Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/358

346 same extent influence posterity, must be in the direction of a lesser craving.

If, then, racial abstinence from alcohol must have for ultimate result only excessive racial indulgence in the poison, how may we save posterity from the curse of intemperance? How cause our race ultimately to crave as little for it as the South Europeans? Most assuredly only by imitating the process of Alcoholic Selection, by eliminating those individuals among us who crave for alcohol to an excessive degree, at least in so far as to prevent them influencing posterity by leaving offspring, who, by marrying the children of the naturally sober, would contaminate the whole race. In other words, we must either permit Alcoholic Selection to rim its cruel course, or we must assist it by Artificial Selection, and so prevent much of the misery, by weeding out the obviously unfit, either by forbidding marriage to drunken individuals, or in the married by preventing the procreation of children by separating the parents, or such other means as science may devise.

The above proposals, as well as the conclusions on which they are founded, will certainly be received on "moral grounds" with horror by a certain section of the community, and in a country, in some respects the foremost as regards sanitation in the world, where that monstrous crime, the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, was possible, whereby, notwithstanding our endeavours to banish all other zymotic diseases, notwithstanding the great care with which we isolate individuals suffering from small-pox, diphtheria, scarlatina, &c., the venereal zymotic diseases were let loose on the community, and England made the plague-spot of Europe—of the world, as many unhappy and vanishing aboriginal races attest—it is certain that they will not at present be accepted. In the future, when the reign of prejudice has grown weaker, and our legislation more