Little Falls transcript. [volume] (Little Falls, Morrison County, Minn.) 1876-1894, 1885-05-08
The Craving for stimulants.
From the Nationa Review. Il

The desire or craving for stimulants
in the most general sense Of the word
for drugs or setlative agents lis almost
il not absolutely, universal human APP
petite; SO general, SO early developed,
that we might almost call it an instinct.
Alcohol, Of course, is the most popular.
under Ordinary circumstances the. most
seductive, and by far the most widely
dii1used of all stimulant subs anees,'
From the Euphrates to the Straits Of
Dover the vine has been from the earli-
est ages second only to corn in popular
estimation; wine, next to bread,
the most priced and most uni
versal article of human food. The con-
nection between Ceres and Bacchus is
found in almost every language as in
the social life of every nation from the
war like Assyrian Monarchy, the stable
hierocratic despotism of Egypt, to the
modern French Republic and German
Empire. Corn itself has furnished
sti1nulanta second in popularity to wine
alone; the spirit which delighted the
fercer, sterner races Of Northern
Europe--Swede, Norwegian and Dane,
st. Olaf and Harold Hardrada, as their
descendants of to-day; and the ale of
our own Saxon and Scandinavian ances-
try, which neither spirit, cider nor
Spanish wine has superseded among
ourselves. The vine, again, seems to
have been native to America, but the
civilized or semi-civilized races of the
southern and central part of the West
ern continent had other more popular
and more peculiar stinulants, also for
the most part alcoholic. The palm,
again, has furnished to African and
Asiatic tribes a spirit not less po-
tent or less noxious, not less popular
and probably not less primitive, than
whisky or beer. But where alcohol has
been unknown, among races to whose
habits and temperament it was alien, or
in climates where SO powerful an excit-
ant produced effects too palpably
alarming to be tolerated by rulers or
law givers royal or priestly, other and
milder sti,nulants or sedatives are found
in equally universal use. Till the
white man introduced among them his
own destructive beverages, till "tre
water" spread decentralization and dis
ease, tobacco was the favorite indulgence
of the real Indian of North America,
and very probably of that mighty race
which preceded them, and seems to have
disappeared before they came upon the
scene-the mound builders, whose
gigantic works bear testimony to
the existence Of an agriculture
scarcely less advanced or less pro-
life, despotism probably not
less absolute than that Of Egypt.
Coffee has for ages been almost
equally dear to the Arab; tea has been
to China all that wine is and was to
Europe. probably from a still earlier
period, and has taken hold Oh the North
ern, as coffee and tobacco upon the
Southern branches of the Tartar race.
Opium, or drugs resembling opium in
character, having been found as we'll
suited to the temper, as delightful to
the taste Of the'quieter, and more pas
sive Oriental races as wine to the Aryan
and Semitic nations. The Malays, the
Vikings of the East Indies, found in
bhang drug the most exciting and
maddening in it's effects of any known
to civilized or uncivilized man; d substi-
tute for opium or hasheesh, bearing
much. the same relation to those seda-
tives as brandy and whisky to the light
wines of Southern Europe. :