Kick?

It is also a fallacy that salt or cigar-ash increases the potency of beer. Nor is brandy any more potent than whisky. All spirits contain about 45 per cent. alcohol and there is a greater range in qualities of a spirit than between equal qualities of different spirits. Stout is no more nutritious than beer.

Alcohol does not make men happy, though it may do so. It dulls the higher nerve centres whose work is partly repressive. A drunken man loses his normal restraint and is shown in his true colours, be they good or bad. The sincere man remains substantially the same sober or drunk.

Alcohol moderately used is not a habit forming drug despite the warnings of rabid prohibitionists. Temperance ginger-beer as brewed in the home has often a higher alcoholic content than beer.

Many of the tonics and patent medicines so loved and so needed by the wowsers contain so much alcohol that they ought really to be called cocktails or even liqueurs.

The suppression of alcoholic beverages by law or by entreaty has always and, I feel sure, will always be found impossible. This is a tribute to the sanity of human beings. There is little trouble in suppressing narcotics because men recognize them as harmful but the rantings of moral cranks on alcohol arouse only amusement or resentment Men can see for themselves that the effects of alcohol are not in truth as deplorable as the reformers assert and they do not intend to be deprived of the pleasures of drink because a few abuse it.

The Latin races should be our model. Drinking is universal, but over-indulgence is rare.