i66 A STUDY IN HEREDITY 



taken an impossible, because Sisyphean, task. 

 They have failed because they have entered into 

 a contest with Nature. Metaphorically speaking, 

 they are striving to breed a long-tailed variety of 

 dogs by carefully preserving all the short-tailed 

 individuals and pulling vigorously at their tails. 

 They are trying to promote temperance by pre- 

 serving the pre- disposed to intemperance, and haling 

 them by moral and legal methods into sobriety. 

 They seek to live on capital ; to promote our happi- 

 ness, but to promote it at the expense of the happiness 

 of our descendants. Unconsciously reversing the 

 maxim attributed to the Jesuits, they have done 

 good that evil may follow. They may achieve 

 some small temporary successes, may benefit us 

 at the expense of posterity — but they cannot 

 possibly be permanently successful ; for the use of 

 alcohol cannot be banished from the world, and 

 the craving for it— or, to speak more precisely, 

 the predisposition to it — would, through reversion, 

 gather head in the race, till, like an obstructed 

 mountain stream, it burst all barriers, when the 

 last state of the race would be worse than the 

 first. 



It follows that every scheme for the promotion 

 of temperance which depends for success on the 

 abolition or diminution of the alcoholic supply, 

 Total Prohibition, Local Option, the Gothenburg 



