intellectualized and less intense physical desires than the
countryside. Moral qualities that were a disadvantage in the dispersed
stage become advantageous in the city, and conversely. Rugged
independence ceases to be helpful, and an intelligent turn for give and
take, for collaboration and bargaining, makes increasingly for
survival. Moreover, there grows very slowly an indefinable fabric of
traditional home training in restraint that is very hard to separate in
analysis from mental heredity. People who have dwelt for many
generations in towns are not only more temperate and less explosive in
the grosser indulgences, but more _urbane_ altogether. The drunken
people are also the "uncivil" peoples and the individualistic peoples.
The great prevalence of drunkenness among the upper classes two
centuries ago can hardly have been bred out in the intervening six or
seven generations, and it is also a difficult fact for Mr. Reid that
drunkenness has increased in France. In most of the cases cited by Mr.
Reid a complex of operating forces could be stated in which the
appearance of fermented liquors is only one factor, and a tangle of
consequent changes in which a gradually increasing insensibility to the
charms of intoxication was only one thread. Drunkenness has no doubt
played a large part in eliminating certain types of people from the
world, but that it specifically eliminates one specific definable type
is an altogether different matter.

Even if we admit Mr. Reid's conception, this by no means solves the
problem. It is quite conceivable that the world could purchase certain
sorts of immunity too dearly. If it was a common thing to adorn the
parapets of houses in towns with piles of loose bricks, it is certain
that a large number of persons not immune to fracture of the skull by
falling bricks would be eliminated. A time would no doubt come when
those with a specific liability to skull fracture would all be