Would you not be
glad to forget life, and its burdens? And opium gives forgetfulness
for a time.
It is true they who thus purchase it pay dearly for their oblivion;
but can you expect the uneducated to count the cost of their
whistle? Poor wretches! They pay a heavy price. Days of
oppressive weariness and languor, whose realities have the feeble
sickliness of dreams; nights, whose dreams are fierce realities of
agony; sinking health, tottering frames, incipient madness, and
worse, the CONSCIOUSNESS of incipient madness; this is the price of
their whistle. But have you taught them the science of
consequences?
John Barton's overpowering thought, which was to work out his fate
on earth, was rich and poor; why are they so separate, so distinct,
when God has made them all? It is not His will that their interests
are so far apart. Whose doing is it?
And so on into the problems and mysteries of life, until, bewildered
and lost, unhappy and suffering, the only feeling that remained
clear and undisturbed in the tumult of his heart, was hatred to the
one class, and keen sympathy with the other.
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