few degrees heightened, and they fall frozen by the roadside. Let but the cholera appear in our land, and they fall before it like the first born of Egypt before the angel of death." After learning these facts, and watching the history of disease and of accident, our physicians have told us that more than half of all the diseases and deaths by which our country is afflicted, are occasioned by intemperance. It is said that 30,000 individuals, annually, perish from the midst. of us in consequence of strong drink. It may, therefore, also be said, that of hundreds of thousands the physical powers are vastly diminished, and their means of acquiring property reduced in like proportion. What tongue can rightly declare the immense amount of loss thus inflicted upon our country! How great the waste of time! How great the loss of vigor! How numerous the expenses of the sick! How expensive the support of those now robbed of him on whom they depended for sustenance! How fatal the inroads of death upon the class of laborers! A strong illustration of the folly and unnaturalness of intemperate habits is furnished by the arrangements of nature in respect to climate. Within the torrid zone, the fiery influences of the sky produce upon man the same effects which in all climates follow the use of ardent spirit. In those southern regions, where labor and exposure would speedily induce debility, disease, and death, the fertile soil, and the almost spontaneous and inexhaustible abundance of natural fruits, render labor nearly needless; a few hour's care, in the cool twilight of morning or evening, is enough to secure a full supply for every want; so that the child of the sun may fly from lassitude and heat to congenial shadows and repose : -"to citron groves; To where the lemon and the piercing lime, With the deep orange, glowing through the green, Beneath the spreading tamarind, that shakes, Fanned by the breeze, its fever-cooling fruit. Deep in the night the massy locust sheds, Quench his hot limbs; or wander through the maze, Or, stretched amid these orchards of the sun, Delighted drain the cocoa's milky bowl, And from the palm draw forth its freshening wine, *Thomson's Summer, slightly varied. But how different is the condition of northern climates! Around us, who people this frosty zone, we behold no such provision of fertile soil or fever-cooling fruit, to mitigate the evils inflicted by that burning climate which is kindled in the veins by alcohol. Our rugged and rocky fields demand incessant toil; and all our food is stimulating. He therefore, who, by artificial means, subjects himself to the torrid influences of inflammatory habits, creates the necessity of an idleness that must reduce him to poverty, or subjects himself to that debility and disease which will finally cut short his life, or cast him upon the public charity. Thus does the voice. of nature declare the wickedness and folly of intemperance. Allow us to say that the voice of nature is echoed from the book of revelation, which tells us that no drunkard can inherit the kingdom of heaven. Let us now direct our readers' attention to what may be called the second great agent in the production of individual and of national wealth;-which is intellectual power, that power which discovers and employs the most efficient means of producing a desired result. Without this second quality, of small avail is physical strength. Let me possess the corporeal powers of a giant, if they be not under the guidance of mind, I am as helpless as the monster Cyclops, whose eye was extinguished by the companions of Ulysses, the magnitude of whose muscular force was as likely to prove ruinous as beneficial. The wildest lunatic in our madhouses, and the greatest idiot that ever appeared in human form, may possess the splendid figure of an Apollo, and the colossal energies of a Hercules. But how useless this whole array of physical perfection, at least so far as concerns the substantial affairs of life? But we have only to look around amongst our neighbors to become convinced that as a general rule, in the industrious part of the community, those are most successful whose natural talents or acquired knowledge are greatest, or whose intellect is most zealously applied to their business; those, in short, who put forth most intellectual effort in their daily labor. We are all aware that the mind can become intoxicated. We are familiar with that intimate connection between this perishable body and the immortal principle by which it is inhabited, whereby the smallest affection of the one is communicated to the other. We are sadly made acquainted with the fact that the same vile habits which injure and destroy the body, drag down the soul also from its lofty soarings, and debase it to the dust, until it loses every mark of its celestial origin. The mind never acts with full force and efficiency, except when all its faculties are in a healthy and natural state; when the body is forgotten, and physical excitement or depression is wholly unfelt. The intemperate are therefore never in the condition best adapted to vigorous intellectual exercise. Their minds are either under unnatural stimulus, or lost in insensibility, or borne down by that lassitude and depression which always follow debauch. In the first of these stages the understanding or judgment, (or whatever you please to call the reasoning faculty,) is enfeebled or dethroned; the 'imagination, that most dangerous power of the mind, is wrought up to unnatural action, and casts its deceptive spell over the whole soul. Under such circumstances no man is to be trusted-no man can act discreetly. This is the stage of the intoxicating process that once gave character to our fourth-of-July dinners, and convivial parties; nay, not unfrequently to our very ordinations. This is the hour of indecent jest, and immodest songs, and foolish toasts, and ribald