THE MORAL STATUS OF ALCOHOL. 373 



person of us to eat and drink those things that are known by 

 experience to bring out the energy of vital force, making it 

 effective 1 I would advise nobody to commit himself lightly 

 to an inconsiderate yea or nay, on this momentous question. 

 Once acknowledge the principle, and it will lead to some 

 startling extreme deductions. Thus, if a nervous bishop should 

 make it out satisfactorily to his own conscience, that his visi- 

 tation charge would be the better delivered when his mental 

 organism had been brought to the certain state of exaltation 

 popularly known as ( half-seas-over/ why, then it would be 

 clearly the prelate's duty to conciliate his idiosyncrasy by a 

 suitable ingestion of alcoholic fluid. Other issues not less 

 extreme, and not less unexceptionable, might be imagined. 

 Examples will occur to every thoughtful person. 



From first to last there have been hundreds, ay thousands 

 perhaps, of different modes and principles of classifying man- 

 kind. Somebody (was it not the great maestro Spohr, at 

 the commencement of his book on violin instruction ?) divided 

 mankind into the two categories of those who play the fiddle, 

 and those who do not : a division which, so far as it goes, 

 is unimpeachable. That great African explorer, Captain 

 Burton, establishes a grand primary division of mankind, 

 under the two categories of those who kiss, and those who do 

 not : a division which has the immense recommendation of 

 being coordinate with marked ethnological qualities. 



According to that great traveller and acute observer, 

 negroes, when at home in their native Africa, never kiss. So 

 little do they understand this delightful mode of salutation, 

 that if by chance a traveller (expwto crede, the captain would 

 seem to wish one to infer) if by chance a traveller essays to 

 kiss a negro girl, she draws back in trepidation and affright ; 

 impressed with the belief that he is a cannibal about to eat 

 her! 



It would be difficult to over-estimate the ethnological 

 importance of this truly grand discovery. Hereafter, when 



