But except as a relief in incurable disease, or in that most incurable of all diseases, old age, the continual or prolonged use of opium is always dangerous and nearly always fatal. It impairs the will; not infrequently it exercises a directly, visibly, unmistakably deteriorating influence upon the moral nature. There is nothing strange in this to those who know how an accidental injury to the skull may impair or pervert the moral no less than the intellectual powers. That moral is hardly a less common or less distinctive disease than mental insanity, that the conscience as well as the intellect of the drunkard is distorted and weakened, no physiologist doubts. Opium has a similar power, but exerts it with characteristic slowness of action. The demoralization of the narcotist is not, like that of the drunkard, rapid, violent, and palpable; but gradual, insidious, perceptible only to close observers or near and intimate friends. In nine cases out of ten, moreover, opium ultimately and certainly poisons the whole vital system. The patient loses physical and mental energy, courage, and enterprise; shrinks from exertion of every kind, dreads the labor of a walk, the trouble of writing a letter, dreads still more intensely any effort that calls for moral courage, flinches from a scene, a quarrel, a social or domestic conflict, becomes at last selfish, shameless, weak, useless, miserable to the last degree. But this, like every other effect of opium, is in some measure uncertain; and hence arises one of its subtlest dangers. De Quincey would seem to have been less susceptible than most men to the worst influences of his favorite drug, seeing what work, excellent in quality as well as considerable in quantity he achieved after he had become a confirmed opium-eater. It took, no doubt, a tenfold greater amount of opium to reduce him to intellectual impotence than would suffice to destroy the minds of nine brain-workers in ten. But his own story clearly reveals how completely the enormous doses to which he had recourse at last overpowered a mind exceptionally energetic, and a temperament exceptionally capable of assimilating, perhaps, rather than resisting the power of opium. Here and there we find a constitution upon which it exerts few or none of its characteristic effects. As a few cannot take it at all, so a few can take it with apparent impunity. With them it will relieve pain and will not paralyse the nerves, will quell excitement without affecting mental energy; nay, while leaving physical activity little more impaired than age and temperament alone might have impaired it. Here and there we may find a confirmed opium-eater capable of taking and enjoying active exercise—a fairly fearless rider, a lover of nature tempted by taste, or it may be by restlessness, to walks beyond his muscular strength; with vivid imagination well under his own control; in whom even the will seems but