vices offering his lapse may take another line. An aggressive, proud
and greatly mortified man may fall upon the same courses. An unwary
youth of the plastic type may be taken unawares and pass from free
indulgence to excess before he perceives that a habit is taking hold of
him.

I believe that many causes and many temperaments go to the making of
drunkards. I have read a story by the late Sir Walter Besant, in which
he presents the specific craving as if it were a specific magic curse.
The story was supposed to be morally edifying, but I can imagine this
ugly superstition of the "hereditary craving"--it is really nothing
more--acting with absolutely paralyzing effect upon some credulous
youngster struggling in the grip of a developing habit. "It's no good
trying,"--that quite infernal phrase!

It may be urged that this attempt to whittle down the "inherited
craving" to a habit does not meet Mr. Reid's argument from the gradual
increase of resisting power in races subjected to alcoholic temptation,
an increase due to the elimination of all the more susceptible
individuals. There can be no denying that those nations that have had
fermented drinks longest are the soberest, but that, after all, may be
only one aspect of much more extensive operations. The nations that
have had fermented drinks the longest are also those that have been
civilized the longest. The passage of a people from a condition of
agricultural dispersal to a more organized civilization means a very
extreme change in the conditions of survival, of which the increasing
intensity of temptation to alcoholic excess is only one aspect.
Gluttony, for example, becomes a much more possible habit, and many
other vices tender death for the first time to the men who are
gathering in and about towns. The city demands more persistent, more