DR. T. ALEXANDER MACNICHOLL, former surgeon of the New York Red Cross hospital, who was sent abroad by President Roosevelt to investigate the subject of alcoholism and narcotics, declares that within a period of fifty years the population of the United States increased 330 per cent, while the number of insane and feeble-minded increased 950 per cent, according to the recent census; and practically all of this, he tells us, is due to the chronic and excessive use of alcohol in one form or another, and narcotics. He says: “A degeneracy so appalling in magnitude that it staggers the mind and threatens to destroy this republic, numbering more victims than have been slain in all the wars and in all the epidemics of acute diseases that have swept the country within two hundred years. During the past five years the birth-rate in the United States has fallen off 33 1-3 per cent. This means the loss of a million babies a year. Let this degeneracy continue at the same rate for a hundred years and there will not be a native-born child five years old in the United States.” He declares that a hundred different intermediate agencies may contribute to the undoing of the race, but back of them all stands alcohol as the chief degenerative factor; and then he cites the following: “Statistics compiled by the leading insurance companies and presented by Sir T. P. Whitaker in a report to the British Parliament, show that out of every one thousand deaths among the population at large, four hundred are due to alcohol. This would mean a mortality from alcohol in the United States of 680,000 a year.” He also tells us that “the great burden of drink is not borne by the drinker but by the drinker's children. The germ-cells to be involved into another being should be the most highly organized of every organ in the body. A defective germ-cell can not evolve a normal body. This is the reason that we find a large percentage of functional and organic diseases among the children of drinking parents. Sixty-two per centum are the children of drinking parents in New York City, and ninety-one per centum of these suffer from some functional or organic disease. And he declares that if this percentage holds good throughout the country, there are thirteen million children of school age afflicted with functional and organic diseases, and less than two and a half millions of these are free from hereditary alcohol taint. A nation half diseased and half well can not live. But here we show three fifths of the rising generation mentally and physically diseased.” Surely that is an awful condition, and out of the alcoholic conditions there breed all sorts of vices which are sapping the life and vitality of the people of the world. Alcohol is a curse, and only a curse. It would seem as if every rational government would prohibit its sale and manufacture forever.