The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-12-24
VANISHING DRUNKARD
NATURES PART IN THE TEMPER
 ANCE MOVEMENT
Natural Law at Work slowly Needing the Intemperate Out of
 the Race.
c. Archdall Reid. M.B., F.R.S.E., in
 Lonuon Chronicle.


 Lonuon Chronicle.
 At the present day we are nearly all agreed that alcohol Is seldom beneficial in health or disease, and never beneficial when taken to excess. We are agreed that it is the principal source of dis ease. poverty and crime. But we are not all agreed as to the right method of meeting the evil. Most temperance reformers desire by legal means to abolish the use of alcohol as bever- age. Neither temperance Legislation nor a knowledge of the evils of alcohol is a new thing. Where torture, mutt lation, imprisonment and the dread or temporary or eternal perdition have failed, mild modern laws and the teach ing of pathological facts to little children can hardly succeed.
 Nature, in a form hardly suspected, is against the temperance reformer. Men differ naturally in their powers of resisting this or than disease, as they do in all other resp ects--in height. in strength, in vigor. and so forth. Thus in a country where measles is preva- lent, the weak in relation to 1t are weeded out, and the race Is left to the strong. It should be noted. however that strength against any given disease does not necessarily imply general bod fly vigor, nor does it even imply su- perior powers of resisting any other disease. For instance, puny man may be more resistant to measles than bigger and more muscular one, and a man who is quite immune to scarlet fever may fall an easy victim to con- sumption. Each disease, therefore, weeds out the weak, the unfit, In rela- tioR to itself. It acts as a kind Of breeder, who permits, as a general rule, only a certain type of individual to have offspring. or at least to have a full quota of offspring. It is what bi- ologists term "selScting" agency.
 Exactly the same Is true of alcohol It is popularly believed that men are sober or incorporate accordingly as they resist, or do not resist, tempta- tion. Doubtless there is a modicum Of truth in this hypothesis, but that 1t expresses the whole truth. or anything like the whole truth, is certainly not the fact. If 1t were true. we should have to suppose that all moderate drinkers. the men and women we meet at dinner. for example, go through life tormented by, but strenuously resisting, that craving for deep indulgence which is the bane of the drunkard To any one, indeed, who has eyes for the world around him, it is obvious that men diff fer as greatly in their Susceptibility to the charm of alcohol" as they diner in their susceptibility to disease. A given experience of alcohol awakens in some men an ardent desire for deep indulgence; in others 1t awakens only a weak desire for moderate indulgence; in others it awakens no desire at all, In this particular drinkers resemble smokers of tobacco. Alcohol is the cause of an enormous mortality which falls on a particular type of people those most tempted by it. It also, therefore, is a selecting agency.
 It is popularly believed that paren- tai disease or intemperance tends to oa a the race, degenerate We are able to put the question to a decisive test. If the popular belief be true, it is clear that a race of men much afflicted dur ing many generations by disease and intemperance will grow increasingly degenerate until at last 1t becomes ex- tinct. On the ether hand if the belief be erroneous, ih offspring are not, as rule, affected by parental ilI-conditions, an opposite effect will be produced; the weeding out of the unfit will render the race. not degenerate.e but increas- ingly resistant. Both effects cannot, or course, be produced together; for a race cannot undergo improvement and degeneration at one and the same time.
 We can easily test these opposing doctrines by noting what has happened to various races of men. Negroes on the west coast of Africa, for example, have been exposed for hundred, perhaps LnouSduOS, or BSnSTdIiOuSs tO bSNSlo malaria. This disease is caused by microbe which invades the body in great numbers and floods 1t with a vir- ulent poison. in which, therefore, the germ-cells are literally soaked.
 Practically speaking, every negro suffers for prolonged period from the malady and many perish of it. If ever the environment of the germ-cell causes variations in offspring, 1t should do so in this instance. But, as a fact, neither the negroes nor any other races exposed to malaria has grown degener- ate. The negroes are a tall and robust race. On the contrary, every race ex- posed to the disease Is resistant to It precisely in proportion to the duration and severity of its past sufferings; and this apparently Is the sole effect that malaria has had on any race. The same Is true of every other disease and every other adverse condition to which any race Is subjected.
 Thus Englishmen who have suffered much from consumption are more re- sistant to 1t than negroes who have suffered less and much more resistant than Polynesians who have had no pre- vious experience of the disease, and are exterminated when it is introduced to their islands Extreme cold has not rendered degenerate the Esquimaux nor extreme heat the Arabs; they have merely been rendered, by the survival of the fit. resistant to cold or heat re- spectively.
 Many races have been affficted by all eohol for thousands of years. Every race IS temperate precisely in propor-