86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a responsive and receptive quality of mind, and real courtesy 

 of manner, are all characteristic of our barbarian in bis hours of 

 social relaxation. He has his faults, but these are always en 

 evidence : what we have determined for once frankly to consider 

 is, not what the poor Indian lacks, but in what he actually sur- 

 passes us. 



I scarcely dare to go deeper, and to compare the modified form 

 of communism and the exceedingly simple mode of government 

 which prevails among these Indians with our political system, so 

 heartily abused and so earnestly defended. It has occurred to me, 

 nevertheless, that the college-bred Indian, the product of our 

 nineteenth-century forcing process for savages, might study with 

 no little wonder and dismay the modern writers on dress-reform, 

 and the enthusiastic advocates of an outdoor life ; that he might 

 find his brain begin to whirl as he rose upon the topmost wave of 

 progress, and discovered in Henry George, in Edward Bellamy, in 

 Tolstoi, that the prophets of the new era were trying to make the 

 world unlearn all that it had so recently taught him, and that 

 their red-hot schemes of reformation bore many of the familiar 

 features of that effete " barbarism " which he had so painfully dis- 

 carded. 



Is it barely possible, after all, that the fundamental equality 

 of man, the necessity of equalizing burdens and benefits, the grace 

 to " judge not " and to " give to him that asketh," in the Tolstoian 

 sense, are some of the lessons to be learned from barbarism ? 



-*- 



THE USE OF ALCOHOL IN MEDICINE.* 



By A. G. BAETLEY, M. D., M. E. C. S. 



MY opinion is adverse to the use of alcohol, and I might pro- 

 ceed to give grounds for this opinion ; statistics, quota- 

 tions from authorities, as well as facts, I might supply myself, so 

 as to make my paper more or less exhaustive. My aim is, how- 

 ever, less ambitious. I have called my paper a contribution 

 merely. It is, in short, an account of certain incidents in my ex- 

 perience which bear upon the question; and these I relate as 

 briefly as possible and in the order of their occurrence. I will 

 begin by relating an incident which first directed my attention 

 to this subject, and which will show that I had taken up a strong 

 ground in this controversy even before I was aware there was 

 such a controversy at all. 



* A paper entitled " A Contribution toward the Discussion of the Employment of 

 Alcohol in Medicine," read before the iEsculapian Medical Society. Eeprinted from the 

 London Lancet. 



