He makes a very strong case for this belief, but strong as it is, I do not think it is going to stand the pressure of a rigorously critical examination. He points out that races which have been in possession of alcoholic drinks the longest are the least drunken, and this he ascribes to the “elimination” of all those whose “drink craving” is too strong for them. Nations unused to alcoholic drink are most terribly ravaged at its first coming to them, may even be destroyed by it, in precisely the same way that new diseases coming to peoples unused to them are far more malignant than among peoples who have suffered from them generation after generation. Such instances as the terrible ravages of measles in Polynesia and the ruin worked by fire-water among the Red Indians, he gives in great abundance. He infers from this that interference with the sale of drink to a people may in the long run do more harm than good, by preserving those who would otherwise be eliminated, permitting them to multiply and so, generation by generation, lowering the resisting power of the race. And he proposes to divert temperance legislation from the persecution of drink makers and sellers, to such remedies as the punishment of declared and indisputable drunkards if they incur parentage, and the extension of the grounds of divorce to include this ugly and disastrous habit.
I am not averse to Mr. Reid’s remedies because I think of the wife and the home, but I would not go so far with him as to consider this “drink craving” specific and simple, and I retain an open mind about the sale of drink. He has not convinced me that there is an inherited “drink craving” any more than there is an inherited tea craving or an inherited morphia craving.
In the first place I would propound a certain view of the general question of habits. My own private observations in psychology incline me to believe that people vary very much in their power of acquiring habits and in the strength and fixity of the habits they acquire. My most immediate subject of psychological study, for example, is a man of untrustworthy