The quantity of spirituous liquor required to keep one of these unhappy men in this degrading slavery varies from a pint a day to two quarts. Many drunkards consume a quart of whiskey every day for years. The regular allowance of one gentleman of the highest position, both social and official, who made his way to the Inebriate Asylum, had been two quarts of brandy a day for about five years. The most remarkable known case is that of a hoary-headed man of education and fortune, residing in the city of New York, who confesses to taking "fifty drinks a day" of whiskey,--ten drinks to a bottle, and five bottles to a gallon. One gallon of liquor, he _says_, goes down his old throat every day of the year. Before he is fit to eat his breakfast in the morning he has to drink twelve glasses of whiskey, or one bottle and one fifth. Nevertheless, even this poor man is able, for some hours of the morning, to transact what people of property and leisure call business, and, during a part of the evening, to converse in such a way as to amuse persons who can look on and see a human being in such bondage without stopping to think what a tragedy it is. This Old Boy never has to be carried home, I believe. He is one of those most hopeless drunkards who never get drunk, never wallow in the gutter, never do anything to scare or startle them into an attempt to reform. He is like a certain German "puddler" who was pointed out to me in a Pittsburg iron-works, who consumes exactly seven dollars' worth of lager-bier every seven days,--twenty glasses a day, at five cents each. He is also like the men employed in the dismal work of the brewery, who are allowed as much beer as they can drink, and who generally do drink as much as they can. Such persons are always fuddled and stupid, but seldom drunk enough to alarm their neighbors or themselves. Perhaps they are the only persons in all the world who are in any degree justified in passing their lives in a state of suspended intelligence; those of them at least whose duty it is to get inside of enormous beer barrels, and there, in darkness and solitude, in an atmosphere reeking and heavy with stale ale, scrape and mop them out before they are refilled. When you see their dirty, pale faces at the "man-hole" of the barrel, down in the rumbling bowels of the earth, in one of those vast caves of beer in Cincinnati, you catch yourself saying, "Drink, poor devils, drink! Soak what brains you have in beer!" What can a man want with brains in a beer-barrel? But then, you think again, even these poor men need their brains when they get home; and _we_ need that they should have brains on the first Tuesday in November.