and upon one
point, the physicians of the world have agreed. American, English, and
German doctors say with one voice that the most {22} hopeless patient
who comes into their hands is the soaked, crapulous, beer-drinker.
"Point out a gray-haired beer-drinker," they challenge, and challenge in
vain. Gray-haired whisky-drinkers may be found, but not the others.

Starch in every stage of decay, carried by the all-penetrating alcohol,
surcharges the tissues with putrefaction, and makes the tumid veins a
forcing-ground for bacteria. Thus the beer-drinker's slight cold becomes
at once pneumonia, or inflammatory rheumatism, or Bright's disease, and
his life flickers out like a candle in a gusty passage.

Intemperance being among the milder vices kills slowly. Sexual sins slay
{23} more rapidly, and the criminal grades of vice do their work with a
swiftness in proportion to their flagrancy. The Psalmist says, "bloody
and deceitful men shall not live out half their days," but police
records will show that David materially overrates the average. "One
quarter their days" would approach much nearer exactness.

------

RETURNING to the major premise that the "survival of the fittest" means
the selection and preservation of those individuals who are most nearly
in harmony with the conditions {24} of their environment, and that the
progress of the race or species involves the destruction of the weaker
or the inferior who are not in such harmony, the conclusion follows that
any aberration toward vice shows such discordance in the individual
with the laws of his environment as marks him as inferior, weak, and
obstructive of the race's development

Vice is not so much a cause as an effect--precisely as disease is a
symptom. Vice does not make a nature weak or defective: a weak and
defective nature expresses its weaknesses and defects in vice, and that
expression brings about in one way and another {25} the sovereign remedy
of extermination.

------

MUCH is said of the devastation of our fairest and brightest by the
Drink Demon. This is mainly nonsense. It was more nearly true in former
generations, when intemperance was an almost universal vice. As

Hamlet says:

"it is a custom
More honor'd in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and tax'd of other nations:
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase