It excites and calms, it stimulates and prostrates, it disturbs
and soothes, it energizes and exhausts, it exhilarates and stupefies
simultaneously. Now, what rational man would ever pretend that in going
through a long course of fever, when his nerves were impaired, his brain
inflamed, his blood fermenting, and his strength reduced, that he would be
able, through all the commotion and change of organism, to govern his
tastes, control his morbid cravings, and regulate his words, thoughts and
actions? Yet these same persons will accuse, blame, and curse the man who
does not control his appetite for alcohol, while his stomach is inflamed,
blood vitiated, brain hardened, nerves exhausted, senses perverted, and all
his feelings changed by the accursed stuff with which he has been poisoning
himself to death, piecemeal, for years, and which suddenly, and all at
once, manifests its accumulated strength over him. In sixteen months I have
fought a thousand battles, every one more fearful than the soldier faces
upon the field of conflict, where it rains lead and hails shot and shell,
and I have been victorious nine hundred and ninety-eight times.
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