cigars are furnished, should be superseded by "rallies," where the same amount of money could provide some light and harmless refreshment. The use of tobacco- and particularly of cigarettes has increased very rapidly during the last twenty years. In the United States about two billion dollars annually are now spent for tobacco and accessories; perhaps twenty billion cigarettes a year are consumed. Apart from the matter of health and efficiency, it may be sharply questioned whether such a vast sum should not be more fruitfully expended. - This is not one of the important problems. But, after all, everything is important; and men must, and ultimately will, learn to find their happiness in things that forward, instead of thwarting, their great interests; what makes at all against health and efficiency when it is so needless and artificial a habit as smoking, so mildly pleasant and so purely selfish - must be rooted out of desire. We shall not brand smoking as a sin, hardly as a vice; but the man who wishes to make the most of his life will avoid it himself, and the man who wishes to work for the general welfare will put his influence and example against it. H. C. King, Rational Living, chap. VI, secs. I, II. J. Payot, The Education of the Will, bk. III, sec. IV. J. MacCunn, The Making of Character, pt. II, chap. II. W. Hutchinson, Handbook of Health. L. H. Gulick, The Efficient Life. F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, bk. III, chap. III. T. Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life. P. G. Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, pt. 1. H. Spencer, Education, chap. IV. C. A. Greene, The Art of Keeping Well. C. W. Saleeby, Health, Strength, and Happiness. R. C. Cabot, What Men Live By, pt. 1. CHAPTER XVI THE ALCOHOL PROBLEM Or all the problems relating to health and efficiency there is none graver than that of the narcotics. With the exception of tobacco, which is probably, for adults, in moderation but mildly, if at all, deleterious, their use is fraught with serious danger. The exact physiological effects of the several narcotics are different, but their general effect and their attraction for users are similar. The opium and cola derivatives-morphia, heroin, codein, cocaine-are the worst of these habit-forming and health-destroying drugs. And they are being used, not only in the East (to the shame of the Western nations and Japan, that have winked at a traffic very profitable to some of their merchants), but in Europe and America, in an increasing and alarming degree. The harm caused by these drugs is, however, so patent, and enlightened opinion so united in opposing them, that space will not be given here to detail the indictment against them. Their sale is not pushed by such powerful interests as have fostered the use of alcoholic drinks; and by the vigilant enforcement of existing laws they can be kept from general use. If necessary, an international control of the cultivation of the poppy and the cola plant can forever remove this so needless form of human suffering. With alcohol the case is different. A large minority of opinion in the United States, and the majority opinion almost everywhere else, still clings to the ancient and alluring habit of alcoholic self-narcotization. Attempts will doubt less recurrently be made to construe the Eighteenth Amendment loosely and legalize the sale of light wines and beers. On the other hand, the fight for prohibition is on all over the rest of the world. It is still a very live issue, and one upon which every student of contemporary moral problems should be thoroughly informed. What are the causes of the use of alcoholic drinks? (1) We may dismiss as relatively unimportant the pleas that alcoholic liquors are desirable for their pleasant taste or for their food value. Plenty of other delicious drinks are available without their toxic effects. And certainly, for nutrition received, the alcoholic drinks are among the most expensive foods, to be ranked with caviare and pâté de foie gras. Beer is the most nutritious of them, and the yeast in it is perhaps, for some people, a valuable aid to assimilation of food. But the non-alcoholic malt liquors are equally valuable in this respect; and an equal amount of money spent on bread would give about thirty times the amount of nutrition. Alcoholic liquors as food are, as has been said, like gunpowder as fuel- very costly and very dangerous.1 (2) A much commoner plea for drinking rests upon its sociability. But this is a matter of convention which can readily enough be altered. There is nothing inherently more sociable in the drinking of wine than in the drinking of grape-juice, or coffee, or chocolate, or tea. Indeed, one may well ask why the chief social bond between men should consist in drinking liquids side by side! Games and sports, in which wit is pitted against wit, or which bring men together in happy cöoperation, together with the great resource of conversation, are more socially binding than any drinks. 1 See H. S. Williams, Alcohol, p. 133 ff.; H. S. Warner, Social Welfare and the Liquor Problem, p. 80 ff., and bibliography, p. 95. (3) More important than any of these causes is the craving for a stimulant. The monotony of work, the fatigue toward the end of the day, the severity of our Northern climate, the longing for intenser living, lead men to seek to apply the whip to their flagging energies. This stimulus to the body is, however, largely if not wholly, illusory. The mental-emotional effects, noted in the following paragraph, give the drinker the impression that he is physically fortified; but objective tests show that, after a very brief period, the dominant effect upon the organism is depressant. The apparent increase in bodily warmth, so often experienced, is a subjective illusion; in reality alcohol lowers the temperature and diminishes resistance to cold. Arctic explorers have to discard it entirely. The old idea of helping to cure snake-bite, hydrophobia, etc., by whiskey was sheer mistake; the patient has actually much less of a chance if so drugged. Only for an immediate and transitory need, such as faintness or shock, is the quickly passing stimulating power of alcohol useful; and even for such purposes other stimulants are more valuable. Reputable physicians have almost wholly ceased to use it.1 (4) The one real value of alcohol to man has been the boon of stimulating his emotional and impulsive life, bringing him an elevation of spirits, drowning his sorrows, helping him to forget, helping to free his mind from the burden of care, anxiety, and regret. As William James, with his unerring discernment, wrote twenty-five years ago: “The reason for craving alcohol is that it is an anæsthetic, even in moderate quantities. It obliterates a part of the field of consciousness and abolishes collateral trains of thought.”2 This use, in relieving brain-tension, in bringing a transient 1 See H. S. Williams, op. cit., p. 4 ff., 124-27; H. S. Warner, op. cit., pp. 84 ff. 2 Tolstoy also hit the nail on the head in his little essay, Why do Men Stupefy Themselves? cheer and comfort to poor, overworked, worried, remorseful men, is not to be despised. Dull lives are vivified by it, a fleeting anæsthesia of unhappy memories and longings is effected, and for the moment life seems worth living. Without considering yet the physical penalty that must be paid for this evanescent freedom, we may make the obvious remark that it is a morally dangerous freedom. As the Odyssey has it, "Wine leads to folly, making even the wise to love immoderately, to dance, and to utter what had better have been kept silent." Alcohol slackens the higher, more complicated, mental functions - our conscience, our scruples, our reason and leaves freer from inhibition our lower passions and instincts. We cannot afford thus to submerge our better natures, and leave the field to our lower selves; it is a dangerous short cut to happiness. A far safer and more permanently useful procedure for the individual would be so to live by his reason and his conscience that he would not need to stupefy them, to forget his life as he is shaping it from day to day. And the lesson to the community is so to brighten the lives of the poor with normal, wholesome pleasures and recreations, so to lift from them the burdens of poverty and social unjustice, that they will not so much need to plunge into the grateful oblivion of the wine-cup. (5) The most tenacious hold of alcoholism has lain, however, in two things not yet enumerated. The one is, that much use of alcohol creates a pathological craving for it; the man who is accustomed to his beer or whiskey is restless and depressed if he cannot get it, and will sacrifice much to still for the nonce that insatiable longing. The other and even more important fact is, that the sale of liquor is immensely profitable to the manufacturers and sellers. The fighters for prohibition everywhere encounter the desperate opposition of those who have become slaves to the drug- many of |