THE PROBLEM OF THE BIRTH SUPPLY
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 paralysing 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 civilised the longest. The passage of a people from a condition of agricultural dispersal to a more organised civilisation 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 intellectualised and less intense physical desires than the country-side. Moral qualities that were a disadvantage in the dispersed stage become advantageous in the city, and conversely.
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