they were a generation ago. Is this due to an increase in the disorders
which are eased by such drugs? Is it not rather due to the softening
influence of luxury, and the fact that we are all being constantly
trained to feel that it is both easy and our right to escape pain,
however brief?

I am sure, too, that a part of it lies in the readiness with which many
physicians give sedatives, and their failure to feel the vast moral
responsibilities of their position. But, whatever be the cause or
causes, it is well in the hour of ease to learn beforehand the risks
which come of too easy and too frequent appeals to agents which benumb
the nerves.

When people are first given opium, it is apt to be the friend of the
night and the foe of the morrow. Repeated often enough, it loses power
to constipate and distress. It still soothes pain. It still gives sleep.
At last it seems to be in a measure a tonic for those who take it. But
after a while it does some other things less agreeable. The mind and
memory suffer, but far more surely the moral nature is altered. The
woman becomes indifferent, her affections dull, her sense of duty
hopelessly weakened. Watchful, cunning, suspicious, deceitful,--a thief,
if need be, to get the valued opiate,--she stops at nothing. It would
seem as if it were a drug which directly affected the conscience. At
last, before this one craving, all ties in life are slight and bind her
not. Insensible to shame and dead to affection, she is happy if the
alcohol habit be not added to her disorder, for if she cannot get the
one drug she longs for, the other will serve her at need.

There is a popular idea that opium gives pleasant dreams, and that it
takes us away into the land of poetry, to which it is supposed to have