Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/48

 cheap, nourishing and delicious dietary will thus be made available.

Finally, the reader will not be unprepared for the opinion that alcohol, as a beverage, must inevitably disappear. Not only because the price of intoxicants is an unproductive expenditure (and we shall have to be more and more thrifty as time goes on) but because the nerves of the new age would never stand them, must all alcoholic beverages be regarded as destined to obsolescence: and the legislative aspect of this question must presently be touched upon. Already a considerable part of the people, in no way influenced by the illogical idea that the abuse of a commodity by one class calls for the abstention from it of another, refrains from alcohol simply because its use inflicts too great a strain on the system. A good many people even now find it necessary to abstain from tea or from coffee for precisely similar reasons; while the highly-organised nervous systems of others find in the latter a stimulant capable of all the advantages of alcohol (and they are many) and not without some of its penalties. I think it quite likely that when alcohol is gone, the nerves of the future may find it necessary to place the sale of tea and of coffee under restrictions similar to those at present inflicted upon the trade in alcohol: and it is quite certain that morphia, cocaine, chloral, perhaps