For truly in politics, morality, and all departments of their
practical and speculative affairs we may trace its influences, good
and bad, to this day. Influences generally bad; pacificatory but bad,
engaging you in idle, cloudy dreams; still worse, promoting composure
among the palpably chaotic and discomposed; soothing all things into
lazy peace; that all things may be left to themselves very much, and
to the laws of gravity and decomposition. Whereby German affairs are
come to be greatly overgrown with funguses in our time, and give
symptoms of dry and of wet rot wherever handled.--_History of
Frederick the Great,_ vol. I, p. 387.] Many cases are known to us,
however, where dyspepsia in smokers has been completely cured by the
abandonment of smoking.
The most recent case is that of Dr. Richardson, who was a dyspeptic
during the whole time he was a smoker. "At length," he says, "I
resolved to give up smoking. It was hard work to do so, but I
eventually succeeded, and I have never been more thankful than for the
day on which it was accomplished." In Carlyle's case a six months'
abstinence could not drive out his enemy, which he declared was the
cause of nine-tenths of his misery. A more successful illustration of
the "harmlessness" of stimulants is supplied in Mr. Augustus
Mongredien, well-known as an able expositor of the principles of Free
Trade. He is now 75 years of age, and has smoked moderately all his
life, and for the last fifty years has never, except in rare and short
instances of illness, retired to bed without one tumbler of
whiskey-toddy.
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