SCIENCE AND ALCOHOL.

Evening Post, Volume L, Issue 114, 9 November 1895, Page 2 (Supplement)

SCIENCE AND ALCOHOL.

At the British Temperance League Annual Conference Dr. F. R. Lees read the following paper : — The broad and lasting foundations of our movement, which is but the progress of ideas concerning toxic Temperance, hare been laid long ago, and the want of the age is a method of getting theee ideas concerning the physiologcal and psychical causes of the appetite and the passion for drink, into the heads of the people, and making them comprehend how the question affects their most varied and vital interests. How the laziness of the people in regard to thinking is to be overcome I know not, but until they do think, ■ooietv will but represent and reflect the muddle of Parliment itself. Yet what a stark, staring delusion it is, that tho manifold misohieis connected with drinking can ever be arrested, while peoplo do not know the eanses that produce them, and refuse to apply the only possible remedies, namely, personal abstinence and State prohibition. Drinking tea, or water, or milk, bears no analogy in its consequences to drinking alcoholics, and hence, not the act of drinking much or little, but the nature of the drink which is drunk, can alone enter into the causation, and results never cease while the causes remain. Every effect, or kind of effect, has, not a general term or word, but a concrete fact or thing which explains it, and thus the talk about " Moderation," of little or much, simply displays an incapacity to reason on the subject— as much bh if someone were to contend that twice four made seven, or that if you take three from five nothing is left. There is another misleading word that has crept into this discussion — the ascription of habit an the cause of the inebriate's appoMte. This i the same as if you ascribed the events of the world to "time," which is but tho field in which they take place, for habit is only <i constant doing 1 ox out, but not tho cause of the consequence s, which must be found in some concrete factor. Dr. Richardson, to whom we are ho much indebted for experiments and expositions cm this subject, has recently pointed out with emphasis tho most serious facts on this natter — namely, that alcohol is offeoting » change in tho organic constitution of tho race. Dr. Clous tou, in tho report I published in the True Thinker, has given an alarming illustration of the fact, showing the increase in the number of cases of senile madness — i.e., in other words, showing that the brain is going faster in each decade — because the strain terminates in madness much earlier. The beginning of the whole evil, considered as a chain of physical -causation, is in the action of alcohol upon nerve and brain cell. From the minutest excitation of the smallest dose, to the madness of delirium and the imbecility of senile insanity, there is no missing link. We can no more elude the eternal law in little than in large. The cumulative evils of society are the exact measures of its transgressions and penalties must correspondingly follow disobedience to the end of time. There has recently b«en published a second edition of a masterly work on Inebriety by Dr. Norman Keif, which has been translated into several languages. The work gives a systematic view of the whole question, and lifts it out of the region of conventional notions, whioh can never accomplish any permanent ohange. Drunkenness, and even the appetite for drink, is a physical disease as muoh as any fever, and moral means alone cannot, therefore, stamp it out. Borne years ago an eminent physician asserted that the last word on alcohol had not been uttered ; but it is satisfactory to know that no experiments haro as yot contradioted the first words, while all tho old defences for drinking have, one by one, gone down in the discussion. Russian and other physicians have recently made experiments, whioh maintain the old declaration

that alcohol does not assist the digestion of ..ur fu<.d, but actually ri-tiud* it. On the auittbt question of all, the pffeotH of ulcohol upou our children, by the law of heredity— a law which enables us eitherto bless or curse them Irom their birth—dißinjtuished members of the medical pro-ieu-uon are now speaking out distinctly.