The tide is turning; the victims of anti-physical dogmas are awakening to the significance of their delusion; the power of public opinion has forced the dupes of the alcohol-brewing Galilean to join the crusade of the temperance movement; diet-reform has become a chief problem of civilization; but the upas-tree of the poison-habit is too deeply rooted to be eradicated in a single generation, and the task of redemption will be the work of centuries. As yet the probing of the wound has only revealed the appalling extent of the canker-sore. The statistics of the liquor traffic have established the fact that the value of the resources wasted on the gratification of the poison-vice far exceeds the aggregate amount of the yearly expenditure for educational, charitable, and sanitary purposes—nay, that the abolition of that traffic would save a sum sufficient for all reforms needed to turn earth into a physical and social paradise. And yet that waste expresses only the indirect and smaller part of the damage caused by the curse of the poison-habit. The loss in health and happiness cannot be estimated in coin; but if the sum thus expended in the purchase of disease were devoted to the promotion of arson and robbery, the utmost possible extent of the consequent mischief would probably fall short of the present result. The stimulant habit in all its forms clouds the sunshine of life like an all-pervading poison-vapor. Alcohol undermines the stamina of manhood; narcotic drinks foster a complication of nervous diseases; opium and tobacco impair the vigor of the cerebral functions. The excessive use of animal food, too, avenges itself in all sorts of moral and physical disorders. It inflames passions which no prayer can quench. “Alas! what avails all theology against a diet of bull-beef?” Father Smeth wrote from the Sioux missions; and the almost exclusive use of flesh food has, indeed, afflicted our Indians with the truculence of carnivorous beasts. The same cause has produced the same effects in western Europe. The carnivorous saints of medieval Spain delighted in matanzas and heretic-hunts, as their carnivorous ancestors in the butcher sports of the circus, and their British contemporaries in bear-baits and Tyburn spectacles. E.—REFORM.