^6 A REPLY TO CRITICISMS OF THE 



made what was going to be the outcome. We had failed to 

 find a marked influence of other environmental factors on 

 the health and mental powers of the child, but we confidently 

 expected to find it in the alcoholism of the parent. Why ? 

 Because we had been so repeatedly told it existed by 

 authorities we credited with a scientific training and a 

 scientific instinct. We did not find it, but we found instead 

 a perfectly appalling mass of fanaticism. We have aroused 

 this fanaticism in a remarkable manner to every degree of 

 invective, misstatement and extravagance of rhetoric. We 

 discovered that not only a large part of the lay press, but of 

 the medical press is not open to anything but a one-sided 

 discussion on these matters — it is already in the hands of 

 so-called temperance reformers. Then we studied those 

 authorities whom we had assumed had given energy and time 

 to a scientific investigation of alcohol, and we found that the 

 whole ' scientific ' basis of the movement was worthless. The 

 men who were demonstrating the evil to the offspring of 

 alcohol-using parents were doing so in nine cases out of ten 

 by statistics, which they had no more notion how to handle 

 properly than boys in an elementary school. Whether we 

 were right or whether we were wrong was relatively of little 

 importance, compared with the national danger of a move- 

 ment which has become immensely influential in press and 

 on platform by claiming a scientific basis which it does not 

 possess. The movement is by no means unlike the English 

 Puritan movement of the seventeenth century. The country 

 was then politically and religiously unsound and the Puritan 

 fanatic saw only one way to mend it. Extreme fanaticism 

 led, as it always does, to reaction, and we had all the evils 

 of the last two Stuarts. Only after years of extremes of 

 both types did moderation in politics and religion get a 

 chance. The bulk of the educated and thinking population 



