As to drink and stimulants more regard if possible must be paid to what we have called “the personal equation” than even in matters of food. Excess of everything--for such is the implication of the word itself--must be bad for everybody, but there is no earthly foundation for supposing that what is excess for one person injures another in the very least. A shower of rain ruins a picture-hat in a few moments: the same shower does not practically injure a locomotive engine at all, and is absolutely good for sprouting corn. Alcohol for instance, if indulged in at all by one man, will assuredly lead either to excess or to inordinate craving for it, while another man will drink wine at lunch and dinner for years without ever feeling the slightest desire to increase his usual quantity. What he drinks, again, would hopelessly disagree with, or perhaps intoxicate another man, while it seems as far as we can judge to suit him; he would perhaps even be definitely less well without it. It is on this point that preachers of total abstinence, just like vegetarians, are often their own worst foes. They seem to regard the process of fermentation (a natural one after all) as productive of something which is in itself immoral. Drunkenness, of course, is a vice; we all know that; but so, and certain teetotallers seem to forget this, is gluttony. They each of them turn man into a brute beast, though what many teetotallers would look approvingly at as “a good hearty meal” appears to us to partake fully as much of the nature of debauchery as does the drinking of a bottle of champagne at dinner. The question of drinking, in fact, seems to us one that each man must settle for himself, by finding out experimentally whether he needs stimulant or not. Probably the healthier he is the less he needs it, and to spur a horse that is already going as well as the rider has any right to expect is both a cruelty and a false use of energy. It seems certain, also, that most people who take stimulants at all take more than they really need, partly because of the pleasant effect of stimulant in the heightened vividity it gives (leaving anything like drunkenness out of the question), and because of the taste of alcoholic beverages, which nine out of ten people find most palatable. Here again preachers of total abstinence put forward an argument so silly that it is scarcely worth combating (were it not for the fact that it is so often repeated), when they say that what we have called “heightened vividity” is the thin end of intoxication. It is nothing of the kind. Food itself is a stimulant as well as a nutriment; a mutton chop or a welsh rarebit when one is hungry gives heightened vividity; so also does whisky and soda.