And no fire racing through the forests
of Nova Scotia for three hundred miles in the direction of some doomed
city, ever moved so fiercely as the infection of habits amongst the
dense and fiery populations of republican North America.
But it is remarkable, that the whole _ancient_ system of
civilization, all the miracles of Greece and Rome, Persia and Egypt,
moved by the machinery of races that were _not_ tainted with any
such popular _marasmus_. The taste was slightly sowed, as an
_artificial_ taste, amongst luxurious individuals, but never ran
through the laboring classes, through armies, through cities The blood
and the climate forbade it. In this earliest era of history, all the
great races, consequently all the great empires, threw themselves, by
accumulation, upon the genial climates of the south,--having, in fact,
the magnificent lake of the Mediterranean for their general centre of
evolutions. Round this lake, in a zone of varying depth, towered the
whole grandeurs of the Pagan earth. But, in such climates, man is
naturally temperate. He is so by physical coercion, and for the
necessities of rest and coolness. The Spaniard, the Moor, or the Arab,
has no merit in his temperance. The effort, for _him_, would be to
form the taste for alcohol.
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