bottle of brandy stood on one hand, and the pit of hell yawned on the other, and I were convinced I should be pushed in as surely as I took one glass, I could not refrain.' Such statements abound in dipsomaniacs' mouths." Between this extreme, and the other of the man who is sickened by a single glass of beer, there are all intermediates.
Now, given an abundant and accessible supply of alcohol to a race, what happens? Those who are not tempted or have adequate control, do not drink to excess; those who are so constituted as to crave the effects of alcohol (once they have experienced them), and who lack the ability to deny themselves the immediate pleasure for the sake of a future gain, seek to renew these pleasures of intoxication at every opportunity; and the well attested result is that they are likely to drink themselves to a premature death.
Although it is a fact that the birth-rate in drunkard's families may be and often is larger than that of the general population,8 it is none the less a fact that many of the worst drunkards leave no or few offspring. They die of their own excesses at an early age; or their conduct makes them unattractive as mates; or they give so little care to their children that the latter die from neglect, exposure or accident. As these drunkards would tend to hand down their own inborn peculiarity, or weakness for alcohol, to their children, it must be obvious that their death results in a smaller proportion of such persons in the next generation. In other words, natural selection is at work again here, with alcohol as its agent. By killing off the worst drunkards in each generation, nature provides that the following generation shall contain fewer people who lack the power to resist the attraction of the effect of alcohol, or who have a tendency to use