42 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ries, and counting-houses. In Northwestern Europe and the Eastern 

 States of North America, eleven million human beings, a fourth of 

 that number minors, are performing their daily toil in an atmosphere 

 that saps the vigor of their souls and bodies more effectually than a 

 diet of potatoes and water could do it in the same time. A full third 

 of the cotton-spinners of Lancashire and Massachusetts are girls and 

 boys in their teens ! They do not complain to a stranger, unless he 

 should be able to interpret the language of their haggard faces and 

 weary eyes; but no one who has fathomed the depth of their misery 

 will charge me with exaggeration if I say that, to the vast majority of 

 the unfortunates, loss of feeling and of reason would be a blessing. 

 What do they feel but unsatisfied hunger in a hundred forms, and 

 what can reason tell them but that they have been defrauded of their 

 birthright to happiness; that not only their opportunity but their ca- 

 pacity for enjoyment is ebbing away ; and that, whatever after-years 

 may bring, their life has been robbed as a day of its morning or a 

 year of its spring-time ? 



The opium-habit may be acquired in less than half a year, and the 

 natural repugnance to alcohol and tobacco is generally overcome after 

 four or five trials ; but the factory-slave has to pass through ten or 

 fifteen years of continual struggle against his physical conscience, 

 before the voice of instinct at last becomes silent, and the painful 

 longing for out-door life gives way to that anaesthesia by which Na- 

 ture palliates evils for which she has no remedy. In more advanced 

 years the habit becomes confirmed, and we find old habitues' who 

 actually enjoy the effluvia of their prisons, and dread cold air and 

 "drafts" as they would a messenger of death. They avoid cold in- 

 stead of impurity, just as tipplers on a warm day imagine that they 

 would " catch their death " by a draught from a cool fountain, but 

 never hesitate to swallow the monstrous mixtures of the liquor-vender. 



Rousseau expresses a belief that any man, who has preserved his 

 native temperance for the first twenty-five years, will afterward be 

 pretty nearly proof against temptation, because very unnatural habits 

 can only be acquired while our tastes have the pliancy of immaturity, 

 and I think the same holds good of the troglodyte-habit : no one who 

 has passed twenty or twenty -five years in open air can be bribed very 

 easily to exchange oxygen for miasma. 



Shamyl-ben-Hacldin, the Circassian hero chieftain, who was capt- 

 ured by the Russians in the winter of 1864, was carried to Novgorod 

 and imprisoned in an apartment of the city armory, which resembled 

 a comfortable bedchamber rather than a dungeon, and was otherwise 

 treated with more kindness than the Russians are wont to show their 

 prisoners, as the Government hoped to use his influence for political 

 purposes. But a week after his arrival in Novgorod the captive moun- 

 taineer demanded an interview with the commander of the armory, 

 and offered to resign his liberal rations and subsist on bread and cab- 



