HEREDITARY EFFECTS OF DRUNKENNESS.
The drinker himself is not the only sufferer from his vice. Indeed, it seems in many cases that he is not the greatest sufferer. He may even live out his threescore years and ten, in apparent defiance of the laws of nature and the warnings of friends; but look at his children. Are they as strong and robust as he?—O, no; instead, we often see them frail, nervous, imbecile, idiotic, poor specimens of the race. The iniquities of the father are visited upon the children. Dr. Edmunds says: “There are thousands who have had diseased physical organisms bequeathed to them, and they are suffering from an irritable brain and an eccentric habit of thought, because their father drank spirits.” Intemperance, more than any other cause, fills our lunatic and idiot asylums. According to the statistics of insanity in France, thirty-four per cent. of the cases of lunacy among males were due to intemperance. One-half of the inmates of the Dublin7insane asylum owe their disease to the use of liquor. Lord Shaftesbury, chairman of the English Commission on Lunacy, in his report to Parliament stated that six out of every ten lunatics in the asylums were made such by alcohol. Dr. S. G. Howe found that the parents of one hundred and forty-five out of three hundred idiots were habitual drunkards. Nothing so tends to perpetuate the evil results of intemperance as the saloon, with its every-day and every-night allurements. The saloon, with all its disastrous fruits, can not exist without the sanction of the people. If the people who see its dreadful work, will set their faces against it, it will have to go. But no system of license ever will eradicate the saloon. To license it, even for a day, is to encourage it. The higher the license, the more the dealer imagines he is a public benefactor, and the more the people are inclined to look upon it in that light.