It is plain, both from the climates and the character of the races among whom the sedative drugs or slightly-stimulant beverages have first and most widely taken root, that the preference for sedatives or gentle excitants is not accidental, but to a large extent dependent upon the temperament and habits of races or nations. Alcohol suits the higher, more energetic, active, militant races; and the fiercer and more militant the temper or habits, the stronger the intoxicant employed. It is not improbable that the first and strongest incitement to the use of alcohol, as of bhang, was the desire for that which a very unfair and ungenerous national taunt describes as Dutch courage. No race, probably, except their nearest kinsmen of England, was ever less dependent on the artificial boldness produced by stimulants than the stubborn soldiers and seamen of Holland. The beer-loving Teutons have never been, like the wine-drinkers of France, Italy, and Spain, a military, or even, like the Scandinavians, a thoroughly martial race. They will fight: none, Scandinavians, Soudanese, and Turks perhaps excepted, fight better or more stubbornly. It may well be that the adventurous, enterprising spirit of Englishmen and Scotchmen, displayed at sea rather than on land, and in semi-pacific quite as much as in warlike enterprise, is derived in large measure from the strong Scandinavian element in our national blood. The tea-drinking Chinamen, the Oriental lovers of haschisch and opium, have mostly been industrious rather than energetic, agricultural or pastoral rather than predatory. The coffee-drinking Arabs were not, till the days of Mahomet, a specially warlike race. Bandits or guerillas they were perforce; like every people which inhabits a country whose mountains or deserts afford a safe refuge to robbers but promise no reward to peaceful industry. No race, no class living in the open air, save in the warmer climates, no people given to energetic muscular labor or devoted to war, would be prompt to abandon alcohol in any of its forms for its milder Oriental equivalents. Tea and coffee were introduced at a time when manufactures and in-door-life were gaining ground in Western Europe and found favor first, as is still the case, with the indoor-living sex. It is still among indoor workers that they are most in vogue. But if, as seems likely, alcohol was first adopted by the warriors of savage or semi-savage races as an inspiring or hardening force, it early lost this character with the introduction of strict military discipline on the one hand or of chivalry on the other. Neither the trained soldier of the phalanx and the legion, nor the knight with whom reckless but also intelligent courage was a point of honor, could find any help in intoxication, partial or total; nay, he soon found that while the first excitement of alcohol was fatal to discipline, its subsequent effects were almost as injurious to the