TEMPERANCE COLUMN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20800, 20 August 1929, Page 3

TEMPERANCE COLUMN.

Published by arrangement with <ho United Temperance Iteform Council. ‘‘Alcohol acts ns a definite protoplasm poison upon all forms of cell life.”—Sir it. Richardson, M.D. “GUARD YOUR RACE.” An Abridgment of an Address on “ Eugenics by C. W. Salccby. M.D., F.R.S.E. The English poet Byron said that “History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page, - ' Upon that page is written the rise and fall of one great nation after another. The supreme problem of history is: Why nations becoming great cannot remain so. I believe, after many years of study devoted to this subject, that some contributions to it can be made which arc not to be found in the accepted works of the historian. As a boy 1 was fascinated by Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." If you have ever read through Gibbon you will learn that lie gives no definite information as to how this extraordinary tragedy happened. I believe that alcohol lias been, and is, a leading factor in the decadence of past nations, and in decadence as it is to be witnessed amongst certain nations at this hour. “Let him that tliinketh he standeth take heed lest ho fall." This applies to tho greatest and most glorious and powerful nations on earth at this moment, as well as to any in the past. ALCOHOL A RACIAL POISON. Many years ago I included alcohol as one of those substances I called racial poison. Most injurious things do not poison the race. They hurt the individual, and the injury ends there. .Thus:— A soldier is mutilated. He was a glorious boy when he went. He eomes back; but he has left a limb behind him in Flanders. _He marries. His children have all their limbs. The race is untouched: Thus Nature is doing her best ever to preserve the life of future generations; but certain agencies have this quality, they destroy posterity in and through parenthood in the present generation. I call them racial poisons. The movement against alcohol is more than a question of reducing the amount of drunkenness on the streets, relieving the_ work of the magistrates or of the police courts. It is more than a question of cutting down the nuipber of automobile accidents or increasing the efficiency of industrial production. It is a question of preserving the life of nations from generation to generation. It is a question of the possibility there may be of breaking the hitherto invariable law of history and so learning and so practising the laws of life that nations may learn how to endure as loilg as the sun shines. I must offer you some evidence. "WHAT HISTORY TEACHES US. Now, if we go back into history we can learn something. In the British Museum a record was found from the second century of our era, the date when, according to Gibbon, Rome began to decline. In this document the fact is deplored that Roman mothers who had onoe been of tho kind that honoured motherhood and honoured childhood had lost that noble tradition; would not be bothered to suckle their infants any more; and gave over that sacred task to fostermothers, slaves, who were intemperate and often unchaste. To a eugeuist “ intemperate " means alcohol circulating in tho maternal blood, or in the foster-maternal blood in this case, and “ unchaste ” means syphilis and gonorrhoea, the two venereal diseases, which were evidently, according to this statement, introduced into tlje blood of the Roman stock at the hour when Gibbon says Rome began to decline. Further back, I found tho great law-giver of the Spartans, Lycurpus, in the interest of his nation, prohibiting, as every law and every law-giver is bound to prohibit, that which injures life and liberty, present and to come. Lyenrgtis decreed that no wine should be used at Spartan weddings, for he wanted the quality of the breed to bo maintained. AN INCIDENT IN BIBLICAL HISTORY. Then I found in the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Judges instructions on this subject. The Lord’s people were captive. They had sinned. He decided to release them, by an agent raised up from themselves. _ He had to make a fine soldier. We tried to make fine soldiers in England in 1014, We sent our finest boys out, and they were shot down by. machine-guns, and we wanted more men very quickly. We tried to make them overnight. We picked the boys who had never seen sunlight properly, who had never had any fresh' food; who had come out of the social system that is indicated by the slum and the liquor bar: who had come out of alcoholic homes; whose fathers had been drinkers; whose mothers had taken stout and porter to help them with their maternity, as some of our most ignorant doctors have advisee], disgracing their profession. —and we tried to turn these poor, pitiful fellows into A 1 soldiers. It was as if you should take an organ or a piano, a delicate instrument, and leave it out in the winter for 20 years, and then try to tune it, and expect our wonderful pianist to get good results out of it. It can’t be done, and it can’t be done with human instruments. But the Lord sent his angel, we are told, to the future mother of the soldier he needed and said to her: “ Beware. I pray thee, and drink no wine, nor strong drink, for 10, thou shalt conceive and bear a son, and he shall bs a Nazarcue unto God from the womb, and he shall begin to deliver bis people from the hands of their enemies.” There is authority for yon. That is the earliest record in human thinking, and in human experience that alcohol is what 1 call a racial poison. MODERN EVIDENCE. I give you a little modem evidence. Professor Stockard has shown that when guinea-pigs inhale a slightly alcoholised atmosphere for one hour per day the race is degenerated. These guinea-pigs are not intoxicated in the sense that a policeman understands the term, or a magistrate oi the conventional typo of legislator, but they are poisoned (which is what the word intoxicated means) because they have inhaled a poison that goes into their blood to all their tissues-, and injures the gone plasm which is the future of the race. This poisoning of the race, of the germ plasm, is the worst thing alcohol does against mankind. I say that everyone who enjoys life, who finds it pleasant to look upon the sun and breathe the air of heaven, and believes it is good to bo alive, that all of us ought to be thankful to our fathers and our mothers and our grandfathers and our grandmothers that they kept the racial poisons out of their blood before we came into being. Another kind of evidence: —Dr Bcrtho!et, of Lausanne, has spent 10 years making post-mortem examinations, and Inis learned what medical students have yet to be taught, that while alcohol can be shown to degenerate the cells of man’s liver or kidney or the grey matter of his brain, it also injures the germ plasm of man and woman upon which the future of the race depends, oftoner, much oftener, as ;t statistical fact, than any other tissiie_ in the body. The race is mom sensitive than the individual. The race is more hurt than the individual. A third student. Dr Mjoen, a man who with his colleagues is responsible for the most that has been done in Norway, has traced family histories (hat show how a man ami woman, well descended in the best, sense, from ancestors who lived long and flourished and were splendid people, may marry and have children, and the children are splendid, and then one wretched day the father starts drinking, and the next child doesn’t flourish in tho same way. He dies of tuberculosis, or some other disease, when lie is young; tho nest dies ns a baby, and the nest dies as a very young baby; and the next is born dead; and there are no more. And that noble race, with the racial poison introduced into it, has been reduced, first of all, to disease, and finally to extinction. Sucb t is some of the modern evidence on this subject.