The Kenosha telegraph. [volume] (Kenosha, Wis.) 1860-1888, 1886-07-09
MORAL SUICIDE.
A Crime Committed by All Persons Ad-
dicted to the Opium Habit.

/
MORAL SUICIDE.
A Crime Committed by All Persons Ad-
| dicted to the Opium Habit.
| Whoever first administered opium to
an agonized sufferer bestowed bless
ing upon the human race that there is
no computing. But whoever first
taught that the dose might be repeated
till it's pleasant sensations created a
desire that became q need, habitual
and not to be resisted, should be Wis
tied with the seyerest punishment that
tate reserves for sinners.
The opium habit is one that has so
firm a hold now upon many that it be-
comes the public duty to expostulate,
and to rehearse the suffering it creates
and the degradation it entails, as a
measure of warning to those in any
danger from it.
The physical effects of eating or of
smoking opium, after short time, are
so fearful that no one who is acquainted
with them, or who realizes them,
would ever willingly become their VIC
tim. Never to be able to digest any
thing, to endure constant nausea, to
have heavy pains, distress and per-
petual burning sensation in the stom-
! ach, to tiutter and tremble and faint, to
feel as if you were bubble rising IN
the air, to suffer all sorts of terrifying
the limbs, to laugh and cry at wrong
times like simpleton, and never to be
sure how much you have made fool
Of yourself, to have blur and blazing
before the eyes, binding headaches to-
gether with torturing pains in the
bones, to have neuralgia so acutely
that the sensation of touching bare
nerve in a tooth is constant, to find
yourself in a condition generally
resembling delirium tremens-all
that is bad enough. But to know
also that it destroys the moral
life in even greater measure, so that
women of pride and wealth, and hith-
erto of virtue, will practice every mean
ness, craft and deception, commit
theft, forfeit modesty, all under its in
tiuence, and pause at no crime in or
der to obtain possession of the drug,
if they can not get it otherwise-to
know all that, and yet to touch it, ex-
cept by prescription, would seem to be
impossible. In short, there is no ques-
ton that opium debauches the whole
moral nature, ruins the physical and
destroys the nervous system, and is
the worst enemy that man has ever en-
countered; for alcohol has it's inter-
missions, however brief, but opium
| never ceases for one moment in it's
tyranny and cruelty How terrible it
is even the Emperor of China declared
when, it being within his option to
seize a large, number of chests of
opium belonging to the British, and
worth many million dollars, turning
the price all into his own purse, he,
with .ssublimity of action unequaled
in any other historical action that we
know, ordered it to be utterly de-
stroyed rather than sell it to his peo-
pie and enrich himself by cursing them.
There are many individuals, how
ever, who will not be deferred in sea-
son from the use of this cruel drug by
any possibilities in relation either to
their physical or moral being; but it
would seem as if human pride, to say
nothing else, might cause them to
| pause when they know that the end of
it all is idiocy, for most of us would
prefer to die to-day under any circum-
stances rather than come to that at
| last; and that, moreover, feminine
pride in especial would shrink from
transformation into the hideous-look-
ing object that the opium-eater event.
ually becomes.
That this generation drinks less in
| toxicating liquor proportionately than
those that have gone before is possibly
true, but that in one form or another it
uses vastly more opium is equally true.
Not merely the fine lady is its slave,
but the operative also. If the innumer-
able number of chemists shops does
not in itself tell the story, it is said that
one would soon discover 1t in taking
up a position in their neighborhood on
any Saturday night, when the custom
ers can be seen coming in for their
| little Walls of poison in whatever form
they use it. The sightmight make one
tremble for the generations to come, if
it were not that after a mother and
daughter addicted to the cruel habit.
or q father and son, there will be no
| generation to come in that family. But
If hardship and want might be pleaded
in any faintest breath as some measure
of excuse for. the oyer-worked and often
ill-used operative who resorts to the
drug that shall open to her an escape,
if only for the present, into a land Of
dreams, there is no excuse for the
woman of property or of education
who puts herself into the power of this
terrible fascination. Ii she is in trouble,
she has other resources, she is not
obliged to drink lethe or nepenthe in
order to forget herself. Long habit of
years, culture, friends, opportunities,
ought to be sufficient to afford relief
from mental sorrow in other ways; and
| if she takes it from iReness, or from
| mere love of the effects of the drug,
then words are too weak to reprimand
er.-Harper Bazar.
Some aspiring amateurs in New