MEMOIR ON PARENTAL ALCOHOLISM o^^ 



of this country has not troubled itself about the temperance 

 movement ; it has become sober — not on account of any- 

 teaching — but owing first to a change of customs, secondly 

 and chiefly to a change of occupations which has involved 

 a corresponding change of tastes. Nine men out of ten of 

 the middle classes in this country, if asked why they had 

 given up the considerable consumption of alcohol of their 

 fathers, to say nothing of the excessive use of alcohol of 

 their grandfathers, would reply, and in most cases quite 

 truly, that they found no pleasure in the habit. The 

 change of taste — probably associated with a difference of 

 foods and occupations — has been far more influential in 

 producing sobriety in the middle and professional classes 

 than any active propagandism. The result has been that 

 the temperance movement has grown up largely outside 

 the influence of the educated, critical, and scientific factors 

 in our national life ; its propagandism is in great part based 

 on statements which, whether true or false, have never been 

 properly tested from the standpoint of science. The 

 educated, thinking man wants to know the truth about 

 vaccination, inoculation, vivisection, and alcohol ; he is ready 

 to act on knowledge, but he is met at every turn by 

 rhetoric, invective, and fanaticism, till he thoroughly dis- 

 trusts ' anti's ' of all types. This is a national disaster, for 

 there may be some truth behind any of these causes, and, 

 if there be not, there is possibility of much harm. 



I am not one of those who think there is no alcohol 

 problem in this country. Had I thought so, I should not 

 have devoted any of the limited energies and the slender 

 funds of the laboratory under my control to the investigation 

 of this subject.^ 



^ I think also that it had the general approval of the founder of that 

 laboratory. Sir Francis Gallon told me some months before his death that 



