ALCOHOLOGY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 275, 11 April 1911, Page 6

ALCOHOLOGY.

WHAT THE SCHOOLS TEACH. (Published by Arrangement). The Education Department of the Dominion has issued a set of three temperance wall-sheet?, of which we give 5!o. 1 in this issue. •1. Drinks sucli as beer, wine and spirits are not foods as milk is; they do not help to make the body grow, they do not help to keep the body from wearing away, and tliev cannot increase the total amount of bodilv strength and warmth. 2. They contain a dangerous substance —alcohol—which is harmful to the. body. In small quantities alcohol is a stimulant, but a healthy, vigorous person does | not need a stimulant. The well-known comparison that stimulants are the whip and the spur, and not the corn and the grass, is strictly true. , • ■3. Alcohol tends to retard the development of the body, and to stunt the growtk. 4. Much alcohol lowers the power of the body to resist disease. An habitual drinker may die from a disease which, in the case of other people, might mean only a short illness. 5. A wound or an injury becomes the more serious tlie more a person is given to heavy drinking. 6. Persons wlio drink to excess do not, as a rule, lead long or healthy lives. Many insurance companies offer more favorable terms to total abstainers than to others. 7. No alcoholic drinks quench thirst so well as water does; they are apt to ■make people more thirrty, and so cause a desire for more. There is always the danger that the desire may become irresistible. 8. Avoid forming the habit of drinking. A person's first blass of beer is no more pleasurable than his first pipe. People usually drink through seeing others drink. 0. It has been proved that alcohol lowers the power to endure fatigue or undergo hardships. Total abstainers, or those who drink very little, have been shown to be the best soldiers on the march, and the best men for hard physical work. A gang of navvies composed i of abstainers, wovkiii" on the Great . Northern Railway, England, did more work enrh dny than other gangs, although tliev worked shorter hours. Polar . explorers forlrd the use of alcohol; it • causes wen to succumb quickly to the ' cold. Athletes when in training nearly : alwavs abstain from alcohol in any form.

10. Money spent on alcoholic drinks is [ money wasted. Beverages such as milk and cocoa, which, generally speaking, cost .less than alcoholic drinks, are heat-giving. and at the same time flesh-forming, whereas alcoholic drinks are of little veal value as 'heat-givers and of not use as llesh-formers. For the threepence a man spends on a gluss of beer he could buy bread containing about looz. of heatgiving food, and 2%0z. of flesh-forming food. 11. Everyone admits that many crimes are caused through drink. 12. Consumptions, inflammation of the lungs, cancer and brain disease,, are among the diseases to which alcohol may render a person specially liable. 13. Children and young people ought not to take alcoholic liquor in any form except by a doctor's express orders. 14. "If we could take away from the world all the ill-health, all the poverty, all the wrechedness, all the cruelty, all the crime that have been brought about by drinking too much wine, beer, spirits or the like, how much happier, wealthier and brighter tlie world would be!"— Sir Michael Foster. This sheet is already exhibited in some schools in New Zealand; and it ought to be in your school. It would be well to enquire about it.