PALE-FACED TEETOTALLERS.

Temuka Leader, Volume I, Issue 86, 12 October 1878, Page 3

PALE-FACED TEETOTALLERS.

Those who laugh at the abstemious for being pale would be warranted in angbing if it were the fact that the red face they so much admire was a face indicative of health and the pale one indicative of disease. Unfortunately for their side of the case, that suffused face, that jolly - red face, that dark red face is the face of disease, while the pale face is the face as nature meant it to be. Unfortunately, also, for the laughers, is the fact, that the r-“d face, and suffused face, and dark red face is not simply skin deep and confined to the face. The same redness extends to other and more vital surfaces ; the surfaces of the brain and of other vital organs are congested in like manner, according to the degree of injury that lias been inflicted on the blood vessels by the paralysing drug that is accredited with so much usefulness. There is an alcoholic population, then, of the order I have described—an immense population living from day to ■day in this semi-paralysed condition of circulation. They are already, in the midst of laughter at the abstainers, half wrecked. There are like the Red Indians, who look with contempt on the pale faces, while unconscious that their own power is as rapidly fading as the power of those they contemn is preserved. They are easily overbalanced by slight causes. In the course of their lives their hearts, constructed naturally to make a certain number of beats, have been doing from ten to twenty thousand extra beats aday, thereby shortening in proportion the number of days in which the ordained amount of work has to be performed. So their hearts are in a few years somewhat disabled.—dilated in the cavaties and disten'ded in the valvular machinery. The larger vessels leading from the heart are dilated and less elastic than is natural ; and the small vessels, as we are aware, are dilated, feeble, and liable to give way under slight undue pressure. Physic illy, the condition of the whole of the members of this great population is very bad. They are the last that should make fun of the pale faces. The physician, at the examining Board of the Life Insurance Company, who has learned the necessity of casting up the value of life as he would a column of figures in simple addition, knows them all very well, and ticks off so many years from their lives, according to the stage of ilcoholic disease at which they have arrived, with as much precision as an engineer driving a steam engine reduces the pressure of his steam from the reading of the pressure-gauge. —Dr Richardson on Practical Abstinence.