THE PRESENT EVOLUTION OF MAN — MENTxVL 333 



must have arisen by some process of evolution, and I 

 submit that it can have arisen only through the opera- 

 tion of Alcoholic Selection ; through the continued 

 survival, in the presence of alcohol, of those that craved 

 least for it, and the elimination of those that craved 

 most for it. The Greeks and Italians are notoriously 

 more passionate and less self-restrained than the English, 

 i. c. the mental traits they inherit or acquire from their 

 progenitors tend less than with us to create a power of 

 self-restraint ; but they are notoriously more abstemious 

 as regards alcohol than the English. Whence this dif- 

 ference, this superiority of self-control in one respect, 

 which belies their characters in all other respects, if not 

 from the survival of the fittest ? If ancient literature 

 can be trusted, the classic races were formerly much 

 more drunken than at the present day. In Sparta, for 

 instance, the question of temperance was a burning one, 

 and unhappy Helots were made to furnish " fearful 

 examples " to the aristocratic youth. In England at 

 the present time, of all the community, the upper 

 classes, though possessing the best opportunities for 

 indulgence, are, on the whole, the least addicted to 

 drunkenness ; that is, those individuals who, generally 

 speaking, have descended from ancestors to whom 

 wealth afforded opportunities for excessive indulgence 

 (i. c. for poisoning themselves), are on the whole more 

 temperate than those who have descended from an 

 ancestry to which poverty denied similar opportunities ; 

 and this notwithstanding the fact that to the poor man 

 excessive indulgence means ruin for himself and his 

 family, since food and shelter compete with alcohol for 

 his resources ; whereas the rich man often need suffer 

 nothing more than ill-health as a consequence of over- 

 indulgence. 



It is said that racial differences in the craving for 

 alcohol, or at any rate in the indulgence of it, are due 



