THE KINDS OF INSANITY 465 



present, and under which liquor of bad quality is being sold every- 

 where. Mr Seddon, the Premier, approves of the proposal. He 

 told a deputation that the chiefs and the police were unanimous in 

 stating that prohibition had spread the evil it had been intended 

 to exclude. Sly grog-selling is rampant and could not be stopped. 

 The same thing was going on in the Clutha district in Otago, where 

 there were no Maoris, and where prohibition was enforced by 

 popular vote." 1 



761. A law forbidding the use of alcohol is as much an 

 anachronism as one enforcing a belief in the Thirty-nine Articles, 

 or the Darwinian Doctrine of Descent. Prohibition merely deprives 

 the authorities of much of their power of controlling intemperance 

 and tends to make them partners, pensioners, or blackmailers of 

 law breakers. The whole habit of modern thought and behaviour, 

 the whole fabric of civilized society is against its effective adminis- 

 tration. But that which cannot be altogether prevented may to 

 some extent be regulated and diminished. Up to a certain point 

 it is possible to control the drink traffic ; attempts to pass that 

 point usually end in worse than failure. Drinking there is sure to 

 be, but the more openly it is conducted the less imperfect are the 

 facilities for control. If, were it possible, all public houses and 

 clubs had glass walls, intemperance would be reduced to a mini- 

 mum. Very little drunkenness occurs in the cafes of the French 

 Boulevards. If, then, we wish to benefit the race in the immediate 

 future our endeavour should be, not to prevent drinking, for that 

 is impossible, but to bring all places where excessive drinking is 

 likely to occur more thoroughly under the hand of the public 

 authorities. That is the only method of external sanitation with 

 respect to alcohol which, in civilised communities, has been at all 

 successful in the past or is likely to be successful in the future. 



762. Insanity. Two very distinct kinds of insanity are observ- 

 able : (A) The individual may possess, and usually does possess 

 in average degree, every mental faculty found in the normal 

 human being except one memory. Thus he may have all the 

 human instincts, imitativeness, curiosity, sexual inclination, and 

 the rest ; but he is more or less incapable of storing experience 

 incapable of filling his conscious memory with data which may 

 be recollected, and his unconscious memory with ' acquired ' 

 dexterities and habits. If his lack of memory is very great, he 

 is an idiot, unable perhaps to learn to walk or speak. A lesser 

 degree of incapacity to learn constitutes imbecility. A still 



1 The Morning Post, Oct. 29th, 1900. 

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