they wake up in the next world and find it not so, that is if they find anything,
Man is the only beast that drinks to make himself drunk. In this he is more beastly than any other beast, and yet he has the impudence to employ a term beneath any which may be applied to himself in order to emphasize a vice too low for any created thing but himself to indulge in. I hold it great injustice to beasts for man to call his own base indulgences beastly. Beasts are less beastly than men. It would be nearer right for beasts to charge the more excessively disgusting of their practices humanly, for beasts are not denaturalized by their passions like men. And along with drunkenness, and the necessity of establishing laws under which to live, place the faculties of speech and abstraction, the one used to no small extent in lying and swearing, and the other in cheating and overreaching, and we have before us all the tangible differences between human and animal societies.
The word whisky is from the Gaelic ooshk’-a-pai, which signifies "water of health." Usquebaugh, Irish, uisge’-a-bagh, also the French eau de vie may be rendered "water of life." The whisky taken to the mines, however much water there may have been in it, was neither "of health" nor "of life." The truth is, if anything could breed distemper, disease, and death it was this same strychnine whisky. In regard to water, too often it was like Father Tom's punch brewed in the parlor of the Vatican—conspicuous for its absence. "Put in the sperits first," said he to the pope, "and then put in the sugar; and remember, every dhrop ov wather you put in after that spoils the punch."
Satan once presented himself before Noah, if we may credit the Talmud, to drink wine with him. The devil in this instance must have been teaching morality, for to show the patriarch the several effects of wine in various quantities, he slew a lamb, a lion, a