story, and idiot laughter; when hiccoughing patriotism exults in the freedom of licentiousness, and celebrates the liberty of folly. At such times the mind of the intemperate is in the right frame to make bad bargains, or commit any other act of folly to be repented of at leisure. They will buy or sell at ruinous prices, or throw away their most precious property, or obey like slaves the bidding of cool and clear-headed knavery. Did you never see a jug of brandy, or a decanter of gin, placed conspicuously forth for gratuitous use at an auction? If not, your eyes have missed a very common spectacle. Under the inspiration of this spirit "old things pass away, and all things become new." The purchaser's eyes are widely opened to discover in the commodities offered for sale, beauties and excellences which a sober man cannot even conceive of, and which, alas, have vanished with the return of sobriety on the following morning. Of how little value, under such circumstances, is the strongest intellect that ever boldly grappled, or nobly overcame difficulty! . But the second stage of intemperance is insensibility-the total suspension of all the mental, and almost all the bodily functions; when the inebriate lies, in the semblance of death, beneath the convivial table, or in the gutter by the road-side, or perhaps upon his own floor, surrounded by his weeping wife and affrighted children-when man, that immortal being, whose destiny for eternity is decided in this world that rational being, whose intellect, after having conquered to its own purposes of profit or of pleasure, every element of the world around him, has ranged through the universe of matter and of mind, studied into all mysteries, and learned all knowledge-man, created in the very image of God Almighty-presents to our view such a picture of debasement and brutal degradation as is never exhibited by the meanest animal, or the vilest reptile that walks or crawls. upon the face of the earth! As well, for all the purposes of life, might such an one be trodden into his grave; nay, far better would it be that his body were mingled with its kindred dust, than that it should thus remain, a cause of loss, and a curse to society; and so far as his soul is concerned, it would be well "were a millstone hanged about his neck, and he cast into the depths of the sea! The third stage of intemperance shows us the miserable victim of this habit recovered from his insensibility, and robbed of his strong excitement, his mind as well as his body. unstrung, and his spirits depressed, so that he abhors all' forms of labor, and can scarcely endure the weight of mere existence. Discontent and restlessness haunt him like spec tres; he is goaded on by an impatient thirst after the poisoned bowl; his powers of resistance are destroyed, and though he may be conscious that indulgence will prove fatal, he returns. again and again to the fountain of ruin. If we believe, therefore, that in every department of human labor, the free and healthful movement of the mind is necessary to any considerable degree of success, we must infer from what has now been said, that the intemperate, as a class, can never attain success in the accumulation of wealth. The truth of this inference, and the real effect of intemperate habits, cannot be more forcibly illustrated than by the contrast afforded by a couple of farms, the one of which has long been under the care of a sober, intelligent, well-informed husbandman, whose heart is in his labor, who reads the papers, and keeps even pace with all the improvements of the day; while the other is conducted by a man whose daily toil is commenced by a libation to the god of wine, and whose composing draught at even-tide is ardent spirit; whose body is so hot in summer that he must cool it with alcohol, and whose blood is in winter so frosty, that he must warm it with the same good creature. In the one picture you behold a smiling landscape; in the centre a neat and substantial farmhouse, echoing, perhaps, to the merry music of a tribe of rosy children; flanked by numerous and well-painted barns, and granaries, and outhouses; surrounded by every indication of plenty in the distance, fair fields under perfect culture extending in every direction, with here and there a group of healthy and hardy workmen, whose implements of labor are of the most approved construction; and the whole scene bounded by an inclosure of fences whose good order bespeaks the masterspirit that reigns over this whole display of rustic beauty. This is the abode of temperance! Approach now the other picture, and behold the broken. inclosures, inviting the trespass of every rambling intruder; the once-comfortable house now shattered and weather-worn ; its clapboards brown with age and moss, and clattering at every gust; its windows crammed with old hats, or patched with bits of shingle; the roof of the barn broken in and gaping to the elements; fragments of carts, and ploughs, and other tools strewing the yard like the relics of shipwreck, cast upon the beach by a storm; the pastures. afford a meagre sustenance to a few starved and shabbylooking cattle; the fields that should be cultivated, nay the very garden, overgrown with weeds, and giving promise rather of famine than of harvest; the red-faced laborers listlessly lounging in the shade, or stretched on the sunny side of a wall, close by their bosom friend-the bottlewhile from the neighboring styes, the one for biped, the other for quadruped swine, ascend the sympathetic wailings of human and beastly hunger. This is the home of the intemperate ! From such contrasts may we learn the political economy of intemperance. But perhaps we cannot, in any way, so correctly estimate the loss which society suffers from the waste of intellect occasioned by that vice, as by asking ourselves what would have been the condition of the world, if Columbus, |