PRACTICAL PROBLEMS 345 



534. The human infant comes into the world gifted with 

 a great capacity to make mental acquirements with a great 



rigorously critical examination. ... He has not convinced me that there 

 is an inherited drink craving, any more than there is an inherited tea 

 craving or an inherited morphia craving " (pp. 55-6). Mr. Wells is 

 mistaken. The drink craving, as I stated very plainly, is an acquire- 

 ment, and as such is never inherited. But the inborn tendency to 

 acquire it is certainly inborn and inherited, for otherwise successive 

 generations would not be drunken. This predisposition, this suscepti- 

 bility to the charm of alcohol, is greater in some races, families, and 

 individuals than in others. " I believe that many causes and tempera- 

 ments go to the making of drunkards " (p. 58). This may be true, 

 but it is not material. Whatever the causes and temperaments which 

 make men delight in drink, the drunkard is always one so constituted 

 that he does delight in it. Wherever alcohol is plentiful, that one type 

 tends to be eliminated, no matter what the sub-types may be. A species 

 is not the less a species because it contains a number of varieties. Mr. 

 Wells might as well meet a statement that elimination by camivora 

 evolved wariness in antelopes with an objection that wariness is a 

 complex thing depending on a number of special senses and other 

 physical and mental factors. "There can be no denying that those 

 nations which have had fermented drinks the longest are the soberest ; 

 but that, after all, may be only one aspect of much more extensive opera- 

 tions. The nations that have had fermented drinks the longest are those 

 which have been civilized the longest " (p. 59). Mr. Wells forgets the West 

 African savages. " The great prevalence of drunkenness among the 

 upper classes two centuries ago can hardly have been bred out in the 

 intervening six or seven generations, and it is also a difficult fact for 

 Mr. Reid that drunkenness has increased in France" (p. 60). I had 

 already dealt with this point elaborately (Alcoholism, pp. 108-9). 

 The course of a river is not to be judged by eddies in a backwater. 

 " Even if we admit Mr. Reid's conception, this by no means solves the 

 problem. It is quite conceivable that the world could purchase certain 

 sorts of immunity too dearly. If it was a common thing to adorn the 

 parapets of houses in towns with piles of bricks, it is certain that a large 

 number of persons not immune to fractures of the skull by falling bricks 

 would be eliminated. A time would, no doubt, come when those with a 

 specific liability to skull fracture would be eliminated, and the human 

 cranium would develop a practical immunity to danger from all sorts of 

 falling substances . . . But there would have been far more extensive 

 suppressions than would have appeared in the letter of agreement" 

 (pp. 60-1). This point also had been dealt with elaborately (Alcohol- 

 ism, pp. 124-6). There has been alcoholic elimination ; but in what 

 particular do Terra del Fuegians or Australian blacks surpass mentally 

 Europeans who have been weeded out by alcohol for thousands of years ? 

 What warrant is there for supposing that artificial selection conducted 

 on the lines of Natural Selection would bring about results that were 

 different 1 



Mr. Wells, Mr. Bernard Shaw, and some other writers insist that our 

 knowledge of heredity is too vague and limited to permit of its practical 

 application to human beings. If this be so, the future will not mend it. 

 Since variations are spontaneous, since the same parents may produce 

 very dissimilar offspring, we shall never be able to state precisely what 

 the result of mating given individuals will be. We can only say in 



