THE BLOOD OF THE NATION. 99 



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 expensi\ e. The people of southern Europe are relatively tem- 

 perate. They have used wine for centuries, and it is thought by Arch- 

 dall 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 un- 

 controllable appetites have been destroyed in the long experience with 

 wine, leaving only those with normal tastes and normal ability of re- 

 sistance. 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 know^n alcohol are 

 even less resistant, and are soonest destroyed by it. 



In all this there must be a certain element of truth. The view, how- 

 ever, ignores the evil effect on the nervous system of long-continued 

 poisoning, even if the poison be only in moderate amounts. The tem- 

 perate Italian, wdth his daily semi-saturation is no more a normal man 

 than the Scotch farmer M'ith his occasional sprees. The nerve disturb- 

 ance which Avine effects is an evil, whether carried to excess in regu- 

 larity 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 

 w^hich 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 estab- 

 lished takes care of itself. In earlier times, when the nature of alcohol 

 was unknown and total abstinence was undreamed of, it w^as 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 sur- 

 vival of the fittest. Who can say that as the Latin races became tem- 

 perate they did not also become docile and weak? In other words, con- 

 sidering 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, w^e can only 

 say that alcoholic selection is a complex force, which makes for tem- 

 perance — if at all, at a fearful cost of life wdiich without alcoholic temp- 



