It is a specialty of sanitary reformers, who are among
the most useful of the many intellectual nuisances in the world, to be deficient in the quality of humour. One of them, some years ago, recommended that a man's dead relatives should be burned at the corners of streets, to save gas-lamps; another, not two years ago, lectured on the unhealthiness of boots in bed- rooms ; and on Saturday, Mr. Mansergh, at the close of a most sensible address to the Sanitary Congress on water supply, brought in his views on teetotalism in the oddest way. He told his audience that " systematic hot-water drinking had been proved in America to be destructive of the appetite for alcohol." We entirely believe him, and if he extended the destructive effect to the appetite for mutton-chops, fruit, or wheaten bread, we should believe him also. But why limit us to hot water, when tartar emetic, ipecacuanha, unrefined cod-liver oil, and perhaps twenty other drugs, would be at least equally potent P The old remedy of Rechab, total abstinence, is an easier one than that, and as perfectly effective as long as it is pursued. The difficulty of the temperate is not to leave off alcohol, but to believe in the use of leaving it off. They do not find that the most perfect abstainers in the world, life-convicts, become better people.
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