PROHIBITION.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 93, 2 December 1911, Page 2

PROHIBITION.

A RACIAL FALLACY.

(By W. H. Symcs, M.D.)

Any honest endeavour to guide aright the popular vote on the momentous question to bo decided next Thursday commands respect and demands thoughtful examination. Tjje pamphlet before us forms no exception to the rule, containing as it does ample evidence that the author has given of his best, and that best the product of a by-no-mcans ill-grip-ped intelligence and a judgment unclouded by prejudice. Having granted this much, one’ has, however, to confess to laying down the pamphlet after the third reading with the sense of being like the yeoman at the banquet after, his third bottle of claret—no forrarder. The author, although a voter for No-licenso in the past, takes up the somewhat curious position of objecting to extending to the whole Dominion what he must have considered good for a part. It will be seen that, the ground ,of his objection would apply, if valid at all, to local No-license in almost if not quite as great a degree as to Dominion Prohibition. Taking it for granted that Prohibition would prohibit, his argument runs in this way: Alcoholism is a racial disease, and hereditary also. In the race it is incurable except by the age-long process of the elimination by the destructive agency of the disease itself of those individuals who, by reason of defective will-power and lack of self-control, become its victims. To illustrate his ‘ theory he states that “every known race has, in its early history, been addicted tq excessive drinking,” that some races, the Chinese, Creeks, Jews, Italians, etc., have, in the course of ages and by the natural process of the survival of the lit, become immune to the disease, and the individaul remains sober although surrounded by cheap and abundant means of inebriety. Ho exercises no conscious self-control because ho inherits self-control won by painful and slow degrees by generation after generation of his tempted and resistant ancestors. Temptation to excess for him does not exist, moderation has become automatic. Unfortunately the British race is not in this happy stage. We are still strugling against our primeval instinct to get drunk; we have to exercise individual self-denial in our dealings with alcohol, or we are undone. There is hope for the race ,however, * if the outlook for multitudes 'of' individuals is dark. In due course, say in thirty generations or so, w«; shall become even as the Italian organgrinder, to bo trusted with untold alcoholic riches. But only, mark you, if we continue to allow alcohol to do its beneficentwork of exercising the will power and self-control of the lit, and killing off the unlit. Shut out alcohol and the end is certain. A brief period of illusory happiness due to the removal of ■ the superficial evils that are admittedly connected with the use of strong drink, a gradual atrophy, due to disease, of the qualities of selfdenial and self-control. Then by sopie mischance a sudden lowering of the barrier that shuts out temptation and, like the gadarene swine, the whole race will rush violently down a steep place into a sea of hopeless drunkenness. Horrible! yet it is to be feared that the ordinary unpliilosophic father and mother, with,their absurdly short views of things, will be less impressed with .this moral qatachysm of the far future, than with the risk that their boys and girls will run of being among the culls that Stockman Alcohol will send to the boiling-down works in the course of his efforts to improvb the breed. Besides, suppose this ingenious theory,J)r. Symes’s is not "after all quite what Providence has in view ? Possibly the Chinaman with all his acquired immunity from disease, alcoholic and otherwise, is not the ultimate-'expression of the Fit. Admirably adapted' to his surroundings in the warrens of Canton or the cellars of San Francisco Chinatown, he docs not strike one as being quite the ideal citizen of the model city of the future. If to become proof against certain diseases is to bo the goal of Professors of Eugenics, why not an essay on “Sanitation, a Racial Fallacy” ? The Chinaman, from long-exposure to contagion and probably a considerable deal of culling, appears to have acquired the faculty of thriving under conditions as to food and filth that would kill US off like flies in a frost. Are we not on the wrong tack with our sewers and pure water? Then again, was there not an ingenious Frenchman who wrote a treatise on the cocotte as the saviour of society, in that she, in compassing the destruction of the idle and profligate members of the jeuncsse doree, performed the same good office as alcohol is to perform with our supeifluous weaklings? On the whole, the people of New Zealand may prefer to try a shorter method rather than the slow and perhaps not too sure one of Natural Selection. When the Americans started to cut the Panama Canal they decided not to wait until Natural Selection provided them with a body of workmen immune to mala riel fever (De Lesseps had tided that plan), but proceeded by way of Prohibition of the mqsquito. It is only fair to Dr. Symes to say that he proposes to assist the evolutionary process by discouraging the marriage of persons with hereditary alcoholic tendencies by the absolute segregation of habitual inebriates. The second part of the pamphlet is devoted to a consideration of the admitted necessity of a drastic reform of the bar-trade. The root of the evil is stated to be the high rents and expenses, which compel licensees to supply inferior liquor and to use every means to encourage drinking. The remedy in the doctor’s opinion is that licensees should have no interest in the profits of the bar— State control in short. Well, we have Bellamy’s as an object lesson and we know what many members’ opinion of that Parliamentary institution is. Then we have an admirable suggestion as to the class of liquor to be sold at the reformed' bar. No spirits, but beer, and not the heady article we know as byer, but a pure creature of malt and hops brewed, for preference, on tiie German plan, and containing , from If to 2 per cent of alcohol. A drink, the doctor says, on which it is practically impossible to get intoxicated. Bravo, doctor! But what becomes of the trailing in self-control under such conditions? Might as well banish alcohol altogether as attenuate him to that extent.*