TEMPERANCE COLUMN

Evening Star, Issue 21092, 3 May 1932, Page 13

TEMPERANCE COLUMN

[Published by Arrangement with the United Temperance Reform Council.] Alcohol docs not curse the drinker alone. It bequeaths to his posterity diseased bodies and weakened constitutions ; to his home it brings strife, poverty, and sorrow; it threatens the public safety of his community; and it robs his country of her nobility. BODY FUNCTIONS RETARDED. Dr Benedict, speaking as a physiologist, presenting a dispassionate laboratory analysis of the effects of moderate amounts of alcohol and basing his words upon years of study of alcohol and its effects on the human system, recently emphasised that “ light wines and beers are always injurious. A person who may not show the slightest sign of intoxication is being harmed in ways that involve his own well-being and that of others whose safety may depend upon his clear vision and steady hand. Vital bodily functions are retarded from 20 to 90 per cent, by amounts of alcohol contained in beverages which advocates of modification arc trying to bring back. The Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory, Dr Benedict said, has been experimenting for many years upon alcohol to determine its food value and also its effects upon neurological processes. Its harmful effects in every case outweigh the slight food value which it may possess when taken in small quantities. Manytests have proved that it does not aid bodily growth, and that it is in no way an essential to the human body. WHAT THE NEW YORK RABBI SAYS. “ It is an American problem, and the attitude of the Jews must bo the American attitude. Alcohol must go. It is a blessing only for the idle rich —for the extinction of their kind and as a means to make their perpetuation impossible. Rum is a race poison. It poisons generations; it poisons the child before it is born. _ Industrial efficiency, domestic happiness, national security, all are incompatible with that demon, alcohol. The Jew has been temperate, but he has been cold to temperance reform. The tender and precious memories which wine plays in the religions life in his homo and synagogue account for this passive attitude. But no fundamental rights of life and liberty are endangered by the temperance crusade, and the Jewish attitude must become one of active opposition to alcohol. Always a moral pioneer, the Jew must not in this case be a moral laggard. Not to discountenance the use of liquor is to sanction it.”—Rabbi Stephen S. Wise (New York). “ WASTE v. SAYING.” Sixpence per working day sunk in beer totals £7 10s at tho end of one year, £75 at the end of ten years, and £3OO at the end of forty years. Tho same sum deposited daily in tho savings bank will (with interest) total £7 12s Gd at the end of one year, £79 10s at the end of ten years, and £724 at the end of forty years. “ Nuf seel!”—‘ Common Sense.’ ALCOHOL ADDS TO PERIL FROM CARBON MONOXIDE. Dr E. E. Press, writing in tho science page of the New York ‘ World,’ says that motorists who have drunk alcohol have greatly increased the hazard of carbon nionoxide gas poisoning. He advises all such not to stay a moment in a small garage with the automobile engine running. This reveals a hitherto unsuspected and entirely new aspect of the dangers to tho human system of alcohol, it discloses the lact that what has come to bo called the city poison, carbon monoxide gas, in combination with a very slight amount of alcohol in tho human system, has resulted in many sudden and mysterious deaths, the clue to which science is only now discoverng. Dr Leonard Hill, head of the National Intitute for Medical Research, London, is the authority for the recent discovery that alcohol increases the deadliness of carbon monoxide. NOTES. Swiss soldiers on tho march can now he supplied with milk instead of beer. The change is very popular. Motorists are learning that “dry” roads are safe, but “wet” roads are very, dangerous.