The second strong impulse to drink is like unto the first; it is to “brace up.” Human nature is either a dreadfully weak machine, or one which the majority persist in overworking. Men’s energies, spurred by their necessities, too often outrun their strength; then stimulation will be resorted to if it is at hand. It is quite true to say there is more strength, and stimulus too, in a loaf of bread or pound of meat than in a glass of liquor; but the food works slowly; the liquor works quickly. There are drinkers almost innumerable among the better classes, who use liquor medicinally, as literally as other men use quinine. Their liquor habit never is an indulgence; they would as lieve take some other stimulant were it equally convenient and effective, but they do not know of any; neither do their doctors. When men feel the need of stimulation, yet dread the use of alcohol, they will search for help somewhere else. With the nominal decay of the rum influence in the United States some years ago, began the enormous sale of bitters, anodynes, narcotics, stimulants, nerve foods, brain foods, and other nostrums of similar purpose, with which the advertising columns of a great many newspapers, including most of the religious weeklies, were filled, as some are at the present time. In the city of New York, where there is one rum shop to every thirty families, it is not a common experience to smell opium or chloral in the breath of the man next you in church or street-car or business resort. But in the State of Maine, which has had more experience with close prohibition than all the other States of the Union combined, it is hard to go into any community of men without being made cognizant of the fact that resort to these stimulants is quite common in that virtuous State. I do not say this in contempt of Maine’s effort to get rid of liquor. The prohibition movement in Maine has done incalculable good in some directions. There is no other State in the Union in which young men have never been invited into bar-rooms, and do not know what public opportunity for drinking is.