THi: XKKYOIS S VST KM AND ITS r< )\SKKV.\Tli\ 



moderate <[Uant itics is highly characteristic. It may be 

 described as intellectual myopia, a condition in which all 

 that is near at hand the promt company and the inter- 

 ests of the hour will he found dominant, and all that is 

 remote from these will tend to he excluded. Thus, the 

 cares that weighed upon the banqueter before he came to 

 the feast and the problems he must face next morning are 

 forgotten. We have insisted that this detachment is most 

 desirable and hygienic. But the ideal is to compass it at 

 will without the employment of a chemical artifice. < >ne 

 who can relinquish care as a voluntary act can take it up 

 again promptly and earnestly. The banishment of obliga- 

 tion by alcohol does not permit the same decisive resump- 

 tion of responsibility. It is well for the man who is head 

 of a family, when he reviews some convivial occasion, to 

 ask himself whether the wife and children at home did not 

 recede farther from the forefront of his consciousness than 

 he would have chosen to have them. Perhaps the bachelor 

 need not he so exacting in his introspective judgment. 



It seems wellnigh impossible to write without bias of the 

 social use of alcohol. Those who uphold it charge their 

 opponents with a want of charity and with a disposition 

 to demand needless renunciations of pleasure. They would 

 probably assert that the typical moderate drinker is a 

 kindlier man than the typical abstainer and that he is 

 not less efficient. To be quite just to those who maintain 

 this position one should read the pleas of such writers as 

 Holmes, Miinslerberg, and Heinemann.' 



If it is a difficult matter to pass judgment upon those 

 who use alcohol, what shall be said of caffein, the active 

 principle of tea and coffee'.' This is an agent which we 

 sometimes hear unsparingly condemned, but most vigor- 

 ously by those who have substitutes to offer. Many 



1 Holmes, "The Anton-;,! of the Ikrakfast Table," Riverside 

 Ivlition, Houston, Mitllin A- Co., K<>sl<m, p. |S7 ,l N, </. Miinstcr- 

 IHTU. "Aiiirrii-.-m lYoblrm.- from the Point of View of :t Psychol- 

 ogist," MoiT:it. Y:inl A- Co., N-w York, nun. Heinemann, "The 

 Hulr of Not Too Mucli," ('hirajio, I'.H'J. l-'or roimtiT-arnuinrnts, 

 (Yookcr, "Shall 1 Drink'. 1 " Tin- I'iknm Press, I'.oMon, l'M-1. 



