The Vice of Drunkenness.

Manawatu Standard, Volume 4, Issue 215, 15 August 1883, Page 3

The Vice of Drunkenness.

ITS TERRJLBLE C(>NSEQUEiNCES i Lecturers on the vice of drunkenness will do yrej^ to take sbfne notes from thw papers published m a short j series (byjj)r Vigoreux. The writer giveß some ferriblei pictures of the penalties inOicted u^bii'the di urikard himself Ibj ' his excessess ; but- far from being content mth these gloomy repi&sentstiohs; he now goes on to attack his victim m, perhaps, a more severe style, by threatening- him with the evils entailed upon his offspring 1 . Of the multitudinous diseases which by his conduce they are doomed to inherit, space fails to give .us a complete list; but among them may be mentioned dropsy inj the heaJ, causing, that part of the child ltd grow, to extraordinary dimen* eions ; > epilepsy, deafness, and a variety of! maniacal affections of the brain. Examples are then quoted to show by pratical illustration the working of these principles. From them may be "culled the following pleasant little genealogical tables. A drunkard, whose case had been Catefully considered by/ one of tho French doctors^ is found, by him to have had three sons, all of whom are alive. , The eldest is a victim of pericidical delirious attacks. The second from his youth up has been m a state of hajb^tual stupor, and the third is a bora fdiot. In an instance reported by another .physioian, a man .who had long been under treatment for deliriUm trimena has been married twice, and is the' lather of a family, singularly numerous compared 'with . those of most French married people. By his first wikhe had sixteen children, of whom h'feeen died without 'attaining the age of bi;e year,,the oauße of death m each casje convulsions The survivor of this family is a martyr to epileptic fits. By the| second wife this very unsuitable husband had eight children, of whom seven were speedijy carried off by the same disease which, whs fatal to their f_alf bircithers an<J siflWs. The survivor of jthis branch ot th'e family is a vicfitn'of scrofula, so that of the twentyrfauif^children 'only two emerged from : infancy," end each of, these is, a mere burden to the community. .