CHAPTER IX. 



MARRIAGE AND DRUNKENNESS. 



" The morbid craving for alcohol is common, and so intense that 

 men who labour under it will gratify it without regard to their 

 health, their wealth, their honour, their wives, their children, or 

 their soul's salvation. 



. . . After they have become dipsomaniacs, in the present state 

 of the law that does not allow legal interference with their liberty 

 I say it with deliberation the sooner they drink themselves to 

 death the better. They are a curse to all who have to do with 

 them, a nuisance and a danger to society, and propagators of a bad 

 breed." CLOUSTON.* 



UNFORTUNATELY it is not necessary to say much in the 

 way of proof of the transunssibility of the "drink 

 crave," as this neurosis has been called. It speaks for 

 itself from every grade of society in the land, from the 

 highest to the lowest, and its voice gives forth no 

 uncertain sound. With instances of the hereditary 

 transmission of this curse every one is only too familiar, 

 and I need not soil these pages with any long record 

 of cases. All any one has to do is to look around among 

 his friends and acquaintances to see how this sin in 

 parents is visited upon the children. 



The hereditary character of the abnormal condition 



* " Mental Diseases," by T. S. Clouston, M.D. 



