nothing definite enough for our purpose, there can be picked out and
defined certain criminal (or at any rate disastrous) tendencies that
are simple, specific and transmissible. Those who have read Mr.
Archdall Reid's _Alcoholism_, for example, will know that he deals
constantly with what is called the "drink craving" as if it were such a
specific simple inheritance. 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