MORE TRUTHS

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIV, 4 August 1928, Page 4

MORE TRUTHS

ABOUT JOHN BARLEYCORN. ALCOHOL AND EFFICIENCY. The taking of alcohol as a beverage reduces the fitness of the individual, and increases the number of those who are a charge upon the fit. The man who uses only his muscles is a machine under direction; while the man using his brain directs the machine—whether it is made of muscle or steel. Machinery is replacing muscle. There is a decreasing demand for the man who has neither brain-power nor physical skill to offer. The unfit become an overhead charge against machinery and fit men. Alcohol is a brain poison. It not only reduces the power of the individual but it gradually robs him of his ambition to be anything better. In this way he drifts from the ranks of casual employment to that of chronic unemployment. “Drinking is associated with low ideals of social duty and responsibility. It numbs the intellectual faculties. It makes its victims content with miserable conditions and surroundings and destroys the desire for culture and refinement.” —Rt. Hon. Philip Snowden, M.P.

The drinking of alcohol leads to unfitness, even though the drinker is not what is regarded as a drunkard. It first cheeks progress; then it thrusts down, until the victim becomes of little value in the labour market. Not only does he tend to become a charge against the national wealth, but often he causes those whom he should be supporting to be a burden on the community. The need and effort of to-day is to prevent individuals from swelling the ranks of the unfit; and in some measure to transfer men from the ranks of the unfit to the ranks of the efficient producers of wealth. The “Efficiency Magazine” proprietors refused whisky advertisements on the ground that: “In these days we need all the brains we have and there are not ten men in Britain who are so clever that they can afford to addle their brains with whisky.” Conclusion. If brains are a necessary asset of the future, can we afford to use a brain poison as a beverage? Alcohol and Health. The custom of using alcohol as a beverage reduces the standard of health in a community. The best defence against disease is a healthy body. When disease attacks the human body, the best chance it has of recovery is not the drugs on the chemists’ shelves, nor even the skill of the doctor, but its own natural powers unimpaired that it may cure itself. The skill of the doctor is in his knowledge of those natural fighting powers, and in his advice as to how they can be helped and not hindered in their work. What Science Says. “The way in which our bodies fight disease is partly by means of the white blood corpuscles, which actually devour the germs, and partly by the increase in the blood of chemical substances, which are antidotes

to the poisons given out by the germs The reason why a disease like pneumonia comes to an end is that in undeteriorated tissue’ the blood corpuscles, aided by the substances in the plasma, get the better of the germ of pneumonia and the poisons which it produces. “It is now proved that alcohol, even in extremely small doses, paralyses more or less the white cells which thus cease from exercising their microbe-destroying function. Speaking in popular language, alcohol renders the white blood-cells less alert, so that they remain passive and motionless in the presence of dangerous microbes, which it is their duty to promptly destroy.”—Horsley and Sturge, Chapter 9. Conclusion. It does not show a very high standard of intelligence that we still drink to each other’s health in that which science declares to be the friend of disease....