202 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY 



it regularly, and babies are bathed in it, but drunkenness in 

 the English sense does not exist." l 



340. If we may trust somewhat scanty historical records, 

 every race which is now temperate was anciently drunken. 

 The Jews were a drunken people till, and long after they 

 settled in the Promised Land, in which every man dwelt 

 beside his own vineyard. Examples of drunkenness and 

 exhortations to sobriety are common in the older scriptures. 

 They occur less often in the New Testament, in which the 

 exhortations are addressed chiefly to the Gentiles. At the 

 present day, though a Jewish abstainer is seldom seen, yet a 

 Jewish drunkard is as rare as a native of India who takes 

 opium to excess. The sobriety of the Jews as compared to 

 that of Anglo-Saxons may be judged from the following 

 passage : 



341. " Among the Jews it (alcoholism) is an almost un- 

 known affection. Their sobriety is proverbial; and the 

 experience among Jewish medical practitioners is unani- 

 mously to the effect that occasion to observe the disease in 

 the person of a Jew is an excessive rarity. Statistics confirm 

 the general opinion of Jewish sobriety. Selecting two typical 

 hospitals as possessing the most trustworthy records, a com- 

 parative investigation may be made as to the prevalence of 

 alcoholism among their patients. The Boston City Hospital 

 has a general clientele in a town that does not contain 

 a disproportionately large number of Hebrews. In 1899 

 there were 7,104 cases treated there, and of these 226 a 

 little over 3 per cent. were admitted for alcoholism. The 

 Beth Israel Hospital of New York City has an entirely Jewish 

 dient&le, the proportion of non-Jews treated there being a 

 negligible quantity not one-fourth of one per cent. Its 

 records show four cases of alcoholism, or diseases directly 

 attributable to it, in 3,000 cases that applied for admission 

 during the last few years that is, a little over one-tenth of 

 one per cent. Hence the records show that alcoholism is, 

 at least, thirty times as prevalent among the general com- 

 munity, including the Jews, as in that race itself." 2 



342. Classical literature supplies abundant evidence of 

 the ancient insobriety of the Greeks and Romans as well as 

 of the ancestors of the modern Germans and French. The 

 Spartans made drunken helots serve as " awful examples " 

 to their youth. Lycurgus cut off the legs of drunkards and 

 destroyed the vines. Pittacus inflicted double punishment 



1 Dr. H. Laing-Gordon, British Journal of Inebriety, Jan. 1904. 

 a Jewish Encyclopaedia. 



