Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/670

 Absinthe should be under the control of the Sale of Poisons Act, and no person ought to be able to get it in any form at all without signing a book and going through all the necessary formality for the purchase of a poison. To move the country to a due regard for its own interests as well as for the interests of the ignorant and deluded toxico-maniacs who indulge in absinthe, is the duty of all honest and truthful men.

It is my business in the remaining part of this communication to deal with a question which springs out of the practice of using lethal agents, and with which the minds of the thinking community are sorely exercised. The question I refer to is—Whether the use of these agents springs from a natural desire on the part of man, and of animals lower than man, for such agents; or whether it springs from a perversion or unnatural provocation acquired and transmitted in hereditary line, a toxico-mania, in plain and decisive language.

In respect to the idea that these agents are demanded by living animals as necessities of their transitory existence and residence on this earth, it must be obvious that the argument, as so stated, is based on the desire which has been impressed on the mind of the reasoners by the agents themselves. It is quite certain that men, and all the lower animals, can live without the supposed aid afforded by these substances, and that when they are not known life goes on smoothly and happily enough in their absence. They therefore are only pleaded for when they have made themselves felt, which looks strangely like an artificial pleading for an artificial as apart from a natural thing. Children do not plead for them; men who have been educated without them do not plead for them; animals do not beg for them; none ask for them until by education they have learned to use them. At first all rebel at them, and only after a fiery trial, during which they get over repugnance, acquire a liking to them, after which the liking may run into desire, and desire into infatuation.

Again, if these agents were natural for the wants of man and animal, they would not reasonably be expected to be left so far away, as they are left, from the immediate reach and possession of man and animal. To secure them for man and animal they have to be produced; to produce them, requires human ingenuity and skill, knowledge, science, and in some cases, as in the case of alcohol and alcoholic beverages, a very considerable degree of skill and an enormous amount of skilled labor. It is true that two of these substances, absinthium and opium, lie nearer at hand than the others, might be gathered and utilized by men in their savage state, and might be plucked and eaten even by beasts of the field. But the fact really seems to be that these very simples have not come into the possession of man for the service of the human family until by art the educated of the human race have learned the mode of use; while the lower animals, instead of instinctively finding them out and claiming the advantages which come from