A PLEA TOR VICTIMS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 151, 30 June 1928, Page 21

A PLEA TOR VICTIMS

"Genius and Disaster. By Jeanette Marks. London: John. Hamilton, Ltd. Intemperance seems to be deep-seat-ed in the instincts of the human race. All savages discover and cherish some form of intoxication. "It is not possible to go so far back that there will not be evidence of this instinct at work. It crops out in race expression as well as iv the individual at work; it is part of all race experience. Love is an intoxication from which some never recover and some never wish to recover. Crowds, mobs, loud noises, music, sculpture, the theatre, politics, cold baths, all produce exhilaration, all break, down the inhibitions and give the illusion or reality of a larger life." Enlarging upon this thesis, Miss Marks writes neither as a moralist nor as a sentimentalist, emphasising the fact that the victims of drugs and alcohol are subjects, not for moral condemnation but for scientific investigation. "A society which casts stones at a Poe or a James Thomson is no higher, biologically speaking, than the doe which seeks to drown her fawn because it is blind. Narcomania and alcoholism should not seem any more amusing than cancer to an age which is trying to understand them scientifically, their reason for existence, their compensations, the sufferj ing which they cause, and the social and economic losses which they bring about."