Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/359

Rh rational, I hope and expect it will be different; I hope and expect that individuals, weak against alcohol, suffering from what in the unavoidable presence of alcohol is to all intents and purposes a mental disease, will not be permitted to contaminate the race by bearing offspring, any more than individuals suffering from other grave forms of mental disease are permitted at the present time to do so; but that they only will be permitted to continue the race who are innately sober, and crave little for excessive indulgence in alcohol. If it is morally right to prevent imbeciles and lunatics reproducing themselves, it is surely right, from a moral point of view, to adopt similar measures against inebriates. We have ceased to walk in processions when threatened with pestilence, and resort only to cleanliness and sanitation; presently in our endeavours to procure sobriety we shall cease to resort to enforced or voluntary abstinence—i.e. we shall cease to oppose changing moral influences to an unchanging instinct, and we shall recognize that the will of man, even in the most limited sense, is not entirely free, but, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has truly said, is trammelled by his desires, and that on the average his actions are regulated by the strength of those desires. When we have recognized this, we shall recognize also that it is vain, especially in a retrogressing species, to expect that permanent racial sobriety will result notwithstanding the survival of the unfittest—i.e. notwithstanding that the unfittest are permitted to have as much influence on posterity as the fittest.

It may be argued, Why, if we seek to banish the microbes which cause zymotic disease, should we not seek to banish alcohol, which causes what is practically the death-dealing disease of alcoholism? If it is right to banish the one, it is surely right to banish the other. On the other hand, if the only way to secure permanent