What does cigarette smoking tend to produce? What other effect has it on the system? What is its effect on the appetite? How does it excite a craving for drink? What is said by Dr. Keep, of Brooklyn? What has been done by some of the States? What are your own views on the vice of cigarette smoking? Are you weak-minded enough to be persuaded ever to place a vile cigarette between your lips? CHAPTER XVIII. ALCOHOL. Alcohol does not exist in nature. It is a fluid made by fermentation, or the rotting of vegetables and their juices. Beer, cider, and wine are produced by the decay of a sweet liquid taken from grain or fruits. Alcohol is that element in malt and spirituous liquors which produces intoxication. ITS DANGER. Alcohol is indigestible and lessens the muscular power. No person training for any severe contest would dare swallow a drop of it. Its great danger lies in its attractiveness. It makes one at first feel in high spirits, reckless of right and wrong, and it destroys his judgment and sense. You all know that an intoxicated person talks like an idiot. EFFECT UPON THE ORGANS OF THE BODY. Alcohol destroys the nerves, ruins the stomach, weakens the muscles, affects the heart, bloats the body, kills the liver, causes insanity, and makes men descend lower than the beast of the field. It turns wise men into fools; peaceable persons into brawlers; good citizens into wicked and dangerous ones; and is the direct cause of more than three fourths of all the crimes in the country. COST OF ALCOHOL. The total cost of alcoholic drinks each year is eight times that spent for education. The saloon-keepers outnumber the ministers of the gospel four to one. Sixty thousand people die annually from alcohol. Those who use alcohol are very liable to disease. In Russia the cholera swept off one year every drinking person in a certain town before it affected a single temperate one. In New Orleans, five thousand drinking men died one season from yellow fever before it touched a sober one. In 1832, in Park Hospital, New York, out of 204 cases of cholera, only six were men of temperate habits; these all recovered, while 122 of the others died. Sir John Ross, the famous Arctic explorer, never used alcohol or tobacco. On one of his voyages, when a youth, every one of the crew that was a drinker, died; but he himself was not sick a single hour. When exploring the frozen regions, he was an old man, the oldest of his crew being twenty years younger than he. His men used tobacco and spirits, but he went without either; and with his advanced years, stood the rigors and hardships better than any of them.