TEMPERANCE.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXII, Issue 42745, 8 July 1905, Page 1

TEMPERANCE.

By Reformer.!

E. Esquirol, gives the case of one Brikton. She was the offspring of a healthy mother, and a father who was habitually intoxicated. Her two brothers were never capable of learning to read. She came into the world in a pitiful condition, and it was only after two years nursing that she learned how to find the breast of her mother. In Combe’s ‘ Constitution of Man ’ 1 there is a most striking case of an idiot who at the time was six years old. The only sign he gave of his wants was a' wild shriek. Both parents of the child were healthy and intelligent ; one at least was habitually sober, but both were drunk at the time of inception and : the result was thie idiot offspring. In the town of Suffolk, England two cousins married and lived on a small property. Their usual occupation was muddling themS selves with alcoholics, not often perhaps, actually drunk, but always more or less under their influence. In this .state they ' usually went to bed. They had five children, and all were idiots of the worst class. That is, not ;t only defective in intellectual capacity, but inherited from their senseless parents an excess of the animal propensities. The wife of the amiable clergyman of S , in Staffordshire, > England, was so addicted to drunkenness, that she had frequently to be carried to bed. Every effort of her distressed husband failed to reclaim her: till at last premature death cut short her career. She was the mother of three idiotic children. ¥m. Smith, Governor of Ripon Prison, said: “Drunkards have generally come of parents who have led bad lives. In fact, ■ ■ I have one case in particular, of t a woman who has been in differ-. > ent jails 38 times, and she is now serving penal servitude for seven years. She had a drunken father -;; and mother, was a drunkard a herself, and had been drinking herself when she committed the felony.” Dr F. Winslow said : “ I was looking at some statistics the other day in a list of criminals ; there was a father a drunkard, a grandfather a drunkard, a grandmother an idiot, and in the whole line there were in that family, drunkards, criminals, and idiots; all the forms of vice were hereditarily trans-1 mitted ” “Dr Macgill, Surgeon of Glasgow Police Station, says : “ During sixteen years, had 600 cases of insanity from intemperate habits, or 30 or 40 cases annually, out of 12,000 intemperate persons brought before him.” Dr F. E. Anstie, in his evidence before the Committee on Habitual Drunkards, said:. “ Of the-: kind of drinking which is entirely paroxysmal, it is a disease.” That is not a fancied distinction. ? I know of several such cases. • These persons are children of families where invariably, or almost invariably, insanity is_ hereditory ; very often drinking ,has been hereditary in a marked, degree. “ The tendency to drink, is a disease of the brain, which’ is inherited. Where drinking has been strong in both parents* I think that it is a physical c&tM, tainty that it will be traced in the children.” “ I have / no d >ubt . that, many parents who were never drunk, in the old jV'vU'vi'.K' drinking v-evhvl, have Vv?y viVuUe .ViVY* systems to