368 BODY CONTROL AND HABIT FORMATION 



most likely to succeed. The paralyzing effect of alcohol upon the 

 nerve centers must place the drinker at a disadvantage. In a 

 hundred ways, the drinker sooner or later feels the handicap that 

 the habit of drink has imposed upon him. Many corporations, 

 notably several of our greatest railroads (the Pennsylvania and 

 the New York Central Railroad among them), refuse to employ 

 any but abstainers in positions of trust. Few persons know the 

 number of railway accidents due to the uncertain eye of some en- 

 gineer who mistook his signal, or the hazy inactivity of the brain 

 of some train dispatcher who, because of drink, forgot to send the 

 telegram that was to hold the train from wreck. In business and 

 in the professions, the story is the same. The abstainer wins out 

 over the drinking man. 



Effect of Alcohol on Ability to do Work. — In Physiological 

 Aspects of the Liquor Problem, Professor Hodge, formerly of Clark 

 University, describes many of his own experiments showing the 

 effect of alcohol on animals. He trained four selected puppies to 

 recover a ball thrown across a gymnasium. To two of the dogs 

 he gave food mixed with doses of alcohol, while the others were 

 fed normally. The ball was thrown 100 feet as rapidly as recov- 

 ered. This was repeated 100 times each day for fourteen suc- 

 cessive days. Out of 1400 times the dogs to which alcohol had 

 been given brought back the ball only 478 times, while the others 

 secured it 922 times. " 



Dr. Parkes experimented with two gangs of men, selected to be as 

 nearly similar as possible, in mowing. He found that with one 

 gang abstaining from alcoholic drinks and the other not, the ab- 

 staining gang could accomplish more. On transposing the gangs, 

 the same results were repeatedly obtained. Similar results were 

 obtained by Professor Aschaffenburg of Heidelberg University, 

 who found experimentally that men " were able to do 15 per cent 

 less work after taking alcohol." 



Recently many experiments along the same lines have been 

 made. In typewriting, in typesetting, in bricklaying, or in the 

 highest type of mental work the result is the same. The quality 

 and quantity of work done on days when alcohol is taken is less 

 than on days when no alcohol is taken. 



