Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/345

Rh must have arisen by some process of evolution, and I submit that it can have arisen only through the operation of Alcoholic Selection; through the continued survival, in the presence of alcohol, of those that craved least for it, and the elimination of those that craved most for it. The Greeks and Italians are notoriously more passionate and less self-restrained than the English, i.e. the mental traits they inherit or acquire from their progenitors tend less than with us to create a power of self-restraint; but they are notoriously more abstemious as regards alcohol than the English. Whence this difference, this superiority of self-control in one respect, which belies their characters in all other respects, if not from the survival of the fittest? If ancient literature can be trusted, the classic races were formerly much more drunken than at the present day. In Sparta, for instance, the question of temperance was a burning one, and unhappy Helots were made to furnish "fearful examples " to the aristocratic youth. In England at the present time, of all the community, the upper classes, though possessing the best opportunities for indulgence, are, on the whole, the least addicted to drunkenness; that is, those individuals who, generally speaking, have descended from ancestors to whom wealth afforded opportunities for excessive indulgence (i.e. for poisoning themselves), are on the whole more temperate than those who have descended from an ancestry to which poverty denied similar opportunities; and this notwithstanding the fact that to the poor man excessive indulgence means ruin for himself and his family, since food and shelter compete with alcohol for his resources; whereas the rich man often need suffer nothing more than ill-health as a consequence of overindulgence.

It is said that racial differences in the craving for alcohol, or at any rate in the indulgence of it, are due