312 THE EVOLUTION AGAINST NARCOTICS 



have undergone prolonged alcoholic selection are moderate. All 

 the rest, for example Andamanese, Red Indians, Polynesians, and 

 Australasians, are very drunken. Jews and South Europeans are 

 temperate in all the climates to which they migrate. West Africans 

 are temperate in the torrid zone. 



523. Education^ and general mental training. What is there in 

 the education of Jews and South Europeans that should render 

 them more capable of exercising self-control than North Europeans? 

 The upper classes in England and elsewhere amongst civilized 

 races are supposed to be better trained mentally than the lower. 

 Certainly they have more information derived from reading and 

 are also less inclined to excess. But the upper classes of the 

 present day are in general derived from those of former times, and 

 therefore are precisely the classes which have had the greatest 

 command of alcohol, and have been most weeded out by it. 

 Recruits from lower to higher classes are almost always tem- 

 perate people ; contrariwise intemperance has lowered many 

 families from a higher to a lower stratum. There has been, 

 in this particular instance, a process of Social as well as Natural 

 Selection. It must be remembered that though education may 

 create a moral abhorrence, it cannot alter sensations neither 

 those created by alcohol, nor tobacco, nor salt, nor sugar, nor 

 anything else. The sensations created by excessive indulgence in 

 a majority of people in the upper classes are apparently different 

 from those experienced by many in the lower, in that, on the 

 average, they are so much less pleasurable that they awaken desires 

 which are very much less keen. Poverty and its accompaniments, 

 hardship, want, overcrowding, dirt, insanitation, and lack of in- 

 tellectual pleasures are supposed to conduce to the intemperance 

 of our poorer classes. Doubtless they do, but to a very limited 

 extent. Under similar or worse conditions, for instance in the 

 East End of London, Jews and Italians are extremely temperate. 

 In their own countries the lower classes of South Europeans are 

 as temperate as the upper. 1 The fact that South Europeans (e.g. 

 Italians and Spaniards) living in cities or engaged in manufactories, 

 tend to be more intemperate than their rural compatriots, has been 

 supposed to demonstrate the influence of the environment (i.e. 

 mental training) as against that of heredity. But the influence of 

 the environment has been denied by no one. It is maintained 



1 It is interesting to note that while the intemperance of the English lower 

 classes is often attributed to their poverty, the comparative sobriety of the poorer 

 Chinese has been assigned to the same cause (see History of Drink, p. 32). 



