TEMPERANCE COLUMN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20930, 21 January 1930, Page 2

TEMPERANCE COLUMN.

Published by arrangement with the United Temperance Reform Council. PARENTHOOD AND THE RACE. POST-NATAL INFLUENCES. Sixteen years ago I included alcohol as one of those substances I call racial poisons. Mqst 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 wont. He comes 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 damnable quality, they destroy posterity in and through parenthood in the present generation. I call them racial poisons . . .while alcohol can be shown to degenerate the cells of man's liver and kidney or the gray matter of his brain, it also injures the germ plasm of man and woman upon which the future of the race depends, oftener, much oftener. as a statistical fact, than any other tissue of the body . . . and I say this poisoning of the race, of the gem plasm, is the worst thing alcohol does against mankind! . If we glance rapidly over the ground we have covered, we see that we have recognised alcohol as a poison not only for the individual, but the race. The individual dies from hia injury, but the race lives on. That which he injures soils the clear spring of life which flows through us and beyond us and from whose momentuous floods all energy and beauty Spring anew, and without which there is no powerful nation and no high civilisation.

Wherever the race sinks, there little by little disappear the great mothers and the great men of science, of art, of statesmanship and of war. all of that stamp of men and women are stifled and tha state in which this generous race lives sinks slowly out of the councils of the nations. Hence it is the duty not only of the physician and hygienist, but also of the modern statesman, to keep a sharp lookout for all possible sources of degeneracy, and, therefore, for the injuries from alcohol. We have not now behind us- in reserve as in the days of old Rome, a vigorous, unexhausted, barbarian race. Thera is no race of unbroken higher power and habits beyond the limits of our civilisation'. We are the last and already hardpressed muster and, because of the necessities which our evolution lays upon us, we must overthrow the tenacious drinking customs of a still more tenacious opposition. This is the supreme problem of history. Why nations becoming great cannot re-, main so. A new morality grows out of new knowledge with new duties of restriction, of submission and of sacrifice, but also with a new commanding purpose. Women should not wait for men teachers and writers to emphasise this duty. That would take a long time. But they should use every opportunity to prepare the women’s movement to take up the matter of creating high ideals of manhood.

Wherever we look for authoritative information, the same story is told. We are loaded with the dead-weight of custom, appetite, and ignorance. We cannot make men and women radically different from what they are, even if we would. Human nature takes a lot of altering, and in a sense it is fortunate that this is the case; for if we could quickly improve ourselves we could just as quickly at other times undo the work that has been done. So though we sometimes chafe at the inertia of humanity in the mass, it is well to remember that that very inertia is a guarantee that there can be no sudden, complete reversion to a lower plane. It is our duty to add little by little to our knowledge. Emphasis upon one aspect of human activity alone will not accomplish everything; but when one single fact is made plain, and the way is made clear to take one definite practical step toward an improvement of conditions, then to take that step is to make a practical contribution to human welfare. Knowledge of the truth and a weakened and diseased mankind means failure. Given a healthy, happy motherhood, and a robust childhood, and all will tend to a development of our higher faculties. Not only is information of this kind desirable and necessary for the potential mother and the expectant mother, but it is in the highest degree necessary for the parent. We have derived a certain satisfaction from the fact that despite the great increase in the population of New Zealand, there has been no increase in the number of distributing centres of alcohol But as a matter of fact, the protection afforded by a restriction in the number of distributing, centres is more apparent than real. The protection afforded by distance baa been largely nullified by improvements in roads and transport, so that all places in New Zealand have been moved nearer in time to the centres of distribution of alcohol. It is an unfortunate thing to’ have to devote time, energy, and/ money to bring home elementary facts to the adult There is little prospect of advancement if we have to educate all adults anew concerning matters in which they Should be grounded in infancy. The process of education is slowed down if we do not teach the young those facts which remain true nt all times. We can reduce certain truths to formulae which hold good. To have the child well grounded' in the essentials of health and morality is to afford protection to the adult, and a great saving in time and effort later on. Mr S W. Springthorpe, a Victorian representative at the Royal Sanitary Institute Jubilee Congress, and also at the Fourth English-speaking Conference on Child Welfare, in a letter to The Times says: "But the _ main mistake, and the main cause of this comment, is our failure to teach health matters in any systematic way to the young. For almost every Other subject we sow seeds, in the subconscious mind and utilise the years in which the intellect is being trained and habits are being formed, yet we teach in our primary schools laws of syntax, but not laws of health. . . . Alcoholism will abound later on, yet we teach nothing of the true position of stimulo-seda-tives. vf which alcohol is the Anglo-Saxon type.”

This was not written of. the New Zealand educational system.' Here some effort is being made to teach these things. It is in the school that the best work can he_ done; and it is in the school that provision can be made for avoiding the spending of time, energy, and money in the education of the adult on matters in which he already should be well grounded. But we must carry information to those on whom so much depends—the mothers of the race. Sir Arthur Newsholme, one of the greatest of English doctors, prepared maps a few years ago in England and Wales to show the distribution of public houses and drinking, and then he prepared maps to show the distribution of the deaths of babies. Those two maps are identical in England and Wales. Whore most babies die is the place where most liquor is consumed. It is not meant that the facta dealt with in this paper are the only important facts requiring the serious attention of our people. It would be presumptuous to claim so. But we ourselves claim the heritage of health. We can claim this only if we recognise our responsibility to hand it on. No woman need lack the information, couched it the simplest and clearest language, which is essential to laying the foundations of a virile, happy race. In New Zealand we arc particularly fortunate. Statistics prove beyond all question that New Zealand is in the lead of civilized nations in the matter of low death rate for babies. We have in this country a system of child welfare and pre-natal welfare which, though it may be improved, is yet well advanced. But when the highest medical authorities throughout the world condemn the use of the race-destroying poison: when onr information is gleaned from the best scientific sources; when we know—as we do know that enlightenment concernin'' the properties of this narcotic, depressant drug will result in its disuse, and such disuse will give an opportunity to our people to survive in the struggle for existence—then we arc justified, we arc compelled, to keep on sounding the alarm.