52 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



But it is true that the impaired vitality of the habitual drunkard 

 transmits itself mentally in the form of a peculiar disposition which 

 I have found to be equally characteristic of the children (and even 

 grandchildren) of an opium-eater. They lack that spontaneous gayety 

 which constitutes the almost misfortune-proof happiness of normal 

 children, and, without being positively peevish or melancholy, their 

 spirits seem to be clouded by an apathy which yields only tK> strong 

 external excitants. But out-door work and healthy food rarely fail to 

 restore the tone of the mind, and even before the age of puberty the 

 manifestations of a more buoyant temper will prove that the patient 

 has outgrown the hereditary hebetude, and with it the need of artificial 

 stimulation. Temptation, of course, should always be guarded against, 

 and also everything that could tend to aggravate the lingering de- 

 spondency of the convalescent harsh treatment, solitude, and a mo- 

 notonous occupation. 



"With normal children such precautions are superfluous. They 

 will resist temptation if we do not force it upon them. No need of 

 threats and tearful exhortations ; you need not warn a boy to abstain 

 from disgusting poisons Nature attends to that ; but simply provide 

 him with a sufficient quantity of palatable, non-stimulating food, till 

 he reaches the age when habit becomes as second nature. It was 

 Rousseau's opinion that a taste for stimulants could be acquired only 

 during the years of immaturity, and that there would be little danger 

 after the twentieth year, if in the mean while observation and confirmed 

 habits had strengthened the protective instincts which Nature has 

 erected as a bulwark between innocence and vice. We need not for- 

 tify that bulwark by artificial props, we need not guard it with anx- 

 ious care ; all we have to do is to save ourselves the extraordinary 

 trouble of breaking it down. After a boy becomes capable of induc- 

 tive reasoning, it can, of course, do no harm to call his attention to 

 the evils of intemperance, and give him an opportunity to observe the 

 successive stages of the alcohol-habit, the gradual progress from beer 

 to brandy, from a " state of diminished steadiness " to delirium tre- 

 mens. In large cities, where the evils of drunkenness reveal them- 

 selves in all their naked ugliness, children can easily be taught to 

 regard the poison-vice as a sort of disease which should be guarded 

 against, like small-pox or leprosy. 



But it should always be kept in mind that even the milder stimu- 

 lant-habits have a progressive tendency, and that under certain cir- 

 cumstances the attempt to resist that bias will overtask the strength 

 of most individuals. According to the allegory of the Grecian myth, 

 the car of Bacchus was drawn by tigers ; and it is a significant circum- 

 stance that war, famine and pestilence have so often been the fore- 

 runners of veritable alcohol-epidemics. The last Lancashire strike was 

 accompanied by whisky riots ; the starving Silesian weavers tried to 

 drown their misery in Schnapps. In France almost every general de- 



