Alcoholic Liquors and Social Degeneration
Dr. N. Davis, called the Father of the American Medical Society, read a paper at the recent International Congress of Physicians at Chicago on alcoholic liquors, in which he said: “Facts are sufficient to show that if those who use any kind of alcoholic liquor were compelled to intermarry only among themselves, their part of the population would become extinct in one or two centuries. Their free intermarriage with total abstainers is all that has prevented their extinction long ere this, and yet it is this that has enabled them to diffuse and propagate their moral and physical degeneration through all ranks of society and fill more almshouses, asylums, reformatories, and prisons than there are churches and school-houses, and to fill important space in almost every daily paper with accounts of vicious revelry, burglaries, highway robberies, murders, rapes, suicides, occurring in even the very centers of population and wealth. The earth brings forth to supply every need; but as long as food material is converted into alcoholic drinks, and billions are paid out in their consumption, so long will poverty, imbecility, insanity, and crime increase.”