects of drinking
upon many journalists and others; but it appears to me that smoking
produces still greater evil. A man knows when he is drunk, but he does
not know when he has smoked too much, until the effects of
accumulation have made themselves permanent. To smoking are to be
traced many affections of the eyes, and of the ears, besides other
ailments. I have heard much said in favour of smoking and drinking,
but never saw any favourable result. The communication of the evil
results of these stimulants to offspring appears to me to constitute a
further serious objection to them, I approve fully of your object, but
as I do not go to the length of total abstinence advocates, I am
desirous not to be misunderstood. Several years of my life were spent
in the East, and my experience there only confirms me the more. I have
known many drunkards among literary men, and the stimulants they took
never helped their work; and it was only because they were men of
exceptionally strong brain that their excesses did not incapacitate
them. There are many excesses of this kind that are equally
misunderstood by those who indulge in them, and by temperance writers.
There are, in fact, many men of enormous power, who can smoke and
drink all day long. They constitute no standard: so far as I have
seen, the consequences show themselves only in the offspring, though
in this case it must be taken into account, that the children are
sometimes born before a man's health has been seriously injured. A man