ALCOHOLIC DRINKS 170 



which prompted men to boast that they had 

 'will power" enough to avoid excess ought no 

 longer to mislead anyone, and no young per- 

 son of normal intelligence and ambition has 

 any right to risk his chances for social and 

 industrial promotion. 



Its Effect upon Posterity. Finally, what 

 effect has alcohol on the offspring and on the 

 race? From comparatively trifling questions 

 of personal liberty or indulgence we are rapidly 

 coming to see that the answer to this funda- 

 mental question must determine the use of 

 alcoholic drinks by man. The human problem 

 being too complex for sure interpretation, ex- 

 haustive laboratory experiments have been 

 made upon animals. These have confirmed 

 observations upon men and now present most 

 convincing evidence that alcohol weakens the 

 germinal cells and tends to cause stillbirth and 

 early mortality, deformation of the brain and 

 sense organs, and weakening and degeneration 

 of offspring in both animals and man'. 



Experiments upon Animals. Carefully-bal- 

 anced experiments were made with dogs, the 

 females being sisters from the same litter and 

 the males brothers from an unrelated strain. 

 To one pair chemically pure alcohol was given 

 daily, diluted and with the food, in amounts 

 too small to cause perceptible intoxication. 

 The growth of the dogs was not interfered 

 with, and their general health remained normal, 

 except that an epidemic of distemper affected 

 all the alcoholic dogs in the kennel much more 

 severely than it did the normal animals. This 

 also confirms considerable evidence gathered 



ALCOHOLIC DRINKS 



from observations upon man that infections 

 are more likely to be serious or fatal in case 

 of alcoholics. 



The sedative effect of alcohol, mentioned 

 above, was clearly demonstrated in the al- 

 coholic dogs. They showed only about half 

 the play and spontaneous activity of their 

 normal brother and sister. In tests of strength 

 and endurance, too, the normal dogs showed 

 more than thrice the ability and less than 

 fifteen per cent of the fatigue of the alcoholics. 

 There are many similar experiments on men, 

 and they all point to the same conclusion, viz., 

 that alcohol must be excluded from the diet 

 of men likely to be called on for feats of skill, 

 strength and endurance. The British official 

 report on the Boer War in which it took 

 300,000 veteran English soldiers to overpower 

 25,000 abstaining Boer ranchmen leaves no 

 doubt as to the bad influence of alcohol on 

 the stamina, vigor and general physical and 

 mental efficiency of men. 



Returning to the experiments, the alcoholic 

 dogs developed marked timidity, a trembling, 

 cringing nervousness, totally absent from the 

 behavior of their normal fellows. This, again, 

 substantiates the human experiment, in which 

 delirium tremens is the most terrible fear; 

 alcoholic insanities commonly take the form 

 of phobias, or irrational fears. 



This series of experiments extended over 

 more than five years; its most important re- 

 sults are seen in the reproductive history of 

 the two pairs of dogs. This is given statistically 

 in the table below: 



ALCOHOLIC PAIR 



NORMAL PAIR 



Demme, in Switzerland, compared the chil- 

 dren in ten alcoholic and ten normal families 



over a long period of years, with the following 

 results : 



