Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/109

Rh XXII. The effect of alcoholic drink on race progress should be considered in this collection. Authorities do not agree as to the final result of alcohol in race selection. Doubtless, in the long run, the drunkard will be eliminated, and perhaps certain authors are right in regarding this as a gain to the race. On the other hand, there is great force in Dr. Amos G. Warner's remark, that of all caustics gangrene is the most expensive. The people of southern Europe are relatively temperate. They have used wine for centuries, and it is thought by Archdall Reid and others that the cause of their temperance is to be found in this long use of alcoholic beverages. All those with vitiated or uncontrollable appetites have been destroyed in the long experience with wine, leaving only those with normal tastes and normal ability of resistance. The free use of wine is, therefore, in this view, a cause of final temperance, while intemperance rages only among those races which have not long known alcohol, and have not become by selection resistant to it. The savage races which have never known alcohol are even less resistant, and are soonest destroyed by it.

In all this there must be a certain element of truth. The view, however, ignores the evil effect on the nervous system of long-continued poisoning, even if the poison be only in moderate amounts. The temperate Italian, with his daily semi-saturation is no more a normal man than the Scotch farmer with his occasional sprees. The nerve disturbance which wine effects is an evil, whether carried to excess in regularity or irregularity. We know too little of its final result on the race to give certainty to our speculations. It is moreover true that most excess in the use of alcohol is not due to primitive appetite. It is drink which causes appetite, and not appetite which seeks for drink. In a given number of drunkards but a very few become such through inborn appetite. It is influence of bad example, lack of courage, false idea of manliness, or some defect in character or misfortune in environment which leads to the first steps in drunkenness. The taste once established takes care of itself. In earlier times, when the nature of alcohol was unknown and total abstinence was undreamed of, it was the strong, the boisterous, the energetic, the apostle of 'the strenuous life,' who carried all these things to excess. The wassail bowl, the bumper of ale, the flagon of wine, all these were the attribute of the strong. We can not say that those who sank in alcoholism thereby illustrated the survival of the fittest. Who can say that as the Latin races became temperate they did not also become docile and weak? In other words, considering the influence of alcohol alone, unchecked by an educated conscience, we must admit that it is the strong and vigorous, not the weak and perverted, that are destroyed by it. At the best, we can only say that alcoholic selection is a complex force, which makes for temperance—if at all, at a fearful cost of life which without alcoholic