Amazon.com description: Product Description: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1885 edition. Excerpt: ... the government of the country an interest in providing facilities for its consumption." A pecuniary interest, of course; an interest, the extent of which depends upon the amount of wreckage performed upon human character, human happiness, and upon personal and domestic peace and prosperity. For, the proportion of the liquor profits belonging to the government being substantially fixed by law, the extent of the government's interest in the liquor traffic is practically in the direct ratio of the degradation, want, and despair inflicted by alcohol upon the victims of disease. Living upon the western frontier for some years, I there became acquainted with a "mountain man;" a person employed in the service of the American Fur Company. This man, when he came into the settlement, was a drunkard. While recovering from the effects of a spree he told me that he had engaged in the business of trapping solely to be removed from the temptation to drink; that, when he was within the reach of liquor he could not resist the impulse to intoxication. He had no serious craving for alcohol while away in the mountains. He knew it could not be obtained, and his appetite was not aroused by contemplating the subject of drink. The plans to which the inebriate resorts in order to cheat and overcome his appetite for liquor are innumerable, and they are known, as a rule, to himself only. But they demonstrate his weakness and the imbecility of his will in the direction of his proclivity, while they also prove his anxiety to escape from the galling yoke of his morbid predisposition. CHAPTER X. Dipsomania in its mental attitudes and relations, continued. The operations and characteristics of impulse further considered--When impulse may be...